To move to a new town in the West and to tie one's life and career to its destiny was to acquire, between 1830 and the Civil War, a lesson in the dynamics of power within a regional urban economy. Hoping to re-create life as it was in the East and draw the core of the national system west, Easterners poured out of the older states along the Atlantic Coast and into the Midwest. In coming west, however, they faced considerable uncertainty. As we have seen, they first had to make the difficult decision of where to settle. If they intended to settle in a town, they had to choose one in which they had the initial advantages necessary to be successful. Often, given the rapidity of settlement and speed of economic development, a settler had only one or two chances to find the right venue for his strategy. Once decided, the newcomer then had to forge his way through the thicket of intense local competition. If one survived, the next step was to establish a position that could serve as a platform for expanding one's regional activity and securing the continued success of the town. The town, therefore, gradually became the focus of one's efforts because its success or failure in the regional economy and in continuing to adapt to changes in that economy, determined the success or failure of most of the townspeople. The difficulty of pinning one's hope's on a town was that one could, given a town's environment, topography, and economic location, only do so much to insure its success.