Page:American History Told by Contemporaries, v2.djvu/418

390 them, we have no districts of "sold land" as it is called, that is large tracts of land in the hands of individuals, or companies who neither sell nor improve them, as is the case in Lower Canada, and the north-western part of Pennsylvania. These unsettled tracts make huge blanks in the population of the country where they exist.

The division lines between those whose lands adjoined, were generally made in an amicable manner, before any survey of them was made, by the parties concerned. In doing this they were guided mainly by the tops of ridges and water courses, but particularly the former. Hence the greater number of farms in the western parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia bear a striking resemblance to an amphitheatre. The buildings occupy a low situation and the tops of the surrounding hills are the boundaries of the tract to which the family mansion belongs.

Our forefathers were fond of farms of this description, because, as they said, they are attended with this convenience "that every thing comes to the house down hill." In the hilly parts of the state of Ohio, the land having been laid off in an arbitrary manner, by straight parellel lines, without regard to hill or dale, the farms present a different aspect from those on the east side of the river opposite. There the buildings as frequently occupy the tops of the hills, as any other situation.

Our people had become so accustomed to the mode of "getting land for taking it up," that for a long time it was generally believed, that the land on the west side of the Ohio would ultimately be disposed of in that way. Hence almost the whole tract of country between the Ohio and Muskingum was parcelled out in tomahawk improvements ; but these latter improvers did not content themselves with a single four hundred acre tract a piece. Many of them owned a great number of tracts of the best land, and thus, in imagination, were as "Wealthy as a South sea dream." Many of the land jobbers of this class did not content themselves with marking the trees, at the usual height, with the initials of their names ; but climbed up the large beech trees, and cut the letters in their bark, from twenty to forty feet from the ground. To enable them to identify those trees, at a future period, they made marks on other trees around them as references.

Most of the early settlers considered their land as of little value, from an apprehension that after a few years cultivation it would lose its fertility, at least for a long time. I have often heard them say that such a field would bear so many crops and another so many, more or less than that. The ground of this belief concerning the short lived fertility of