n language
attributed to President Monroe, "the era of good feeling." It was a
time of peace and prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid
extension of territory. The new nation was entering upon its vast
estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. The peace with
Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes
in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement.
Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President
Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand inhabitants,
and half of the State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for most of
its course through an unbroken wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort.
Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on
the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. This
movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and
the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that
amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine. All through
this period sounded the ax of the pioneer clearing the forest about his
log-cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant-wagon over the
primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies or followed the valley
of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as "Peter Parley," in
his _Recollections of a Life-time_, 1856, describes the part of the
movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County,
Connecticut: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through
Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some
persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of
father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some
on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles,
gridirons, feather-beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms
and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book--the lares and penates of the
household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of
ten miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in a state of
poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they
reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from
fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was
then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that
I published a small tract entitled, _'Tother Side of Ohio_--that is,
the other view, in contrast to t