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… is from pages 65-66 of Daniel Boorstin’s 1965 volume, The Americans: The National Experience [2]:
This order of events was repeated again and again in American history. Typical of the transients during their heyday between the Revolution and the Civil War, it helps explain many of the distinctive features of American life in the following century. As we have seen, groups moving westward organized into communities in order to conquer the great distances, to help one another drag their wagons uphill or across streams, to protect one another from Indians, and for a hundred other purposes. Knowing they were moving where jurisdiction was uncertain or nonexistent, they dared not wait for government to establish its machinery. If the services that elsewhere were performed by government were to be performed at all, it would have to be by private initiative.