Traveling across America in 1861, English author Anthony Trollope was particularly taken by the characters he met in the frontier regions of the upper Mississippi valley. “The first settler is a rough fellow, and seems to be so wedded to his rough life that he leaves his land after his first wild work is done, and goes again further off to some untouched allotment,” Trollope observed. “He finds that he can sell his improvements at a profitable rate and takes the price. He is a preparer of farms rather than a farmer. He has no love for the soil which his hand has first turned. He regards it merely as an investment; and when things about him are beginning to wear an aspect of comfort, when his property has become valuable, he sells it, packs up his wife and little ones, and goes again into the woods.”
Trollope couldn’t help comparing the Americans with farmers he knew in England. An Englishman cherished his farm and his home. Not so the frontier American. “The western American has no love for his own soil or his own house,” Trollope said. “The matter with him is simply one of dollars. To keep a farm which he could sell at an advantage from any feeling of affection—from what we should call an association of ideas—would be to him as ridiculous as the keeping of a family pig would be in an English farmer’s establishment. The pig is a part of the farmer’s stock in trade, and must go the way of all pigs. And so is it with house and land in the life of the frontier man in the western states.”
Yet the American had a presence Trollope didn’t encounter in England, and which he found appealing. “This man has his romance, his high poetic feeling, and above all his manly dignity. Visit him, and you will find him without coat or waistcoat, unshorn, in ragged blue trousers and old flannel shirt, too often bearing on his lantern jaw the signs of ague and sickness; but he will stand upright before you and speak to you with all the ease of a lettered gentleman in his own library. . . . He is his own master, standing on his own threshold, and finds no need to assert his equality by rudeness. He is delighted to see you, and bids you sit down on his battered bench without dreaming of any such apology as an English cottier”—small farmer, often a tenant—“offers to a Lady Bountiful when she calls. He has worked out his independence, and shows it in every easy movement of his body. He tells you of it unconsciously in every tone of his voice.”
The American made the most of his circumstances. “You will always find in his cabin some newspaper, some book, some token of advance in education. When he questions you about the old country, he astonishes you by the extent of his knowledge. I defy you not to feel that he is superior to the race from whence he has sprung in England or in Ireland.”
The American frontiersman had a hard life. Frontier women had it harder. “‘I have lived very rough,’ I heard a poor woman say, whose husband had ill-used and deserted her,” Trollope wrote. “‘I have known what it is to be hungry and cold, and to work hard till my bones have ached. I only wish that I might have the same chance again. If I could have ten acres cleared two miles away from any living being, I could be happy with my children. I find a kind of comfort when I am at work from daybreak to sundown and know that it is all my own.’”
Speaking in his own voice, Trollope said, “I believe that life in the backwoods has an allurement to those who have been used to it that dwellers in cities can hardly comprehend.”
Trollope himself didn’t comprehend it completely. But what he saw made him appreciate the essential nobility of the frontier American. “He is dirty and perhaps squalid. His children are sick and he is without comforts. His wife is pale, and you think you see shortness of life written in the faces of all the family. But over and above it all there is an independence which sits gracefully on their shoulders and teaches you at the first glance that the man has a right to assume himself to be your equal.”