still remained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the
cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than
one hundred thousand in 1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825,
it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who went by canal to
Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at
Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first
settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of this great
water-way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and
thirty thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi. Their power
had been broken by General Hamson's victory over Tecumseh at the battle
of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and
fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization
and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries. It was
not until some years later than this that railroads began to take an
important share in opening up new country.

The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation
which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque
contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was
encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness--all these found
expression, not only in such well-known books as Cooper's _Pioneers_,
1823, and Irving's _Tour on the Prairies_, 1835, but in the minor
literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but
for the light that it throws on the history of national development: in
such books as Paulding's story of _Westward-Ho!_ and his poem, _The
Backwoodsman_, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's _Recollections_, 1826, and
his _Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley_, 1827. It was
not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and
expanding prospects. The new consciousness of empire uttered itself
hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy