cheap lands
in the West to sever the slender ties which bound them to the stony
hillsides of New England.

After 1815 New England emigration rose to astonishing proportions, and
an increasing number of the homeseekers passed--directly or after a
sojourn in the Lower Lake country of New York--into the Northwest. The
opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made the westward journey easier and
cheaper. The routes of travel led to Lakes Ontario and Erie, thence
to the Reserve in northern Ohio, thence by natural stages into other
portions of northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and eventually into
southern Michigan and Wisconsin. Not until after 1830 did the stalwart
homeseekers penetrate north of Detroit; the great stretches of prairie
between Lakes Erie and Michigan, and to the south--left quite untouched
by Southern pioneers--satisfied every desire of these restless farmers
from New England.

For a long time Southerners determined the course of history in the
Old Northwest. They occupied the field first, and they had the great
advantage of geographical proximity to their old homes. Furthermore,
they lived more compactly; the New Englanders were not only spread over
the broader prairie stretches of the north, but scattered to some extent
throughout the entire region between the Lakes and the Ohio. * But by
the middle of the century not only had the score of northern counties
been inundated by the "Yankees" but the waves were pushing far into
the interior, where they met and mingled with the counter-current. Both
Illinois and Indiana became, in a preeminent degree, melting-pots in
which was fused by slow and sometimes painful processes an amalgam which
Bryce and other keen observers have pronounced the most American thing
in America.

* In 1820 the population of Indiana was confined almost entirely
to the southern third of the State, although the removal of the capital,
in 1825, from Corydon to Indianapolis was carried out in the confidence
that eventually that point would become the State's populational as it
was its geographical center. When, in 1818, Illinois was admitted to
the Union its population was computed at 40,000. The figure was probably
excessive; at all events, contemporaries testify that so eager were the
people for statehood that many were counted twice, and even emigrants
were counted as they passed through the Territory. But the census
of 1880 showed a population of 55,000, settled almost wholly in the
s