1783-96] The migration to the West. 357 3,500,000. Yet sparse as the population was, a rage for migration had infected it. Commerce was almost gone; trade was dull; times were bad ; many of the States owned western lands which they were trying to sell ; and thousands of families, disposing of what little they had, gladly bade farewell to the East and hurried westward to seek new homes in the wilderness. Every small farmer whose barren acres were covered with mortgages or whose debts pressed heavily upon him, every young man whose roving spirit or love of adventure gave him no peace, was eager to quit his old home in the East and begin life anew in central New York, or in the yet more favoured region on the banks of the Ohio. Such was the rush to the Ohio country that, every spring and summer, hundreds of arks heavy with cattle and household goods went down that river from Pittsburg. One observer at Fort Pitt wrote home that during six weeks he saw fifty flat-boats set off for the new settlements. Another at Fort Finney saw thirty-four boats float by in as many days. The adjutant at Fort Harmer had taken pains to count the boats which went by between October, 1786, and May, 1787, and declared that they numbered 177 and carried 2700 souls. Another authority estimated that no less than 10,000 emigrants passed Marietta during 1788. When the first census of the population was taken in 1790, 73,000 persons were living in Kentucky. In general, this movement consisted of three great streams pouring out of the three centres of population, the Eastern, the Middle, and the Southern States. One stream, made up of New Englanders, pushed up the Mohawk Valley into central New York. A second, crossing Pennsyl- vania and Virginia, went down the Ohio and settled in Kentucky and on the government lands at Marietta and Cincinnati. Further south, a third stream from Virginia and North Carolina crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains and settled about the headwaters of the Tennessee. While emigration along these lines was at its height, a series of events occurred which powerfully affected it. The appearance of the little bands of settlers north of the Ohio in 1788 was followed in 1789 by an Indian rising, which aimed at the expulsion of all settlers north of that river. From 1789 till 1794, when Anthony Wayne broke the Indian power in the great battle at the rapids of the Maumee river, and gave peace to the frontier, little inducement existed to lure settlers into the North-west Territory. The second stream, therefore, went into Kentucky, which became a State in 1791 ; and the third stream into Tennessee, which entered the Union in 1796, when the North-west Territory was still scarce better than a wilderness. The trading and commercial States, from which the first stream was moving out, had meantime begun to prosper greatly. The severe depression which followed the peace of 1783 passed rapidly away under the Constitution. The funding of the National Debt, the establishment of the National Bank, and the financial policy of the government in
