ew Orleans.(393) Improvement of the Wabash was
entrusted to an incorporated company in 1825, and several years earlier a
canal across the peninsula at the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi
was contemplated.(394)

Many immigrants came overland. The following is typical: "In the year 1819
a party of six men, and families of three of them, started from Casey
County, Kentucky, for Illinois.... The first three were young unmarried
men, the last three had their wives and children with them. They came in
an old-fashioned Tennessee wagon, that resembled a flat-boat on wheels.
The younger readers of this sketch can form but a faint idea of the
curious and awkward appearance of one of these old fashioned wagons,
covered over with white sheeting, the front and rear bows set at an angle
of forty-five degrees to correspond with the ends of the body, and then
the enormous quantity of freight that could be stowed away in the hole
would astonish even a modern omnibus driver! Women, children, beds,
buckets, tubs, old fashioned chairs, including all the household furniture
usually used by our log-cabin ancestors; a chicken coop, with 'two or
three hens and a jolly rooster for a start,' tied on behind, while, under
the wagon, trotted a full-blood, long-eared hound, fastened by a short
rope to the hind axle. Without much effort on your part, you can, in
imagination, see this party on the road, one of the men in the saddle on
the near horse, driving; the other two, perhaps on horseback, slowly
plodding along in the rear of the wagon, while the boys 'walked ahead,'
with rifles on their shoulders 'at half-mast,' on the lookout for
squirrels, turkey, deer, or '_Injin_.' "(395) Muddy roads sometimes caused
emigrants to make long detours in the hope of finding better ones, and if
the roads became impassable water transportation might be resorted to when
the locality permitted.(396) The fear of breaking down was omnipresent and
danger from professional bandits(397) was not lacking. There was also
danger of being lost on the enormous prairies in Illinois.(398)

The best road from North Carolina to Indiana, for loaded wagons, was that
which crossed the Blue Ridge at Ward's Gap, in Western Virginia, led
through East Tennessee and Kentucky, and reached the Ohio River at
Cincinnati,(399) and this was a part of the route for some of the Illinois
immigrants. Illustrations of the moving instinct, the ever-present desire
to go frontierward, were co