molestation, it was certain that settlers would seek them instead of
paying twenty to fifty dollars an acre for farms that lay not much
farther to the east--particularly when the western lands were more
fertile. The introduction of the steamboat on the western waters in
1811, moreover, soon revolutionized transportation conditions in the
West. [Footnote: Flint, Letters, 260; Monette, in Miss. Hist. Soc.,
Publications, VII., 503; Hall, Statistics of the West, 236, 247;
Lloyd, Steamboat Disasters (1853), 32, 40-45; Preble, Steam
Navigation, 64; McMaster, United States, IV., 402; Chittenden, Early
Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri, chap. ix.] At the beginning of
the period of which we are treating, steamers were ascending the
Mississippi and the Missouri, as well as the Ohio and its
tributaries. Between the close of the War of 1812 and 1830,
moreover, the Indian title was extinguished to vast regions in the
west. Half of Michigan was opened to settlement; the northwestern
quarter of Ohio was freed; in Indiana and Illinois (more than half
of which had been Indian country prior to 1816) all but a
comparatively small region of undesired prairie lands south of Lake
Michigan was ceded; almost the whole state of Missouri was freed
from its Indian title; and, in the Gulf region, at the close of the
decade, the Indians held but two isolated islands of territory, one
in western Georgia and eastern Alabama, and the other in northern
and central Mississippi. These ceded regions were the fruit of the
victories of William Henry Harrison in the northwest, and of Andrew
Jackson in the Gulf region. They were, in effect, conquered
provinces, just opened to colonization.

The maps of the United States census, giving the distribution of
population in 1810, 1820, and 1830, [Footnote: See maps of
population; compare U. S. Census of 1900, Statistical Atlas, plates