um River district, which was presently sending many
flatboats southward. Cincinnati was founded in the same year as
Marietta, with the building of Fort Washington and the formal
organization of Hamilton County. The soil of the Miami country was as
"mellow as an ash heap" and in the first four months of 1802 over
four thousand barrels of flour were shipped southward to challenge the
prestige of the Monongahela product. Potters, brickmakers, gunsmiths,
cotton and wool weavers, coopers, turners, wheelwrights, dyers,
printers, and ropemakers were at work here within the next decade. A
brewery turned out five thousand barrels of beer and porter in 1811, and
by the next year the pork-packing business was thoroughly established.

Louisville, the "Little Falls" of the West, was the entrepot of the Blue
Grass region. It had been a place of some importance since Revolutionary
days, for in seasons of low water the rapids in the Ohio at this point
gave employment to scores of laborers who assisted the flatboatmen in
hauling their cargoes around the obstruction which prevented the passage
of the heavily loaded barges. The town, which was incorporated in 1780,
soon showed signs of commercial activity. It was the proud possessor of
a drygoods house in 1783. The growth of its tobacco industry was rapid
from the first. The warehouses were under government supervision and
inspection as early as 1795, and innumerable flatboats were already
bearing cargoes of bright leaf southward in the last decade of the
century. The first brick house in Louisville was erected in 1789 with
materials brought from Pittsburgh. Yankees soon established the "Hope
Distillery"; and the manufacture of whiskey, which had long been
a staple industry conducted by individuals, became an incorporated
business of great promise in spite of objections raised against the
"creation of gigantic reservoirs of this damning drink."

Thus, about the year 1800, the great industries of the young West
were all established in the regions dominated by the growing cities
of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville. But, since the combined
population of these centers could not have been over three thousand in
the year 1800, it is evident that the adjacent rural population and the
people living in every neighboring creek and river valley were chiefly
responsible for the large trade that already existed between this corner
of the Mississippi basin and the South.

In this trade the rive