of the country.

[Sidenote: Western pioneers.]

[Sidenote: Settlements on the Ohio. _Eggleston_, 232-234; _Higginson_,
243.]

232. Making of the West.--Even before the Revolutionary War
explorers and settlers had crossed the Alleghany Mountains. In
Washington's time pioneers, leaving Pittsburg, floated down the Ohio
River in flatboats. Some of these settled Cincinnati. Others went
farther down the river to Louisville, in Kentucky, and still others
founded Wheeling and Marietta. In 1811 the first steamboat appeared on
the Western rivers. The whole problem of living in the West rapidly
changed. For the steamboat could go up stream as well as down stream.
Communication between the new settlements, and New Orleans and
Pittsburg, was now much safer and very much easier.

[Sidenote: Cotton growing.]

[Sidenote: Beginning of exportation, 1784.]

233. Cotton Growing in the South.--Cotton had been grown in the
South for many years. It had been made on the plantations into a rough
cloth. Very little had been sent away. The reason for this was that it
took a very long time to separate the cotton fiber from the seed. One
slave working for a whole day could hardly clean more than a pound of
cotton. Still as time went on more cotton was grown. In 1784 a few bags
of cotton were sent to England. The Englishmen promptly seized it
because they did not believe that so much cotton could be grown in
America. In 1791 nearly two hundred thousand pounds of cotton were
exported from the South. Then came Whitney's great invention, which
entirely changed the whole history of the country.

[Illustration: THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. As designed by Thomas
Jefferson.]

[Sidenote: Eli Whitney.]

[Sidenote: His cotton gin, 1793. _McMaster_, 195-196.]

234. Whitney's Cotton Gin, 1793.--Eli Whitney was a Connecticut
schoolmaster. He went to Georgia to teach General Greene's children. He
was very ingenious, and one day Mrs. Greene suggested to him that he
might make a machine which would separate the cotton fiber from the
cotton seed. Whitney set to work and soon made an engine or gin, as he
called it, that would do this. The first machine was a rude affair. But
even with it one slave could clean one hundred pounds of cotton in a
day. Mrs. Greene's neighbors promptly broke into Whitney's shop and
stole his machine. Whitney's cotton gin made the growing of cotton
profitable and so fastened slavery on the South. With the exception of
the stea