Peck, Guide for Emigrants (1831), 183-188; cf. Birkbeck (London,
1818), Letters, 45, 46, 69-73; S.H. Collins, Emigrant's Guide;
Tanner (publisher), View of the Valley of the Miss. (1834), 232; J.
Woods, Two Years' Residence, 146, 172.] But the mass of the early
settlers were too poor to afford such an outlay, and were either
squatters within a little clearing, or owners of eighty acres, which
they hoped to increase by subsequent purchase. Since they worked
with the labor of their own hands and that of their sons, the cash
outlay was practically limited to the original cost of the lands and
articles of husbandry. The cost of an Indiana farm of eighty acres
of land, with two horses, two or three cows, a few hogs and sheep,
and farming utensils, was estimated at about four hundred dollars.

The peculiar skill required of the axeman who entered the hardwood
forests, together with readiness to undergo the privations of the
life, made the backwoodsman in a sense an expert engaged in a
special calling. [Footnote: J. Hall, Statistics of the West, 101;
cf. Chastellux, Travels in North America (London, 1787), I., 44.]
Frequently he was the descendant of generations of pioneers, who, on
successive frontiers, from the neighborhood of the Atlantic coast
towards the interior, had cut and burned the forest, fought the
Indians, and pushed forward the line of civilization. He bore the
marks of the struggle in his face, made sallow by living in the
shade of the forest, "shut from the common air," [Footnote:
Birkbeck, Notes on Journey, 105-114.] and in a constitution often
racked by malarial fever. Dirt and squalor were too frequently found
in the squatter's cabin, and education and the refinements of life
were denied to him. Often shiftless and indolent, in the intervals
between his tasks of forest-felling he was fonder of hunting than of
a settled agricultural life. With his rifle he eked out his