"
[Footnote: Morris Birkbeck, "Notes on a Tour in America, 1817," pp. 34,
35.] This is a detail of the exodus through the most northern mountain
pass.
Farther south the procession moved in heavy wagons drawn by four or six
horses. "Family groups, crowding the roads and fords, marching toward the
sunset," at right angles to the courses of the migratory birds, not
mindful as they of seasons, "were typical of the overland migration"
across Tennessee and Kentucky. The poorer classes travelled on foot, as at
the north, but drew after them carts with all their household effects.
[Footnote: F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 80.]
Still farther south "the same type of occupation was to be seen; the
poorer classes of southern emigrants cut out their clearings along the
rivers that flowed to the gulf and to the lower Mississippi," [Footnote:
F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 90.] and later still farther west
into what is now Texas.
The squatters whom I saw in my walk around the city of Paris, inhabiting
what was the military zone with their portable houses, or in their
dilapidated shacks, had better shelter than they who first invaded the
zone beyond the mountain walls that were the natural western
fortifications of the Atlantic colonies.
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