back-settlers

Updated: May 7, 2025

Here were pompous merchants in white wigs and laced velvet, the bronzed faces of sea-captains, the foreign garb and air of Spanish Creoles, and the disdainful port of natives of Old England, all contrasted with the rough aspect of one or two back-settlers negotiating sales of timber from forests where axe had never sounded.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Twice Told Tales

The loss of their industrial position is a grievance and a national mischief which our "Economists" are prone to undervalue, and pass unnoticed. Let us contrast the case of men who work not for a master, not for wages, but for themselves; holding their own little homestead, from which they cannot be driven out. Such is the case of back-settlers in the Far West of the United States.

Giberne Sieveking - Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman