g 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.

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