be his future abode, in a two-horse waggon, containing his family, and his little all, consisting of a few blankets, a skillet, his rifle, and his axe. Suppose him arrived in the spring: after putting up a little log cabin, he proceeds to clear, with intense labour, a plot of ground for Indian corn, which is to be their next year's support; but, for the present, being without means of obtaining a supply of flour, he depends on his gun for subsistence. In pursuit of the game, he is compelled after his day's work, to wade through the evening dews, up to the waist, in long grass, or bushes, and returning, finds nothing to lie on but a bear's skin on the cold ground, exposed to every blast through the sides, and every shower through the open roof of his wretched dwelling, which he does not even attempt to close, till the approach of winter, and often not then. Under these distresses of extreme toil and exposure, debarred from every comfort, many valuable lives have sunk, which have been charged to the climate.

'The individual, whose case is included in this seeming digression, escaped the ague, but he lay three weeks delirious in a nervous fever, of which he yet feels the remains; owing, no doubt, to excessive fatigue. Casualties, doubly calamitous in their forlorn estate, would sometimes assail them. He, for instance, bad the misfortune to break his leg at a time when his wife was confined by sickness, and for three days they were only supplied with water, by a child of two years old, having no means of communicating with their neighbours (neighbours ten miles off perhaps) until the fourth day. He had to carry the little grain he could procure twelve miles to be ground, and remembers once seeing at the mill, a man who had brought his sixty miles, and was compelled to wait three days for his turn.

Such are the difficulties which these pioneers have to encounter; but they diminish as settlements approach each other, and are only heard of by their successors. The number of emigrants who passed this way, was greater last year than in any preceding; and the present spring they are still more numerous than the last. Fourteen waggons yesterday, and thirteen to-day, have gone through this town. Myriads take their course down the Ohio. The waggons swarm with children. I heard to-day of three together, which contain forty-two of these young citizens. The wildest solitudes are to the taste of some people. General Boon, who was chiefly instrumental in the first settlement of Kentucky, is of this turn. It is said, that he is now, at the age of seventy, pursuing the daily chase, two hundred miles to the westward of the last abode of civilized man. He had retired to a chosen spot, beyond the Missouri, which, after him is named Boon's Lick, out of the reach, as he flattered himself, of intrusion; but white men, even there, incroached upon him, and two years ago, he went back two hundred miles farther.'-p. 50—53.

The country in the neighbourhood of Chillicotlie and on the banks of the Sciota was poor, and not sufficiently tempting for settlement. Our travellers therefore bent their course towards Cincinnati; they halted at Lebanon, a small town which, in four

teen

teen years, from two or three cabins of half-savage hunters, has grown into the residence of a thousand civilized inhabitants. The supper-bell was just ringing at the taverns, and our travellers seated themselves at the table among a set of travellers like themselves, with a number of store-keepers, lawyers, and doctors,—men who board at the taverns, and make up a standing company for the daily public table.'

"Cincinnati,' like most American towns, Mr.Birkbeck says, stands too low; it is built on the banks of the Ohio, and not out of the reach of spring-floods; consequently it is not healthy.

It is, however, a most thriving place, and backed as it is already by a great population and a most fruitful country, bids fair to be one of the first cities of the west. We are told, and we cannot doubt the fact, that the chief of what we see is the work of four years. The hundreds of commodious, well-finished brick houses, the spacious and busy markets, the substantial public buildings, the thousands of prosperous well-dressed, industrious inhabitants; the numerous waggons and drays, the gay carriages and elegant females;—the shoals of craft on the river, the busy stir prevailing every where: house building, boat building, paving and levelling of streets; the numbers of country people, constantly coming and going; with the spacious taverns, crowded with travellers from a distance.'-p. 70.

While at this place, Mr. Birkbeck takes occasion to observe, that the merino mania seems to have prevailed in America to a degree exceeding its highest pitch in England.'

