The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 119 



the rich, rockless land of the Mohawk and Genesee Valleys. 



Even the terrible winter of 1788-89 when corn sold in 

 Albany at prices beyond what anyone had known, when two 

 hundred families living near James Fenimore Cooper's father 

 had no bread, when the poor tore the wild leeks from the fields 

 and ate them, did not discourage the land-seekers. York State 

 had another famine, in the Freezing Year, five years later. 

 Then two young men in Albany died of doing what many are 

 reported to have done, pulling the green, growing rye from 

 the fields to fill their empty bellies. Still people could not be- 

 lieve the Genesee Valley could return anything but plenty. 



But when the Freezing Year of 1816, which brought a frost 

 every month, killed the harvest, the cry went up: 



It's killed the potatoes, the wheat in milk, 

 Now it's frozen the corn in the silk. 

 Damn the Genesee Country/ 



Men packed up their tools and household goods, climbed 

 into wagons and moved farther west into the Ohio country 

 which Franklin had longed to see colonized. 



It is significant that even the most disappointed did not turn 

 back to the humming little mill towns. They went on seeking 

 kinder climate and more and more generous soil. In his his- 

 toric letters to Arthur Young, Washington attributes his coun- 

 trymen's zest for land and the consequent rise in land values 

 to confidence in the American form of government, and to 

 faith in the country's future and permanent prosperity. 



Land promoters were everywhere with scores of schemes. 

 Tench Coxe, of Philadelphia, who served as Assistant Secre- 

 tary of the Treasury in 1792, planned a settlement on the upper 

 waters of the Susquehanna, either in York State or Pennsyl- 

 vania. The company advertised rich farmland at fifteen dollars 

 an acre, lying along the river, which offered a route to the Balti- 

 more flour market. 



Rufus Putnam, cousin to "Old Put," who had scandalized 

 the Bostonians by leading his troops through their city in shirt 



