The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 123 



frog which continues to kick spasmodically for some time after 

 its legs have been amputated. 



The first United States census, taken in 1790, numbered a 

 population of approximately four millions. Two hundred thou- 

 sand of these were living west of the Alleghenies. Louisville 

 had fifty to sixty houses and three hundred whites. Ten years 

 previous, Virginia had encouraged settlers in Kentucky by 

 offering four hundred acres and an additional one thousand 

 acres by pre-emption to everyone who would plant corn. Set- 

 tlers were lured from New Jersey and Pennsylvania by reports 

 of the richness of Kentucky soil which would grow turnips so 

 sweet and juicy as to make a man forget the pears in the 

 orchards along the Delaware. Pittsburgh was a city of log 

 houses where money was scarce. Nails, lumber, axes, calico and 

 flat-boats were paid for in wheat flour, corn, pork and lard. 

 But it had a newspaper, the first to be published west of the 

 Alleghenies, and a bustling river-front where broad-horns and 

 flatboats were built and launched to carry passengers and 

 cargoes down the river. Philadelphia firms had as much as 

 $150,000 invested in river boats. They kept fleets of Cones toga 

 wagons busy carrying goods over the mountains to the com- 

 pany warehouses in Pittsburgh. One of these firms, Baynton, 

 Wharton and Morgan, employed as many as three hundred 

 and fifty boatmen. Many a young man Stephen Girard was 

 one got his start in life as a river-way peddler. 



When navigation opened in the spring of 1786, Pittsburgh 

 was jammed with families waiting places on the boats to the 

 new corn-growing lands downstream. Within forty days after 

 the ice broke, more than one thousand persons with their 

 household goods, cattle and tools had started down the river. 

 Another seventeen thousand were to follow before ice blocked 

 the rivers again. 



The flatboats were weighted down to the water line with as 

 motley a collection of moveables as any caravan ever carried. 

 There were pineapple-topped four-posters too precious to be 



