ON JANUARY 29, 1804, less than a year after France ceded Louisiana to the United States, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Dr. Joseph Priestley:

“I very early saw that Louisiana was indeed a speck in our horizon, which was to burst in a tornado.”

IT WAS mentioned in the previous chapter that the Austin family, which had resided for several decades in Missouri, became impoverished. Their mining property at Mine-a-Burton was taken away; their investment in bank shares was unfortunate, and their land speculations, including the New Madrid fiasco, were failures. Things became so bad that the father, Moses Austin, wrote his son-in-law on April 21, 1821, that he was “without a dollar to get his shirt washed.”

IN Niles Register, that renowned weekly compendium of American political and economic information during the first half of the nineteenth century, there appeared in the issue of May 9, 1835, the following headlines:

SPECULATION! SPECULATION!! SPECULATION!!!

We offer a selection of articles as to what is going on in the way of speculation. Verily, the people are mad.

Then follows this excerpt from the Baltimore Advocate:

“IN ALL the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate,” wrote Henry George, California philosopher and economist, in 1870, “but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest.”1

THE peerless co-author of The Gilded Age, Mark Twain, was from Missouri. But he knew Yankee characteristics as well as those of his southern neighbors, and his description of Squire Hawkins’, of Obedstown, great faith in his “Tennessee lands” was no more genuine than his characterization of Mr. Bigler’s, the eastern contractor’s ideas of railroad promotion:

WHEN Jay Cooke, “financier of the Civil War,” in 1869 consented to furnish capital to rescue the Northern Pacific Railroad from the pangs of infantile weakness, he made the following stipulation:

A Company shall be organized for the purpose of purchasing lands, improvement of town sites, or other purposes, and the same shall be divided in the same proportion; that is, the original interests shall have one-half, and Jay Cooke & Company shall have one-half.

THAT caustic commentator and caricaturist of American characteristics, Charles Dickens, when he visited the United States in 1842 could not have failed to notice the prevalence of town jobbing and “city building.” Picturing himself as Martin Chuzzlewit, he is told, soon after landing, by Major Pawkins, “a most distinguished genius for swindling, who could start a bank, or negotiate a loan or form of land-jobbing company, (entailing ruin, pestilence, and death on hundreds of families) with any gifted creature of the Union”:

THE semi-tropical, semi-submerged State of Florida has ever been an inspirer of fantastic dreams. Ponce de León believed that he would find there the Fountain of Youth. Others who came after him believed that there the rainbow ends, and that merely to stake off a part of its soil would give them access to the fabulous pot of gold. Youth, health, wealth, and freedom from inheritance taxes have been the lures to the sunshine and everglades of this Riviera of America.

Aaron Burr, Wandell and Minnigerode, 80, note; 202

Account of the Lands, etc., An, R. L. Pell, 144

Adams, Herbert B., notes, 7, 8, 14

Adams, Samuel, 27

Addresses, Speeches and Letters upon Various Subjects, Hugh McCulloch, notes, 247, 248

Address to the Reader . . . Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, 225, note

Adirondack Mountains, 92, 96

Adirondack State Park, N. Y., 26