peace.

Wayne forthwith became a national hero. Returning to Philadelphia in
1796, he was met by a guard of honor, hailed with the ringing of bells
and a salute of fifteen guns, and treated to a dazzling display of
fireworks. Congress voted its thanks, and Washington, whose fears had
long since vanished, added his congratulations. There was one other
service on the frontier for the doughty general to render. The British
posts were at last to be surrendered, and Wayne was designated to
receive them. By midsummer he was back in the forest country, and in
the autumn he took possession of Detroit, amid acclamations of Indians,
Americans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen alike. But his work was done. On
the return journey he suffered a renewed attack of his old enemy, gout,
and at Presqu'isle (Erie) he died. A blockhouse modeled on the defenses
which he built during his western campaign marks his first resting-place
and bears aloft the flag which he helped plant in the heart of the
Continent.

Chapter VI. The Great Migration

While the fate of the Northwest still hung in the balance, emigration
from the eastern States became the rage. "Every small farmer whose
barren acres were covered with mortgages, whose debts pressed heavily
upon him, or whose roving spirit gave him no peace, was eager to sell
his homestead for what it would bring and begin life anew on the banks
of the Muskingum or the Ohio." * Land companies were then just as
optimistic and persuasive as they are today, and the attractions of the
western country lost nothing in the telling. Pamphlets described the
climate as luxurious, the soil as inexhaustible, the rainfall as both
abundant and well distributed, the crops as unfailingly bountiful;
paid agents went among the people assuring them that a man of push and
courage could nowhere be so prosperous and so happy as in the West.

* McMaster, "History of the People of the United States," vol.
III, p. 461.

As early as 1787 an observer at Pittsburgh reported that in six weeks
he saw fifty flatboats set off for the downriver settlements; in 1788
forty-five hundred emigrants were said to have passed Fort Harmar
between February and June. Most of these people were bound for Kentucky
or Tennessee. But the census of 1790 gave the population north of the
Ohio as 4,280, and after Wayne's victory the proportion of newcomers who
fixed their abodes in that part of the country rapidly increased. For
a decade Ohio was