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The era was one in which the West guided public policy; and it was the West that was chiefly interested in further circumscribing Indian lands, trade, and influence. In Jackson's day, too, the people ruled; and it was the adventurous, pushing, land-hungry common folk who decreed that the red man had lingered long enough in the Middle West and must now move on.
Yet sad was the day that brought the news of the signing of the treaty fixing their boundary along the forty-ninth parallel, thus leaving the little land-hungry settlement only a mere quarter-million of miles! As the Willamette is one of the most foodful of valleys, so is the Columbia one of the most foodful of rivers.
From this group of workers for freedom later the Socialist-revolutionary party developed. "All land for the peasant" is their slogan, while their promise to expropriate all land without any compensation naturally meets with approval on the part of the land-hungry peasants.
To go to the ends of the earth in these globe-trotting days is attended with little anxiety, much less heart-break, but in those days when Canada was cut off at the Lakes, the land beyond was a wilderness, untravelled for the most part but by the Indian or trapper, and considered a fit dwelling place only for the Hudson Bay officer kept there by his loyalty to "the Company," or the half-breed runner to whom it was native land, or the more adventurous land-hungry settler, or the reckless gold-fevered miner.
Much he related to them of the river lands, and after a while he got on the subject of tenant farming. Saxon had started him by speaking of the land-hungry Anglo-Saxons. "Land-hogs," he snapped. "That's our record in this country. As one old Reuben told a professor of an agricultural experiment station: 'They ain't no sense in tryin' to teach me farmin'. I know all about it.
Years ago, when the supply of government land had seemed inexhaustible, the tide of settlers had swept around the forgotten frontier, on beyond the arid and semi-arid land to the fertile soil and the gold fields on the Pacific Coast. But the time had come when this neglected prairie was the only land left for a land-hungry people. Some way had to be found to make the great arid plains productive.
Newcomers were consequently forced to cross the mountains and not only newcomers, but all residents who were still land-hungry and ambitious to better their condition. To such the appeal of the great West was irresistible.
Through the doors of the different rooms passed an endless procession; men from the front with the marks of the desert sun on their faces engineers, superintendents, bosses, messengers, agents servants of the Company; laborers of every sort and nationality came in answer to the cry: "Men wanted!"; special salesmen from foundry, factory and shop drawn by prospective large sales of machinery, implements and supplies; land-hungry men from everywhere seeking information and opportunity for investment.
The refusal of the Georgia members to go with the Tenneseeans disappointed the land-hungry whites, and from that time the authorities of the State labored incessantly both to break down the notion that the Cherokees were a "nation" to be dealt with through diplomatic channels, and to extend over them, in effect, the full sovereignty of the State.
The great wide uncultivated prairie seems to open its welcoming arms to the land-hungry, homeless dwellers of the cities, saying: "Come and try me. Forget the past, if it makes you sad. Come to me, for I am the Land of the Second Chance. I am the Land of Beginning Again. I will not ask who your ancestors were. I want you nothing matters now but just you and me, and we will make good together."
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