Chapter 4

CHARACTER, MANNERS, AND PURSUITS OF THE PEOPLE.

Cotton and Sugar Planters;--Farmers;--Population of the large towns and cities;--Frontier class;--Hunters and Trappers;--Boatmen.

There is great diversity in the character and habits of the population of the Valley of the Mississippi.

Those who have emigrated from the Atlantic states, as have a very large proportion of those persons who were not born in the Valley, of course do not differ essentially from the remaining population of those states. Some slight shades of difference are perceptible in such persons as have lived long enough in the country to become assimilated to the habits, and partake of the feelings, of western people.

Emigrants from Europe have brought the peculiarities of the nations and countries from whence they have originated, but are fast losing their national manners, and feelings, and, to use a provincial term, will soon become "westernized."

The march of emigration from the Atlantic border has been nearly in a line due west. Tennessee was settled by Carolinians, and Kentucky by Virginians. Ohio received the basis of its population from the states in the same parallel, and hence partakes of all the varieties from Maryland to New England. Michigan is substantially a child of New York. The planters of the south have gone to Mississippi, Louisiana, and the southern part of Arkansas. Kentucky and Tennessee have spread their sons and daughters over Indiana, Illinois and Missouri; but the two former states are now receiving great numbers of emigrants from all the northern states, including Ohio, and multitudes from the south, who desire to remove beyond the boundaries and influence of a slave population.

Slavery in the west, keeps nearly in the same parallels as it holds in the east, and is receding south, as it does on the Atlantic coast. Many descendants of the Scotch, Irish and Germans, have come into the frontier states from Western Pennsylvania.

We have European emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland. Those of the latter are more generally found about our large towns and cities, and along the lines of canalling.

The French were the explorers and early settlers of the Valley immediately bordering on the Mississippi, 150 years since. They formed the basis of population of Louisiana a few years since, but are relatively diminishing before the emigration from other states of the Union. Their descendants show many of the peculiar and distinctive traits of that people in all countries. They possess mild vivacity, and gaiety, and are distinguished for their quiet, inoffensive, domestic, frugal, and unenterprising spirit and manners. The poorer class of French are rather peculiar and unique. Their ancestors were isolated from the rest of the world, had no object of excitement or ambition, cared little for wealth, or the accumulation of property, and were accustomed to hunt, make voyages in their canoes, smoke and traffic with the Indians. But few of them knew how to read and write. Accustomed from infancy to the life of huntsmen, trappers and boatmen, they make but indifferent farmers. They are contented to live in the same rude, but neatly whitewashed cabin, cultivate the same cornfields in the same mode, and drive the same rudely constructed horse cart their fathers