y the Erie Canal from $32 a ton per hundred
miles to $1. New Orleans was destined to lose her primacy in the
Mississippi Valley.

The diversion of traffic to Eastern markets was also stimulated by
steamboats which appeared on the Ohio about 1810, three years after
Fulton had made his famous trip on the Hudson. It took twenty men to
sail and row a five-ton scow up the river at a speed of from ten to
twenty miles a day. In 1825, Timothy Flint traveled a hundred miles a
day on the new steamer _Grecian_ "against the whole weight of the
Mississippi current." Three years later the round trip from Louisville
to New Orleans was cut to eight days. Heavy produce that once had to
float down to New Orleans could be carried upstream and sent to the East
by way of the canal systems.

[Illustration: _From an old print_

AN EARLY MISSISSIPPI STEAMBOAT]

Thus the far country was brought near. The timid no longer hesitated at
the thought of the perilous journey. All routes were crowded with
Western immigrants. The forests fell before the ax like grain before the
sickle. Clearings scattered through the woods spread out into a great
mosaic of farms stretching from the Southern Appalachians to Lake
Michigan. The national census of 1830 gave 937,000 inhabitants to Ohio;
343,000 to Indiana; 157,000 to Illinois; 687,000 to Kentucky; and
681,000 to Tennessee.

[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION, 1830]

With the increase in population and the growth of agriculture came
political influence. People who had once petitioned Congress now sent
their own representatives. Men who had hitherto accepted without
protests Presidents from the seaboard expressed a new spirit of dissent
in 1824 by giving only three electoral votes for John Quincy Adams; and
four years later they sent a son of the soil from Tennessee, Andrew
Jackson, to take Washington's chair as chief executive of the
nation--the first of a long line of Presidents from the Mississippi
basin.

=References=

W.G. Brown, _The Lower South in American History_.

B.A. Hinsdale, _The Old North West_ (2 vols.).

A.B. Hulbert, _Great American Canals_ and _The Cumberland Road_.

T. Roosevelt, _Thomas H. Benton_.

P.J. Treat, _The National Land System_ (1785-1820).

F.J. Turner, _Rise of the New West_ (American Nation Series).

J. Winsor, _The Westward Movement_.

=Questions=

1. How did the West come to play a role in the Revolution?

2. What preparations were necessary