for twenty
miles on either side was filling up with an industrious population.
Auburn, where twenty years before land sold for one dollar an acre, was
the first town in size and wealth west of Utica, and land within its
limits brought $7000 an acre. Fourteen miles west was Waterloo, on the
Seneca River, a village which did not exist in 1814, and which in 1816
had fifty houses. Rochester, the site of which in 1815 was a wilderness,
had a printing press, a bookstore, and a hundred houses in 1817.[1]

[Footnote 1: McMaster's _History of the People of the United States_,
Vol. IV., pp. 381-386.]

%303. Scenes on the Western Highways.%--By 1817 this migration was at
its height, and in the spring of that year families set forth from
almost every village and town on the seaboard. The few that went from
each place might not be missed; but when they were gathered on any one
of the great roads to the West, as that across New York, or that across
Pennsylvania, they made an endless procession of wagons and
foot parties.

A traveler who had occasion to go from Nashville to Savannah in January,
1817, declares that on the way he fell in with crowds of emigrants from
Carolina and Georgia, all bound for the cotton lands of Alabama; that he
counted the flocks and wagons, and that--carts, gigs, coaches, and
wagons, all told--there were 207 conveyances, and more than 3800 people.
At Haverhill, in Massachusetts, a train of sixteen wagons, with 120 men,
women, and children, from Durham, Me., passed in one day. They were
bound for Indiana to buy a township, and were accompanied by their
minister. Within thirteen days, seventy-three wagons and 450 emigrants
had passed through the same town of Haverhill. 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