At Easton, Pa., which lay on the favorite westward route for New Englanders, 511 wagons, with 3066 persons, passed in a month.  They went in trains of from six to fifty wagons each day.  The keeper of Gate No. 2, on the Dauphin turnpike, in Pennsylvania, returned 2001 families as having passed his gate, bound west, between March and December, 1817, and gave the number of people accompanying the vehicles as 16,000.  Along the New York route, which went across the state from Albany to Buffalo, up Lake Erie, and on by way of Chautauqua Lake to the Allegheny, the reports are just as astonishing.  Two hundred and sixty wagons were counted going by one tavern in nine days, besides hundreds of people on horseback and on foot.[1]

[Footnote 1:  McMaster’s History.  Vol.  IV., pp. 387, 388.]

%304.  Life on the Frontier.%—­The “mover,” or, as we should say, the emigrant, would provide himself with a small wagon, very light, but strong enough to carry his family, provisions, bedding, and utensils; would cover it with a blanket or a piece of canvas or with linen which was smeared with tar inside to make it waterproof; and with two stout horses to pull it, would set out for the West, and make his way across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then the greatest city of the West, with a population of 7000.  Some, as of old, would take boats and float down the Ohio; others would go on to Wheeling, be ferried across the river, and push into Ohio or Indiana or Illinois, there to “take up” a quarter section (160 acres) of government land, or buy or rent a “clearing” from some shiftless settler of an earlier day.  Government land intended for sale was laid out in quarter sections of 160 acres, and after being advertised for a certain time was offered for sale at public auction.  What was not sold could then be purchased at the land office of the district at two dollars an acre, one quarter to be paid down, and three fourths before the expiration of four years.  The emigrant, having gathered eighty dollars, would go to some land office, “enter” a quarter section, pay the first installment, and make his way in the two-horse wagon containing his family and his worldly goods to the spot where was to be his future home.  Every foot of it in all probability would be covered with bushes and trees.

[Illustration:  Distribution of the Population of the United States Fourth Census, 1820]

%305.  The Log Cabin.%—­In that case the settler would cut down a few saplings, make a “half-faced camp,” and begin his clearing.  The “half-faced camp” was a shed.  Three sides were of logs laid one on another horizontally.  The roof was of saplings covered with branches or bark.  The fourth side was open, and when it rained was closed by hanging up deerskin curtains.  In this camp the newcomer and his family would live while he grubbed up the bushes and cut down trees enough to make a log cabin.  If he were a thrifty, painstaking man, he would smooth each log on four sides with his ax, and notch it half through at each end so that when they were placed one on another the faces would nearly touch.  Saplings would make the rafters, and on them would be fastened planks laid clapboard fashion, or possibly split shingles.