[Illustration: UNITED STATES CENSUS 1870.]
It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography
of this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a
surplus, and the time when it had permanently set its face away from
the land east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see page 30) will
prove of the best service, and its little blotches of color tell much
in brief regarding the West of 1800. For forty years before this time
the fur trade had had its depot at the city of St. Louis. For a hundred
years there had been a settlement upon the Great Lakes. For nearly a
hundred years the town of New Orleans had been established. Here and
there, between these foci of adventurers, there were odd, seemingly
unaccountable little dots and specks of population scattered over all
the map, product of that first uncertain hundred years. Ohio, directly
west of the original hotbed, was left blank for a long time, and
indeed received her first population from the southward, and not from
the East, though the New-Englander Moses Cleveland founded the town
of Cleveland as early as 1796. Lower down in the great valley of the
Mississippi was a curious, illogical, and now forgotten little band of
settlers who had formed what was known as the "Mississippi Territory."
Smaller yet, and more inexplicable, did we not know the story of the
old water-trail from the Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a
dot, a smear, a tiny speck of population high up on the east bank of
the Mississippi, where the Wisconsin emptied. These valley settlements
far outnumbered all the population of the State of Ohio, which had
lain directly in the path of the star, but the streams of which lay
awkwardly on the scheme of travel. The West was beginning to be the
West. The seed sown by Marquette the Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La
Salle the Bold, by Tonti the Faithful,--seed despised by an ancient and
corrupt monarchy,--had now begun to grow.
[Illustration: UNITED STATES CENSUS 1890.]