Gambling: The Speculation of Westering Migrants
Keeping to westbound paths, settlers moved from the tired soils of Virginia, eastern Kentucky, central Alabama, and west-central Mississippi.
They settled not up against the river, where their holdings would have been flooded periodically by the stream, but rather at a slight distance inland, preserving the line of forest that bordered the rivers.
The massive migration continued into the early 1830s as Indians ceded more and more land.
As late of 1832, much of the northern and western portions of the state Mississippi, including that part bounded by the river, remained reserved for Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians.
The presence of these tribes prolonged the pioneer phase of society and restricted the growth of the nearby river towns, Memphis and Vicksburg, by occupying potential hinterlands.
With the removal of the few remaining native Americans during the mid-1830s, one last influx of newcomers capped the Great Migration to the cotton frontier along the lower Mississippi, and marked a turning point in the development of this gamblers' West.
The instability of the new country became especially apparent in Arkansas on the western side of the river, a territory that retained its frontier character for an unusually long time.
Peopled by numerous displaced Indians, and burdened with swampy terrain and inadequate roads, Arkansas remained unsettled long after lands just east of the river had been subdued by the culture of cotton and slaves.
Emigrants hesitated to push beyond the Mississippi into the interior of the territory. Consequently, it remained a no man's land 'admired' by bankrupts, homicides, horse-stealers, and gamblers.'
The territory perpetuated frontier conditions throughout the lower river valley by serving as a refuge for the blacklegs chased out of other communities.
While Arkansas was exceptional in the extent of it unruly population and slow development, the territory nonetheless demonstrated the uncertainty of life in newly occupied lands along the western rivers.
The people of the river frontier diverged markedly from the cotton planters migrating to new lands in the southwest.
The first comprised a commercial and fast society of towns right next to the rivers where pioneer conditions endured, while the second formed an agricultural society, inland from riverbanks, that was disciplined by the presence of black slaves.
The two groups of settlers depended heavily upon each other, for farmers mostly shipped their produce through river towns and often purchased goods from townspeople; yet they each cultivated their own styles of living.
Town residents thrived in a speculative and transient western planters quickly reproduced the rigid order and restraints of the slave South.