'In Kentucky, (he says,) where even the negroes would no more eat mutton than they would horse-flesh, there were great merino breeders. There is, I believe, a Sheep Society here, to encourage the growth of fine wool on land as rich as the deepest vallies of our island-that there should ever have been a rage for sheep of any kind in any part that I have seen of this country, must be owing to general ignorance of the constitution and habits of this animal. There is scarcely a spot where a flock of fine-woolled sheep could be kept with any prospect of advantage, even if there were a market for the carcass; yet, by the ragged remains of the merino family, which may be recognized in many places, I perceive that the attempt has been very general. Mutton is almost as abhorrent to an American palate, as the flesh of a swine to an Israelite; and the state of the manufactures does not give great encouragement to the growth of wool of any kind, of merino wool less, perhaps, than any other. Mutton is sold in the markets of Philadelphia at about half the price of beef; and a Kentuckian, who would have given a thousand dollars for a merino ram, would dine upon dry bread rather than eat his own mutton. A few sheep on a farm, to supply coarse wool for domestic manufacture, seems to be all that ought at present to be attempted in any part of America that I have seen.'p. 100.

And yet Mr. Birkbeck has the confidence to assert, that artizans

must

must succeed in every part of it!-and yet the manufacturer of Devizes is selling his looms and little furniture to procure a passage to the United States, that he may leap into a sudden fortune by weaving!

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Twenty years ago, Mr. Birkbeck says, the vast region comprizing the states of Ohio and Indiana, and the territory of Illinois and Michigan, only counted 30,000 inhabitants, the number now living in the little county of Hamilton, in which stands the town of Cincinnati. And he asks,- Why do not the governments of Europe afford such an asylum, in their vast and gloomy forests, for their increasing myriads of paupers?'-Such a project he pronounces to be worthy a convention of sovereigns, if sovereigns were really the fathers of their people.'-If the sovereigns of Europe could transplant the back woods of America into their dominions, after hunting down and scalping the native possessors, (only taking care, like the subscribers of Alleghany,* to preserve both ears,') such a project, which does infinite credit to the integrity of our benevolent Quaker, might probably occur to them.' Land being at too high a price in Hamilton county, Mr. Birkbeck determined on proceeding farther westward, sagaciously reflecting that the time was fast approaching when the grand intercourse with Europe would not lie, as at present, through Eastern America, but through the great rivers which communicate by the Mississippi with the ocean at New Orleans. In this view,' he observes, 'we approximate to Europe as we proceed to the west.' The tide of emigration is undoubtedly setting with extraordinary rapidity in that direction; and Old America,' to the eastward of the Alleghany mountains, is very soon likely to become, as our Cambridge friend expresses it, the thinnest part of the wedge.' The south-western states have not merely the advantage, in point of local situation relatively with the rest of the commercial world,—but the soil and climate, in places where cultivation prevails, are preferable to those in the eastern states. Under such circumstances, and considering the character of the people who are flocking to the other side of the Alleghany chain, the opinion is by no means chimerical, that New America' will be induced shortly to shake off her allegiance to the parent states and set up a congress of her own. A few such settlers as Morris Birkbeck (who seems to think that every little society of men ought to govern itself) will marvellously expedite the separation.

Another circumstance may probably tend to hasten the event, as it renders the provinces, beyond the Alleghany, wholly independent of the eastern or northern states of Old America:'-the Quarterly Review, vol. x. p. 532.

VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVII.

navigation

navigation of the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi, opens a ready communication with every part of the extensive country behind those mountains, and establishes an intercourse with the shores of Europe within two months, and with the West India islands in the course of two weeks. To every other part of the world they have a nearer as well as less dangerous navigation than from Old America.' They have already steam-vessels of four hundred tons burden plying on those rivers, and their average rate, when deeply laden and against the stream, is about sixty miles a-day.-(p. 133.)-Their products are precisely the same as those of the eastern and northern states, which can neither supply what they require, nor take off what they produce;-what possible bond of union then can long subsist between Old and New America? With no great desire to indulge a spirit of prophesy, we cannot help surmizing that the late Navigation Act, drawn up, as it would seem, more in a spirit of political hostility towards England, than with a view to any commercial advantages that could be hoped to result from it to America, is well calculated to hasten the event. Can the Congress hope to throw an impassable barrier across the Mississippi, and thus prevent a supply of provisions and lumber for the West India islands whenever such supply shall be demanded? The back settlements are already too strong, and they know it, to submit to navigation laws that shall operate so detrimentally to their interests. We consider all apprehension of the West India islands being starved in time of war with America, to be now removed, and that in war, as well as in peace, the steam-boats of the Mississippi will bring down the produce of the New provinces into the Atlantic; unless indeed, which is as little to be apprehended, Old America shall be able to blockade its own river with a superior squadron.

It is but common justice to say, that whatever countenance the President of the United States may find it expedient to give to measures offensive to Great Britain, neither his public nor private conduct, nor his speeches partake of those coarse and splenetic invectives which some of the members of the government seem to think it necessary to adopt. If any soreness might be expected to remain in consequence of the war, we should rather look for it on the part of the people of England than of America,—but both would do well to bear in mind the noble example of forbearance set by our venerable sovereign, at the close of the former contest, on the occasion of the first audience of Mr. Adams. I perceive, Mr. Adams,' said the King, that you are a little agitated; I am not surprised at it; I am agitated myself; but let me make one observation---As I was the last man in this country to accede to the acknowledgment

acknowledgment of the independence of my American dominions, depend upon it, I shall likewise be, now that the act is ratified, the last to infringe it.'

The settlers of the Indiana territory are not, Mr. Birkbeck says, that set of lawless, semi-barbarous vagabonds, which he had been taught to believe; but a remarkably good sort of people, kind' and gentle to each other and to strangers. There are, however, among them many abandoned characters, but they retire to the depth of the woods with the wolves, and live by the rifle :-With respect to the inhabitants of towns, the Americans, from Norfolk on the eastern coast, to the town of Madison in Indiana, are all alike; and this is their portrait.

"The same good-looking, well-dressed (not what we call gentlemanly) men appear every where. Nine out of ten, native Americans, are tall and long-limbed, approaching, or even exceeding six feet; in pantaloons and Wellington boots, either marching up and down with their hands in their pockets, or seated on chairs poised on the hind-feet, and the backs rested against the walls. If a hundred Americans of any class were to seat themselves, ninety-nine would shuffle their chairs to the true distance, and then throw themselves back against the nearest prop. The women exhibit a great similarity of tall relaxed forms with consistent dress and demeanour; and are not remarkable for sprightliness of manners. Intellectual culture has not yet made much progress among the generality of either sex where I have travelled; but the men have greatly the advantage in the means of acquiring information, from their habits of travelling, and intercourse with strangers:--sources of improvement from which the other sex is unhappily too much secluded?' -p. 80, 81.

'We have remarked,' (our traveller says,) en passant, that people generally speak favourably of their own country.' p. 115. He has the courage, however, to become a striking exception to this general practice. Abuse of England appears to be, with Mr. Morris Birkbeck, a kind of travelling ticket, a sort of conventional money, which he offers at every house, and which, we regret to add, seems to pass tolerably current.

On the way to Vincennes our Friend loses himself, and is obliged, in the phraseology of the country, to camp out,' that is, to sleep in the woods. The night, as Mrs. Wilkins says in Tom Jones, happened to be very fine, only a little windy and rainy,' and our travellers contrived by dint of oil and brandy, and gunpowder and cambric handkerchiefs, to kindle a fire, and pass it as they could. This agreeable adventure, which would sicken an English gipsy of' camping out,' leads quite naturally to a lofty panegyric on the superior. advantages of travelling in that vast western wilderness' compared with those to be found in this country. Let,' says Mr. Birkbeck, a stranger

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