A good poor man’s country

From Stephen Arons, How the West Was Lost. The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. The Johns Hopkins Unversity Press, 1996.

A good poor man’s country. The phrase was ubiquitous among the contemporaries of Daniel Boone. Its meaning, however, was ambiguous. Indeed, that ambiguity helps explain why Kentucky did not become one. In its most common usage, the trope referred to a territory where men and the households they headed could get ahead. From the founding of British North America, promoters of settlement recommended various colonies as places where cheap land and high wages allowed Europeans of low stations and slim prospects to advance up social and economic ladders. In the era of the American Revolution, Kentucky became the latest and the most renowned land of opportunity. Tens of thousands of poor men and their families joined Boone in the conquest and colonizaton of trans-Appalachia, propelled by what Michel-Guillaume_Jean de Crèvecoeur described as “the happy restlessness . . . which is constantly urging us all to become better off than we are now.”

East and west of the Appalachians in the eighteenth century, poor men asked more of a good country than material prosperity. What drove pioneers across the mountains in the last quarter of the century was a hunger for lands that would allow families to get by with greater security and less effort. Fertile soil, ample range, and game-filled woods might not produce riches, but they captivated poor men who dreamed of achieving personal independence and providing more easily for dependents and descendants. While men of the backcountry from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas habitually testified to the hardships of border life, they also spoke often of the satisfactons of their simple, yet liberating, ways. Instead of “sigh[ing] for what was out of reach,” remembered one son of the Greater Pennsylvania backcountry, we were “happy and contented with such living, had fewer aches and pains . . . and slept more soundly.” Limiting wants and lending hands to neighbors in need held the key to a good poor man’s country in which how well people got along counted for more than how frequently or how far they got ahead.

That formula Ohio Indians well understood. Indian orators did not employ the metaphor of a good poor man’s country, and colonial writers did not attach the phrase to the Indian country beyond the Appalachians. Yet judged by the security and ease with which people got by and fellow villagers got along, the best poor man’s country belonged to the unconquered Indian peoples. Judge by almost any standard, Ohio Indian country was a better poor woman’s country than the adjacent backcountry. [pp. 192-193]

Arons’s argument is that Boone et al. had a unique opportunity to establish a variety of “new Eden” for the ordinary man. They blew it, not just because of men like Henry Clay who carved out huge estates using exploited slave labor, but because they themselves bought into the notion of land acquisition for wealth and profit. Instead they killed off all the game and lost the land to cannier exploiters. And so it was for the entire westward expansion.

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