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In Pursuit of a Better Life follows the travels of Judah Colt (1761-1832), son of a Connecticut farmer, who goes West soon after the War of Independence and the opening of the land west of the Alleghenies in the 1780s. In these days of the Early Republic, he follows in his father’s and uncle’s footsteps, investing in land; but unlike them he settles on the new frontier, and becomes surveyor, farmer, importer and seller of dry goods, individual agent buying and selling small quantities of land, and quickly amasses wealth and status in the Finger Lakes region of western New York.
Restless, Colt travels on to the newly opened land of Pennsylvania’s Erie Triangle, bordering Lake Erie, where he is hired as the local land agent by the Pennsylvania Population Company. His Journal and his Narrative reveal Colt’s prejudices and his very Anglo-colonial views which allow him, along with most of his contemporaries, to ride brutally over the existing inhabitants of the land - the Native Americans. His quick rise to wealth as an early settler colonial is facilitated by a rich network of New England family and friends who buy the land, provide the dry goods, come and work for him on the frontier.
The book draws on a wealth of other sources to paint a picture of these new frontier towns of the Early Republic. Colt was a man with many trades which he exercised, in a period of real land mania, to reach his ‘better life’. By 1820 he was the third richest man in Erie, Pennsylvania.
