The types of people were as various as the nations they represented.  Timothy Flint, who published his entertaining Recollections in 1826, found the West a strange mixture of all sorts and conditions of people.  Some of them, he relates, had been hunters in the upper world of the Mississippi, above the falls of St. Anthony.  Some had been still farther north, in Canada.  Still others had wandered from the South—­the Gulf of Mexico, the Red River, and the Spanish country.  French boatmen and trappers, Spanish traders from the Southwest, Virginia planters with their droves of slaves mingled with English, German, and Scotch-Irish farmers.  Hunters, forest rangers, restless bordermen, and squatters, like the foaming combers of an advancing tide, went first.  Then followed the farmers, masters of the ax and plow, with their wives who shared every burden and hardship and introduced some of the features of civilized life.  The hunters and rangers passed on to new scenes; the home makers built for all time.

=The Number of Immigrants.=—­There were no official stations on the frontier to record the number of immigrants who entered the West during the decades following the American Revolution.  But travelers of the time record that every road was “crowded” with pioneers and their families, their wagons and cattle; and that they were seldom out of the sound of the snapping whip of the teamster urging forward his horses or the crack of the hunter’s rifle as he brought down his evening meal.  “During the latter half of 1787,” says Coman, “more than nine hundred boats floated down the Ohio carrying eighteen thousand men, women, and children, and twelve thousand horses, sheep, and cattle, and six hundred and fifty wagons.”  Other lines of travel were also crowded and with the passing years the flooding tide of home seekers rose higher and higher.

=The Western Routes.=—­Four main routes led into the country beyond the Appalachians.  The Genesee road, beginning at Albany, ran almost due west to the present site of Buffalo on Lake Erie, through a level country.  In the dry season, wagons laden with goods could easily pass along it into northern Ohio.  A second route, through Pittsburgh, was fed by three eastern branches, one starting at Philadelphia, one at Baltimore, and another at Alexandria.  A third main route wound through the mountains from Alexandria to Boonesboro in Kentucky and then westward across the Ohio to St. Louis.  A fourth, the most famous of them all, passed through the Cumberland Gap and by branches extended into the Cumberland valley and the Kentucky country.

Of these four lines of travel, the Pittsburgh route offered the most advantages.  Pioneers, no matter from what section they came, when once they were on the headwaters of the Ohio and in possession of a flatboat, could find a quick and easy passage into all parts of the West and Southwest.  Whether they wanted to settle in Ohio, Kentucky, or western Tennessee they could find their way down the drifting flood to their destination or at least to some spot near it.  Many people from the South as well as the Northern and Middle states chose this route; so it came about that the sons and daughters of Virginia and the Carolinas mingled with those of New York, Pennsylvania, and New England in the settlement of the Northwest territory.