into the Northwest territory.  In 1806, after many misgivings, it authorized a great national highway binding the East and the West.  The Cumberland Road, as it was called, began in northwestern Maryland, wound through southern Pennsylvania, crossed the narrow neck of Virginia at Wheeling, and then shot almost straight across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, into Missouri.  By 1817, stagecoaches were running between Washington and Wheeling; by 1833 contractors had carried their work to Columbus, Ohio, and by 1852, to Vandalia, Illinois.  Over this ballasted road mail and passenger coaches could go at high speed, and heavy freight wagons proceed in safety at a steady pace.

[Illustration:  THE CUMBERLAND ROAD]

=Canals and Steamboats.=—­A second epoch in the economic union of the East and West was reached with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, offering an all-water route from New York City to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley.  Pennsylvania, alarmed by the advantages conferred on New York by this enterprise, began her system of canals and portages from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, completing the last link in 1834.  In the South, the Chesapeake and Ohio Company, chartered in 1825, was busy with a project to connect Georgetown and Cumberland when railways broke in upon the undertaking before it was half finished.  About the same time, Ohio built a canal across the state, affording water communication between Lake Erie and the Ohio River through a rich wheat belt.  Passengers could now travel by canal boat into the West with comparative ease and comfort, if not at a rapid speed, and the bulkiest of freight could be easily handled.  Moreover, the rate charged for carrying goods was cut by the Erie Canal from $32 a ton per hundred miles to $1.  New Orleans was destined to lose her primacy in the Mississippi Valley.

The diversion of traffic to Eastern markets was also stimulated by steamboats which appeared on the Ohio about 1810, three years after Fulton had made his famous trip on the Hudson.  It took twenty men to sail and row a five-ton scow up the river at a speed of from ten to twenty miles a day.  In 1825, Timothy Flint traveled a hundred miles a day on the new steamer Grecian “against the whole weight of the Mississippi current.”  Three years later the round trip from Louisville to New Orleans was cut to eight days.  Heavy produce that once had to float down to New Orleans could be carried upstream and sent to the East by way of the canal systems.

[Illustration:  From an old print

AN EARLY MISSISSIPPI STEAMBOAT]

Thus the far country was brought near.  The timid no longer hesitated at the thought of the perilous journey.  All routes were crowded with Western immigrants.  The forests fell before the ax like grain before the sickle.  Clearings scattered through the woods spread out into a great mosaic of farms stretching from the Southern Appalachians to Lake Michigan.  The national census of 1830 gave 937,000 inhabitants to Ohio; 343,000 to Indiana; 157,000 to Illinois; 687,000 to Kentucky; and 681,000 to Tennessee.