ates land has since broadened westward to the Pacific, over the
infinite areas which in 1800 belonged to Spain. From an early period
there have been, as now, unorganized territory and also partially
organized and fully organized territories, the last being inchoate
States, ready to be admitted to full membership in the Union when
sufficiently populous, on condition of framing each for itself a
republican constitution.

[Illustration: Portrait]
General Arthur St. Clair.

[1788]

The great ordinance of 1787, re-enacted by the First Congress, forever
sealing the same to civil and religious liberty, opened the Northwest
for immediate colonization, twenty thousand people settling there in the
next two years. The territory was organized and General St. Clair made
governor. In 1788 Marietta was founded, named from Marie Antoinette,
also Columbia near the mouth of the Little Miami. In the same year
Losantiville, subsequently called Fort Washington, and now Cincinnati,
was laid out, the first houses having gone up in 1780. Louisville,
settled so early as 1773, contained in 1784 over one hundred houses.
Emigrants in hundreds and thousands yearly poured over the mountains and
down the Ohio. By the census of 1790 there were 4,280 whites northwest
of this river, 1,000 at Vincennes, 1,000 on the lands of the Ohio
Company, 1,300 on Symmes's purchase between the Great and the Little
Miami, Cincinnati being part of this purchase. In 1800 these numbers had
much increased. The settlements which had Pittsburgh for a nucleus had
also greatly extended, reaching the Ohio. Northern and Central
Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna Valley was yet a wilderness. St.
Louis, in Spanish hands, but to become French next year, had been
founded, and opposite it were the beginnings of what is now Alton, Ill.

[1790]

The centre of United States population in 1790 was twenty-three miles
east of Baltimore. It has since moved westward, not far from the
thirty-ninth parallel, never more than sixteen miles north of it, or
three to the south. In 1800 it was eighteen miles west of Baltimore; in
1810 it was forty-three miles northwest by west of Washington; in 1820,
sixteen miles north of Woodstock, Va.; in 1830, nineteen miles
west-southwest of Moorfield, W. Va.; in 1840, sixteen miles south of
Clarksburg, same State; in 1850, twenty-three miles southeast of
Parkersburg, same State; in 1860, twenty miles south of Chillicothe, 0.;
in 1870, forty-eight