I don’t know...the 1850s were for the most part rather stark. I guess it would depend on your income status.
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It would have been different, that’s for sure. I take into account personal and public hygiene, and working and living conditions of a lot of people, and slavery, and the big troubles that lay just ahead. But I think it would have been exciting to have been here when the country was still young and vigorous and optimistic, and when it produced great literature and men of the cloth, and when it was wide open and you could go places where no one had been before. I am old enough to have known people who were only a generation or two removed from that time. We lost something special when those people passed.
Yes, they did have some wonderful and dramatic stories to tell of settling this beautiful country. But so much poverty. Unrelenting and no real way out of it.