For forty years before this time the fur trade had had its depot at the city of St. Louis. For a hundred years there had been a settlement on the Great Lakes. For nearly a hundred years the town of New Orleans had been established. Here and there, between these foci of adventurers, there were odd, seemingly unaccountable little dots and specks of population scattered over all the map, product of that first uncertain hundred years. Ohio, directly west of the original Pennsylvania hotbed, was left blank for a long time, and indeed received her first population from the southward, and not from the East, though the New Englander, Moses Cleveland, founded the town of Cleveland as early as 1796. Lower down in the great valley of the Mississippi was a curious, illogical, and now forgotten little band of settlers who had formed what was known as the “Mississippi Territory.” Smaller yet, and more inexplicable, did we not know the story of the old water-trail from Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a dot, a smear, a tiny speck of population high up on the east bank of the Mississippi, where the Wisconsin emptied. These valley settlements far outnumbered all the population of the state of Ohio, which had lain directly in the latitudinal path of the star. The West was beginning to be the West. The seed sown by Marquette the Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La Salle the Bold, by Tonty the Faithful, seed cultivated by Boone and Kenton, by Sevier and Robertson and scores and hundreds of stalwart early Westerners—seed despised by an ancient and corrupt monarchy—had now begun to grow. Yet, beyond the farthest settlements of the West of that day, there was still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for the future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements of the past, it must be centuries before the West—whatever that term might mean—could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted was, to be sure, an utterly unthinkable thing. There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Santa Fé to Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful settler of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, Homerically misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West for any and all men.