Between 1810 and 1840 the center of
population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the
neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself
had increased from seven to seventeen millions. The gain was made
partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward.
During the years now under review, {404} the following new States were
admitted, in the order named: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama,
Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Kentucky and Tennessee had been
made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and
Louisiana--acquired by purchase from France--in 1812.

The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness
behind them. They took up first the rich bottom lands along the river
courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the
Mississippi and Missouri, and the shores of the great lakes. But there
still remained back woods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the
cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than
one hundred thousand in 1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825,
it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who went by canal to
Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at
Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first
settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of this great water
way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and thirty
thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi. Their power had
been broken by General Harrison's victory over Tecumseh at the battle
of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and
fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization,
and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries. It was
not until some years later than this that railroads began {405} to take
an important share in opening up new country.

The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation
which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque
contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was
encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness--all these found
expression, not only in such well-known books as Copper's _Pioneers_,
1823, and Irving's _Tour on the Prairies_, 1835, but in the minor
literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but
for the light that it throws on the history of national development