"Go West, young man,” advised Horace Greeley during the depression of the 1840s. And westward did they go, by millions in the first half of the nineteenth century, in obedience to an impulse that has never ceased. “The West is our object, there is no other hope left for us,” wrote a departing migrant. “There is nothing like a new country for poor folks.” “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,” wrote one pioneer on his way to Illinois in 1817.
