Letters from New York describe the condition of that state west of Utica as one of astonishing prosperity. Log cabins were disappearing, and frame and brick houses taking their place. The pike from Utica to Buffalo was almost a continuous village, and the country for twenty miles on either side was filling up with an industrious population. Auburn, where twenty years before land sold for one dollar an acre, was the first town in size and wealth west of Utica, and land within its limits brought $7000 an acre. Fourteen miles west was Waterloo, on the Seneca River, a village which did not exist in 1814, and which in 1816 had fifty houses. Rochester, the site of which in 1815 was a wilderness, had a printing press, a bookstore, and a hundred houses in 1817.[1]
[Footnote 1: McMaster's History of the People of the United States,
Vol. IV., pp. 381-386.]
%303. Scenes on the Western Highways.%—By 1817 this migration was at its height, and in the spring of that year families set forth from almost every village and town on the seaboard. The few that went from each place might not be missed; but when they were gathered on any one of the great roads to the West, as that across New York, or that across Pennsylvania, they made an endless procession of wagons and foot parties.
A traveler who had occasion to go from Nashville to Savannah in January, 1817, declares that on the way he fell in with crowds of emigrants from Carolina and Georgia, all bound for the cotton lands of Alabama; that he counted the flocks and wagons, and that—carts, gigs, coaches, and wagons, all told—there were 207 conveyances, and more than 3800 people. At Haverhill, in Massachusetts, a train of sixteen wagons, with 120 men, women, and children, from Durham, Me., passed in one day. They were bound for Indiana to buy a township, and were accompanied by their minister. Within thirteen days, seventy-three wagons and 450 emigrants had passed through the same town of Haverhill. At Easton, Pa., which lay on the favorite westward route for New Englanders, 511 wagons, with 3066 persons, passed in a month. They went in trains of from six to fifty wagons each day. The keeper of Gate No. 2, on the Dauphin turnpike, in Pennsylvania, returned 2001 families as having passed his gate, bound west, between March and December, 1817, and gave the number of people accompanying the vehicles as 16,000. Along the New York route, which went across the state from Albany to Buffalo, up Lake Erie, and on by way of Chautauqua Lake to the Allegheny, the reports are just as astonishing. Two hundred and sixty wagons were counted going by one tavern in nine days, besides hundreds of people on horseback and on foot.[1]
[Footnote 1: McMaster's History. Vol. IV., pp. 387, 388.]
%304. Life on the Frontier.%—The "mover," or, as we should say, the emigrant, would provide himself with a small wagon, very light, but strong enough to carry his family, provisions, bedding, and utensils; would cover it with a blanket or a piece of canvas or with linen which was smeared with tar inside to make it waterproof; and with two stout horses to pull it, would set out for the West, and make his way across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then the greatest city of the West, with a population of 7000. Some, as of old, would take boats and float down the Ohio; others would go on to Wheeling, be ferried across the river, and push into Ohio or Indiana or Illinois, there to "take up" a quarter section (160 acres) of government land, or buy or rent a "clearing" from some shiftless settler of an earlier day. Government land intended for sale was laid out in quarter sections of 160 acres, and after being advertised for a certain time was offered for sale at public auction. What was not sold could then be purchased at the land office of the district at two dollars an acre, one quarter to be paid down, and three fourths before the expiration of four years. The emigrant, having gathered eighty dollars, would go to some land office, "enter" a quarter section, pay the first installment, and make his way in the two-horse wagon containing his family and his worldly goods to the spot where was to be his future home. Every foot of it in all probability would be covered with bushes and trees.
[Illustration: Distribution of the Population of the United States
Fourth Census, 1820]
%305. The Log Cabin.%—In that case the settler would cut down a few saplings, make a "half-faced camp," and begin his clearing. The "half-faced camp" was a shed. Three sides were of logs laid one on another horizontally. The roof was of saplings covered with branches or bark. The fourth side was open, and when it rained was closed by hanging up deerskin curtains. In this camp the newcomer and his family would live while he grubbed up the bushes and cut down trees enough to make a log cabin. If he were a thrifty, painstaking man, he would smooth each log on four sides with his ax, and notch it half through at each end so that when they were placed one on another the faces would nearly touch. Saplings would make the rafters, and on them would be fastened planks laid clapboard fashion, or possibly split shingles.
An opening was of course left for a door, although many a cabin was built without a window, and when the door was shut received no light save that which came down the chimney, which was always on the outside of the house. To form it, an opening eight feet long and six feet high was left at one end of the house, and around this a sort of bay window was built of logs and lined with stones on the inside. Above the top of the opening the chimney contracted and was made of branches smeared both inside and out with clay. Generally the chimney went to the peak of the roof; but it was by no means unusual for it to stop about halfway up the end of the cabin.
[Illustration: Log cabin[1]