PROGRESS OF OUR COUNTRY BETWEEN 1790 AND 1815

%273.% Twenty-five years had now gone by since Washington was inaugurated, and in the course of these years our country had made wonderful progress.  In 1790 the United States was bounded west by the Mississippi River.  By 1815 Louisiana had been purchased, the Columbia River had been discovered, and the Oregon country had been explored to the Pacific.  In 1790 the inhabitants of the United States numbered less than four millions.  In 1815 they were eight millions.  In 1790 there were but thirteen states in the Union, and two territories.  In 1815 there were eighteen states and five territories.

%274.  The Three Streams of Westward Emigration.%—­Sparse as was the population in 1789, the rage for emigration had already seized the people, and long before 1790 the emigrants were pouring over the mountains in three great streams.  One, composed of New England men, was pushing along the borders of Lake Champlain and up the Mohawk valley.  A second, chiefly from Pennsylvania and Virginia, was spreading itself over the rich valleys of what are now West Virginia and Kentucky.  Further south a third stream of emigrants, mostly from Virginia and North Carolina, had gone over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and was creeping down the valley of the Tennessee River.[1]

[Footnote 1:  For an account of the movement of population westward along these routes, see The First Century of the Republic, pp. 211-238.]

For months each year the Ohio was dotted with flatboats.  One observer saw fifty leave Pittsburg in five weeks.  Another estimated that ten thousand emigrants floated by Marietta during 1788.  As this never-ending stream of population spread over the wilderness, building cabins, felling trees, clearing the land, and driving off the game, the Indians took alarm and determined to expel them.

%275.  The Indian War.%—­During the summer of 1786 the tribes whose hunting grounds lay in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky took the warpath, sacked and burned a little settlement on the Holston, and spread terror along the whole frontier.  But the settlers in their turn rose, and inflicted on the Indians a signal punishment.  One expedition from Tennessee burned three Cherokee towns.  Another from Kentucky crossed the Ohio, penetrated the Indian country, burned eight towns, and laid waste hundreds of acres of standing corn.  Had the Indians been left to themselves, they would, after this punishment, have remained quiet.  But the British, who still held the frontier post at Detroit, roused them, and in 1790 they were again at work, ravaging the country north of the Ohio.  They rushed down on Big Bottom (northwest of Marietta) and swept it from the face of the earth.  St. Clair, who was governor of the Northwest Territory, sent against them an expedition which won some success—­just enough to enrage and not enough to cow them.