mill. In general
the bulk of the crop was made on plantations with cane fields ranging from
rather more than a hundred to somewhat less than a thousand acres, and with
each acre producing in an ordinary year somewhat more than a hogshead of
sugar.

[Footnote 51: _DeBow's Review_, XIV, 199, 200.]

Until about 1850 the sugar district as well as the cotton belt was calling
for labor from whatever source it might be had; but whereas the uplands had
work for people of both races and all conditions, the demand of the delta
lands, to which the sugar crop was confined, was almost wholly for negro
slaves. The only notable increase in the rural white population of the
district came through the fecundity of the small-farming Acadians who had
little to do with sugar culture.

CHAPTER X

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

The flow of population into the distant interior followed the lines of
least resistance and greatest opportunity. In the earlier decades these lay
chiefly in the Virginia latitudes. The Indians there were yielding, the
mountains afforded passes thither, and the climate permitted the familiar
tobacco industry. The Shenandoah Valley had been occupied mainly by
Scotch-Irish and German small farmers from Pennsylvania; but the glowing
reports, which the long hunters brought and the land speculators spread
from beyond the further mountains, made Virginians to the manner born
resolve to compete with the men of the backwoods for a share of the
Kentucky lands. During and after the war for independence they threaded
the gorges, some with slaves but most without. Here and there one found a
mountain glade so fertile that he made it his permanent home, while his
fellows pushed on to the greater promised land. Some of these emerging upon
a country of low and uniform hills, closely packed and rounded like the
backs of well-fed pigs crowding to the trough, staked out their claims, set
up their cabins, deadened their trees, and planted wheat. Others went on
to the gently rolling country about Lexington, let the luxuriant native
bluegrass wean them from thoughts of tobacco, and became breeders of horses
for evermore. A few, settling on the southerly edge of the bluegrass,
mainly in and about Garrard County, raised hemp on a plantation scale. The
rest, resisting all these allurements, pressed on still further to the
pennyroyal country where tobacco would have no rival. While thousands made
the whole journey overland, still more made