Salt, available at natural springs, seasonally attracted great herds of bison which through years of repetitious movement carved an extensive system of buffalo traces: avenues used by Anglo-Americans in settling portions of the Ohio Valley. Frontier settlement concentrated in areas of salt availability as the vital dietary element proved necessary to sustain livestock and to prepare meats, thus providing the frontier farmer with an export commodity. Salt was used as a medium of exchange enabling merchants to pursue a diversified commerce centered in urban places; indeed, the salt trade, more than any other commercial activity, sustained the Valley's early urban structure.REDERICK JACKSON TURNER formu-F lated the initial generalizations relating salt to the Ohio Valley's frontier experience.2 In his epic paper, Turner theorized that a general lack of salt retarded westward migration; he wrote: "The early settlers were tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comf~r t . "~ Conversely, he noted that salt availability stimulated frontier expan~ion:~ When discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawha and the Holston, and Kentucky, and central New York, the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast. It was part of the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains.
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