Creek Indians join the English.
Driven out of Alabama by Jackson.
Take refuge with Florida Seminoles.
After the war rise against the settlers in Georgia.
Destroyed by Jackson.
The boundaries …
1818. Northern boundary of Louisiana
settled to the Rocky Mountains.
1819. Treaty with Spain settled the south
boundary of Louisiana.
1818. Joint occupation of Oregon.
1824. North boundary of Oregon established at 54° 40'.
The Monroe Doctrine.
The Holy Allies.
The South American republics.
Proposal of the Holy Allies to reduce the
South American republics.
The Monroe Doctrine announced (1823).
CHAPTER XXI
THE RISING WEST
%301. Rush into the West.%—The settlement of our boundary disputes, especially with Spain, was most timely, for even then people were hurrying across the mountains by tens of thousands, and building up new states in the Mississippi valley. The great demand for ships and provisions, which from 1793 to 1807 had made business so brisk, had kept people on the seaboard and given them plenty of employment. But after 1812, and particularly after 1815, trade, commerce, and business on the seaboard declined, work became scarce, and men began to emigrate to the West, where they could buy land from the government on the installment plan, and where the states could not tax their farms until five years after the government had given them a title deed. Old settlers in central New York declared they had never seen so many teams and sleighs, loaded with women, children, and household goods, traveling westward, bound for Ohio, which was then but another name for the West.
As the year wore away, the belief was expressed that when autumn came it would be found that the worst was over, and that the good times expected to follow peace would keep people on the seaboard. But the good times did not return. The condition of trade and commerce, of agriculture and manufactures, grew worse instead of better, and the western movement of population became greater than ever.
%302. Rapid Growth of Towns.%—Fed by this never-ending stream of newcomers, the West was almost transformed. Towns grew and villages sprang up with a rapidity which even in these days of rapid and easy communication would be thought amazing. Mt. Pleasant, in Jefferson County, Ohio, was in 1810 a little hamlet of seven families living in cabins. In 1815 it contained ninety families, numbering 500 souls. The town of Vevay, Ind., was laid out in 1813, and was not much better than a collection of huts in 1814. But in 1816 the traveler down the Ohio who stopped at Vevay found himself at a flourishing county seat, with seventy-five dwellings, occupied by a happy population who boasted of having among them thirty-one mechanics of various trades; of receiving three mails each week, and supporting a weekly newspaper called the Indiana Register. Forty-two thousand settlers are said to have come into Indiana in 1816, and to have raised the population to 112,000.