[9] Read McMaster's History of the People of the U. S., Vol. IV, pp. 381-394. All the great highways to the West were crowded with bands of emigrants. In nine days 260 wagons bound for the West passed through one New York town. At Easton, in Pennsylvania, on a favorite route from New England (map, p. 194), 511 wagons accompanied by 3066 persons passed in a month. A tollgate keeper on another route reported 2000 families as having passed during nine months. From Alabama, whither people were hurrying to settle on the cotton lands, came reports of a migration quite as large. When the census of 1820 was taken, the returns showed that there were but 75 more people in Delaware in 1820 than there were in 1810. In the city of Charleston there were 24,711 people in 1810 and 24,780 in 1820. In many states along the seaboard the rate of increase of population was less during the census period 1810-20 than it had been before, because of the great numbers who had left for the West.
[10] If the newcomer chose some settlement for his home, the neighbors would gather when the logs were cut, hold a "raising," and build his cabin in the course of one day. Tables, chairs, and other furniture were generally made by the settler with his own hands. Brooms and brushes were of corn husks, and many of his utensils were cut from the trunks of trees. "I know of no scene more primitive," said a Kentucky pioneer, "than such a cabin hearth as that of my mother's. In the morning a buckeye backlog, a hickory forestick, resting on stones, with a johnny cake on a clean ash board, set before the fire to bake; a frying pan with its long handle resting on a splint-bottom chair, and a teakettle swung from a log pole, with myself setting the table, or turning the meat. Then came the blowing of the conch-shell for father in the field, the howling of old Lion, the gathering around the table, the blessing, the dull clatter of pewter spoons on pewter dishes, and the talk about the crops and stock."
[11] For an account of the social conditions in 1820, read McMaster's History of the People of the U. S., Vol. IV, Chap, xxxvii; also Eggleston's Circuit Rider, Cooper's Prairie, and Recollections of Life in Ohio, by W. C. Howells.
[12] A story is told of an early settler who was elected to the territorial legislature of Illinois. Till then he had always worn buckskin clothes, but thinking them unbecoming a lawmaker, he and his sons gathered hazel nuts and bartered them at the crossroads store for a few yards of blue strouding, out of which the women of the settlement made him a coat and pantaloons.
[13] On the Ohio River floated odd craft of many sorts. There were timber rafts from the mountain streams; pirogues built of trunks of trees; broadhorns; huge pointed and covered hulks carrying 50 tons of freight and floating downstream with the current and upstream by means of poles, sails, oars, or ropes; keel boats for upstream work, with long, narrow, pointed bow and stern, roofed, manned with a crew of ten men, and propelled with setting poles; flatboats which went downstream with the pioneer never to come back—flat-bottomed, box-shaped craft manned by a crew of six, kept in the current by oars 30 feet long called "sweeps" and a steering oar 50 feet long at the stern. Those intended to go down the Mississippi were strongly built, roofed over, and known as "Orleans boats." "Kentucky flatboats" for use on the Ohio were half roofed and slighter. Mingled with these were arks, galleys, rafts, and shanty boats of every sort, and floating shops carrying goods, wares, and merchandise to every farmhouse and settlement along the river bank. Now it would be a floating lottery office, where tickets were sold for pork, grain, or produce; now a tinner's establishment, where tinware was sold or mended; now a smithy, where horses and oxen were shod and wagons mended; now a factory for the manufacture of axes, scythes, and edge tools; now a dry- goods shop fitted up just as were such shops in the villages, and filled with all sorts of goods and wares needed by the settlers.
[14] This canal was originally a ditch 4 feet deep, 40 feet wide, and 363 miles long. The chief promoter was De Witt Clinton. The opponents of the canal therefore called it in derision "Clinton's big ditch," and declared that it could never be made a success. But Clinton and his friends carried the canal to completion, and in 1825 a fleet of canal boats left Buffalo, went through the canal, down the Hudson, and out into New York Bay. There fresh water brought from Lake Erie in a keg was poured into the salt water of the Atlantic.
[15] It was once hoped that Southern states also would in time abolish slavery; but as more and more land was devoted to cotton raising in the South, the demand for slave labor there increased. The South came to regard slavery as necessary for her prosperity, and to desire its extension to more territory.
[16] Meantime Arkansas (1819) had been organized as a slave-holding territory. As Missouri had to make a state constitution and submit it to Congress she did not enter the Union till 1821. The Compromise line 36° 30' was part of the south boundary of Missouri and extended to the 100th meridian. Missouri did not have the present northwestern boundary till 1836; compare maps on pp. 279 and 331. On the Compromise read the speech of Senator Rufus King, in Johnston's American Orations, Vol. II, pp. 33- 62; and that of Senator Pinckney, pp. 63-101.
[17] By the treaty with Great Britain in 1783 a line was to be drawn from the Lake of the Woods due west to the Mississippi. This was impossible, but the difficulty was ended by the treaty of 1818. From the northwesternmost point of the Lake of the Woods a line (as the treaty provides) is drawn due south to the 49th parallel. This makes a little knob on our boundary.
[18] We claimed it because in 1792 Captain Gray, in the ship Columbia, discovered the river, entered, and named it after his ship; because in 1805-6 Lewis and Clark explored both its main branches and spent the winter near its mouth; and because in 1811 an American fur-trading post, Astoria, was built on the banks of the Columbia near its mouth. Great Britain claimed a part of it because of explorations under Vancouver (1792), and occupation of various posts by the Hudson's Bay Company. At first Oregon was the country drained by the Columbia River. Through our treaty with Spain, in 1819, part of the 42d parallel was made the southern boundary. In 1824, by treaty with Russia, the country which then owned Alaska, 54° 40' became the northern boundary. The Rocky Mountains were understood to be the eastern limit.