Workmen were scarce and labor dear.  It was almost impossible to get men fit to work as mill hands, or to do high-class labor in forges even by importing them from Pennsylvania or Maryland. [Footnote:  Clay MSS., Letter to George Nicholas, Baltimore, Sept. 3, 1796.] Even in the few towns the inhabitants preferred that their children should follow agriculture rather than become handicraftsmen; and skilled workmen such as carpenters and smiths made a great deal of money, so much so that they could live a week on one day’s wage. [Footnote:  Michaux, pp. 96, 152.]

    The River Trade.

In addition to farming there was a big trade along the river.  Land transportation was very difficult indeed, and the frontiersman’s whole life was one long struggle with the forest and with poor roads.  The waterways were consequently of very great importance, and the flatboatmen on the Mississippi and Ohio became a numerous and noteworthy class.  The rivers were covered with their craft.  There was a driving trade between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, the goods being drawn to Pittsburgh from the seacoast cities by great four-horse wagons, and being exported in ships from New Orleans to all parts of the earth.  Not only did the Westerners build river craft, but they even went into shipbuilding; and on the upper Ohio, at Pittsburgh, and near Marietta, at the beginning of the present century, seagoing ships were built and launched to go down the Ohio and Mississippi, and thence across the ocean to any foreign port. [Footnote:  Thompson Mason Harris, “Journal of Tour,” etc., 1803, p. 140; Michaux, p. 77.] There was, however, much risk in this trade; for the demand for commodities at Natchez and New Orleans was uncertain, while the waters of the Gulf swarmed with British and French cruisers, always ready to pounce like pirates on the ships of neutral powers. [Footnote:  Clay MSS., W. H. Turner to Thomas Hart, Natchez, May 27, 1797.]

    Small Size of the Towns. 
    Natchez.

Yet the river trade was but the handmaid of frontier agriculture.  The Westerners were a farmer folk who lived on the clearings their own hands had made in the great woods, and who owned the land they tilled.  Towns were few and small.  At the end of the century there were some four hundred thousand people in the West; yet the largest town was Lexington, which contained less than three thousand people. [Footnote:  Perrin Du Lac “Voyage,” etc., 1801, 1803, p. 153; Michaux, 150.] Lexington was a neatly built little burg, with fine houses and good stores.  The leading people lived well and possessed much cultivation.  Louisville and Nashville were each about half its size.  In Nashville, of the one hundred and twenty houses but eight were of brick, and most of them were mere log huts.  Cincinnati was a poor little village.  Cleveland consisted of but two or three log cabins, at a time when there were already a thousand settlers in its neighborhood on the Connecticut Reserve, scattered