Quotation from: The Beginner's American History

Written by: D.H. Montgomery


If a traveller in those days went across the Alleghany Mountains[1]
to the west, he found some small settlements in Ohio, Kentucky, and
Tennessee, but hardly any outside of those. What are now the great
states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were then a
wilderness; and this was also true of what are now the states of
Alabama and Mississippi.


If the same traveller, pushing forward, on foot or on horseback,--for
there were no steam cars,--crossed the Mississippi River, he could
hardly find a white man outside what was then the little town of St.
Louis. The country stretched away west for more than a thousand miles,
with nothing in it but wild beasts and Indians. In much of it there
were no trees, no houses, no human beings. If you shouted as hard
as you could in that solitary land, the only reply you would hear
would be the echo of your own voice; it was like shouting in an empty
room--it made it seem lonelier than ever.

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