Location, Location, Location: Boosterism, Mobility, and the Market for Community in the Antebellum West

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, residents of emerging communities in the trans-Appalachian West produced a deluge of printed texts and personal communications touting the advantages and prospects of their adopted homes. In studying this period of frenetic boosterism, historians have probed its effects primarily on community formation and regional economic development. This article, by contrast, explores how novel methods of promoting western towns, states, and regions altered the meaning and practice of geographic mobility. It focuses, specifically, on how young men of northeastern, middle-class extraction mobilized information and ideas that they encountered in booster literature as they made decisions about westward migration. Perhaps more than any other population of migrants, these transients tended to embrace the booster formula for social mobility, which involved selecting a new community that was poised for rapid development and gradually prospering in tandem with the place. In a variety of ways, however, their engagement with booster culture often made it difficult for young men to decide on a destination and remain committed to it. Consequently, even as they professed a desire for long-term settlement, many grappled with a persistent impulse to uproot themselves in search of a more promising abode.