The Army Officers.
The gentry offered to strangers the usual open-handed hospitality
characteristic of the frontier, with much more than the average frontier
refinement; a hospitality, moreover, which was never marred or
interfered with by the frontier suspiciousness of strangers which
sometimes made the humbler people of the border seem churlish to
travellers. When Federal garrisons were established along the Ohio the
officers were largely dependent for their social pleasures on the
gentle-folks of the several rather curious glimpses of the life of the
time. [Footnote: Major Erkuries Beattie. In the _Magazine of Am.
Hist._, I., p. 175.] He mentions being entertained by Clark at "a very
elegant dinner," [Footnote: 2 Aug. 25, 1786.] a number of gentlemen
being present. After dinner the guests adjourned to the dancing school,
"where there were twelve or fifteen young misses, some of whom had made
considerable improvement in that polite accomplishment, and indeed were
middling neatly dressed considering the distance from where luxuries are
to be bought and the expense attending the purchase of them here"--for
though beef and flour were cheap, all imported goods sold for at least
five times as much as they cost in Philadelphia or New York.
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