dent on the rivers for transportation,
and the areas between the rivers were but lightly occupied. The
Mississippi constituted the principal outlet for the products of the
Middle West; Pittsburgh furnished most of the supplies for the region,
but New Orleans received its crops. The Old National road was built
piecemeal, and too late, as a whole, to make a great artery of trade
throughout the Middle West, in this early period; but it marked the
northern borders of the Southern stream of population, running, as this
did, through Columbus, Indianapolis, and Vandalia.

The twenty years from 1830 to 1850 saw great changes in the composition
of the population of the Middle West. The opening of the Erie Canal in
1825 was an epoch-making event. It furnished a new outlet and inlet for
northwestern traffic; Buffalo began to grow, and New York City changed
from a local market to a great commercial center. But even more
important was the place which the canal occupied as the highway for a
new migration.

In the march of the New England people from the coast, three movements
are of especial importance: the advance from the seaboard up the
Connecticut and Housatonic Valleys through Massachusetts and into
Vermont; the advance thence to central and western New York; and the
advance to the interior of the Old Northwest. The second of these stages
occupied the generation from about 1790 to 1820; after that the second
generation was ready to seek new lands; and these the Erie Canal and
lake navigation opened to them, and to the Vermonters and other
adventurous spirits of New England. It was this combined New York-New
England stream that in the thirties poured in large volume into the zone
north of the settlements which have been described. The newcomers filled
in the southern counties of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern
countries of Illinois, and parts of the northern and central areas of
Indiana. Pennsylvania and Ohio sent a similar type of people to the area
adjacent to those States. In Iowa a stream combined of the Southern
element and of these settlers sought the wooded tributaries of the
Mississippi in the southeastern part of the State. In default of legal
authority, in this early period, they formed squatter governments and
land associations, comparable to the action of the Massachusetts men who
in the first quarter of the seventeenth century "squatted" in the
Connecticut Valley.

A great forward movement had occurred, which