VI

PREFACE

settlements. ... Go to St. Louis . . . and you seem to be still as far from this point of the compass as you were at the beginning of your journey. Ask, as I have done, the emigrant who is trudging his weary, course across the plains more than two hundred miles from the city of Laclede where he is going; his reply is, "To the West." . . . And now, at the northern pass of the Rocky Mountains, near the 49th parallel, and at the southern pass in the same range, leading to California, the same response, the West, the everlasting West, meets the ear.

It is interesting to note not only how this resistless onrush of the pioneers gave answer to the prophecies of pessimists who declared that it was useless to think of peopling the West from the East, but also how the emigration brought about changes in the boundaries and names of new states which optimistic travelers and statesmen tried to forecast. There were those who once looked for the organization of such states as Cumberland and Transylvania in the region south of the Ohio river; but the overwhelming growth of the country led to the early organization of the single state of Kentucky. Thomas Jefferson was a member of a committee which, in 1784, recommended the division of the country north of the Ohio into states to be called Sylvania, Michigania, Chersonese, Metropotamia, Illinoisa, Saratoga, Washington, Polypo-tamia and Pelisipia, but in consequence of the emigrant tide through the Pittsburgh and Buffalo gateways and down the Ohio, the boundaries and, in most cases, the names of the states became quite different.

The fascinating story of the movements that improved on the plan of Jefferson's committee, and went a long way to justify the hyperbole of Jean Pierre Brissot de Warville, "You will see independent America contemplating no other limits but those of the universe," is sketched in this volume.

Full use has been made of the records of early travelers and pioneers which are described in the Bibliography. Grateful acknowledgment is made for the use of copy-