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Pioneer Families of Missouri
Excerpt from A history of the pioneer families of Missouri, pages 66-67
Most of the pioneers of Missouri were from the States of Kentucky and Virginia, with a few from North and South Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.
There were a hardy, honest, friendly class of people, addicted to hospitality and neighborly discourse. Most of them came to the West because they wanted to be free - free from the restraints and shame of society, and the domineering influence of money and aristocracy. A few came to evade the penalty of the laws which they had violated at home, but there were not many of this class, and their standing and character being soon found out, there were shunned by the better class of people.
With the exception of the (Daniel) Boone families, their relations and friends, most of the pioneers were strangers to each other; but every newly arrived stranger met a hearty welcome, and was treated as an old friend, merely because he had come, probably, from the same State in the East or South. It was enough to know that he had come from the home State, and at once he was treated like an old acquaintance and friend. Or, if he happened to be a stray sheet, from some of the outside States, he was still treated as a friend - because they all wanted to be friendly....
Rev. Timothy Flint, an educated Presbyterian minister of New England, who lived in St. Charles during the first part of the present (19th) century, thus wrote of the people and their habits: ... "The backwoodsman of the West, as I have seen him, is generally an amiable and virtuous man. His general motive for coming here is to be a freeholder, to have plenty of rich land, and to be able to settle his children about him. I fully believe that nine in ten of the emigrants have come here with no other motive. You find, in truth, that he has vices and barbarisms, peculiar to his situation. His manners are rough. He wears, it may be, a long beard. He has a great quantity of bear or dear skins wrought into his household establishment, his furniture and his dress. He carries a knife, or a dirk, in his bosom, and when in the woods has a rifle on his back, and a pack of dogs at his heels; but remember that his rifle and his dogs are among his chief means of support and profit. Remember that all his first days here were spent in dread of savages. Remember that he still encounters them, still meets bears and panthers. Enter his door, and tell you you are benighted, and wish the shelter of his cabin for the night. The welcome is, indeed, seemingly ungracious; 'I reckon you can stay,' or, 'I suppose we must let you stay.' But this apparent ungraciousness is the harbinger of every kindness he can bestow, and every comfort that his cabin can afford. Good coffee, corn bread and butter, venison, pork, wild and tame fowls, are set before you. His wife, timid, silent, reserved, but constantly attentive to your comfort, does not sit at the table with you, but like the wives of the patriarchs, stands and attends on you. You are shown the best bed which the house can afford. When this kind of hospitality has been afforded you as long as you choose to stay, and when you depart, and speak about your bill, you are most commonly told with some slight mark of resentment, that they do not keep tavern. Even the flaxen-headed urchins will run away from your money."
To such a degree was this spirit of hospitality carried that no one who kept a tavern and charged for his accommodations, was looked down upon by his neighbors as not the right sort of man to associate with.
In those days there were no railroads or steamboats, nor ever stage coaches, to convey passengers from place to place, and the early settlers had to depend upon their own resources.
| Linked to | Alexander Allison; James Crawford |
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