In western Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, and a part of Tennessee, flour, corn, small grains, pulse potatoes, and other vegetables; fruit, as apples, fresh and dried, dried peaches, and other preserved fruits, beef, pork, cheese butter, poultry, venison hams, live cattle, hogs, and horses were exported. The greater part of the flour was sent from Ohio and Kentucky; wheat was grown with more ease in Illinois and Missouri, and Ohio engaged in the culture of yellow tobacco.[482] Large quantities of flour were shipped from Wellsburg, West Virginia to New Orleans.[483] Cotton, and the Castor bean, and the oil made from it were exported from Illinois for several years prior to 1830.[484]
There were often as many as five or six thousand boatmen in New Orleans from the 'upper country' at this period.[485] The canals, the rapid influx of immigration, and the levelling tendency of the increased facilities of transport, caused western products to rapidly approximate the Atlantic value. Flint says, "The natural result of this order of things will be, that the west will soon export four times its former amount of flour and other produce."[486]
I have endeavored in this chapter to show how rapidly the resources, and the commerce of the country were developed, bringing great prosperity to the West.
CHAPTER IV.
EMIGRATION. GROWTH OF THE RIVER TOWNS.
During the War of 1812, the tide of immigration westward was almost completely arrested, and many of the settlements already established were broken up by the savages.[487] The war being over, and the Indians being deprived of their distinguished British ally,[488] profound peace was soon restored to all our borders, from the northeast to the southwest.[489] Immigration now set more strongly toward the West, for having been so long kept back, and the country was peopled with a rapidity unparalleled in the annals of any other nation.[490] "Shoals of immigrants were seen on all the great roads leading in that direction. Oleanne, Pittsburg, Brownsville, Nashville, Cincinnati, and St. Louis overflowed with them. Ohio and Indiana beheld thousands of new cabins spring up in their forests. The settlements which had been broken up during the war, were repeopled, and many immigrants returned again to the very cabins which they had occupied before the war. Boon's Lick, and Salt River, in Missouri, were the grand points of immigration, as were the Sangama and the upper courses of the Kaskaskia's in Illinois. In the south, Alabama filled with new habitations, and the current, not arrested by the Mississippi, set over its banks, to White River, Arkansas, and Louisiana, west of that river. The wandering propensity of the American people carried hundreds even beyond our territorial limits into the Spanish country."[491]
"This flood of immigrants of course increased the amount of transport, and gave new impulse to building,—in short, every species of speculation was carried to a ruinous excess. Mercantile importations filled the country with foreign goods. In three years from the close of the War, things had received a new face along the great water courses, and in all the favorable points of the interior. The tide began to ebb, and things to settle to their natural level. Between the general failure of the western banks, and the operation of this system, (branches of Bank of the United States, and Post-Office System—medium of sure and prompt remittance of a circulation everywhere uniform), western dealers were driven to the extremely burdensome and precarious resource of specie in their foreign transactions. Business and trade were brought to a dead pause. The evils were spread along a course of two thousand miles, and were experienced in the remote cabins, as well as the towns, and villages on the rivers. The result of a sound and uniform currency was seen in the restoration of business and credit; and commerce sprung up, like a Phoenix, from its ashes. Shapeless and meanlooking villages became towns, and the towns in neatness and beauty began to compare with those in the Atlantic country. The best evidence of the change, wrought by this order of things is, that produce and every species of vendible property rose to double and triple its value, during the season of general embarrassment."[492]
As early as 1813, the roads over the Alleghanies were in a very rough condition, though the Cumberland Road was partly made, and in the spring of this year there were considerable stretches of it used by the wagoners. For emigrants and the transportation of freight, there was no mode of conveyance but the large "road wagons", as they were called, usually drawn by five or six horses, and carrying sixty to seventy hundred weight. There were several routes by which these wagons approached the mountains, but after passing Cumberland they followed the one road, known as Braddock's Trail, which struck the Monongahela River at Brownsville, or Red Stone Fort, passing down the Laurel Hill, near Uniontown, then called Beesonstown.[493] The wagoners usually traveled in groups for company and to assist one another by doubling teams, on the steep hills, and to help in case of accidents. Howells says that it is his impression that his father paid between $3 and $4 a hundred weight (112 pounds) for the carriage of his goods to Brownsville.[494]
A mighty population was pouring into Ohio in 1813, a great number of the people coming from Lower Canada.[495] A "New England Emigration Society" was established in Boston, in 1815, for the purpose of promoting emigration to the western country. The association was composed of a considerable number of persons of all parties, who were determined to establish a colony of their own.[496] The Buffalo Gazette says, that during the spring of this year scarcely a day passed without the editor's noticing the passage of several families from New England through that village for the State of Ohio.[497] The monthly returns from the several land offices in Ohio and Indiana Territory exhibited an unparalleled sale of public land, and in some districts the sales had been doubled in the six months prior to February, 1815. The emigration to the State in the summer of 1814 was very great, the main road through the State being literally covered with wagons moving out families.[498]