Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 9).djvu/76

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70
WATERWAYS OF WESTWARD EXPANSION

Thus at the opening of the actual pioneer period, about 1800, we find both shores of the Ohio dotted with settlements. In Virginia and Kentucky there are Pittsburg, Charleston, Wheeling, Limestone (Maysville), and Louisville; and on the old-time Indian Side are Beaver (Fort McIntosh), Wellsburg, Marietta (Fort Harmar), Gallipolis, Manchester, Columbia, Cincinnati; and Madison and Clarksville, Indiana. By 1800 there are forty-five thousand inhabitants in the entire Northwest Territory, of which probably twenty-five thousand are in the Ohio Valley. Kentucky contains a population of over two hundred thousand; not such a large fraction are on the Ohio however, as is true in the Northwest Territory. The question of conquest is past, though still for a decade the British, who have sullenly withdrawn across the Detroit River, will continue to incite the Indians until Harrison shall annihilate Tecumseh's confederacy at Tippecanoe in 1811. But so far as the Ohio Valley is concerned the question is one of occupation; and now come the streams of immigration from all easterly points of the compass to this great waterway.