to great camps where revivalists, like James McCreary, of
Kentucky, or the later Bishop Soule, of Ohio, preached for weeks in
succession and seemed to work miracles hardly less wonderful than those
of New Testament times. Hundreds were "stricken" on a single day and
were later gathered into the church clothed and in their right minds.
Before 1830 the greater denominations of the East and South realized the
importance of the West as a semi-destitute land to which missionaries
should be sent, though by this time the churches of the older border and
of most of the great valley were self-supporting and the population
could no longer complain that the Gospel had never been preached to
them.

While the civilizing hand of the churches was being spread over the
West, schools and colleges were built and opened to students. The
liberal land grants of the Federal Government were made to serve the
cause of common schools, while institutions of higher learning
flourished at Lexington, Natchez, Granville (Ohio), and Hanover
(Indiana),--schools where many of the statesmen of the Civil War period
were trained and where preachers prepared themselves for their strenuous
labors in a poor country. The civilizing forces of religion and
education were rapidly leavening the lump of hard Western life and
preparing it for the great days and the awful struggle that were so soon
to come. Books found their way into the Athens of the West, as Lexington
was called, and gradually, under the fostering care of Henry Clay, the
Mechanics' Library came to play an important part. St. Louis, too,
boasted of its Mercantile Library; and there were numerous other
collections of religious writings, history, and the English poets,
mostly in private hands like those of John M. Peck, of Illinois.
Newspapers, such as the _Republican_ of St. Louis, the Maysville
_Eagle_, or the Louisville _Advertiser_, carried their weekly or
semi-weekly burden of neighborhood gossip and political news to near-by
villages and distant settlements.

The roads were also improving and steadily expanding the area of
productive farming, though all, or nearly all, led to the river ports or
the old fort towns like La Porte, Indiana, or Detroit and Cleveland on
the Lakes. The Erie and the Ohio Canals were already turning exports and
communication northeastward, while the Lake steamers were adding their
share to the development of the Western frontier; but the great river
steamers, the Cit