the West." Situated where the river reached with a great bend
towards the interior of the northwest, in the rich farming country
between the two Miamis, and opposite the Licking River, it was the
commercial center of a vast and fertile region of Ohio and Kentucky;
[Footnote: Melish, Information to Emigrants, 108.] and by 1830, with
a population of nearly twenty-five thousand souls, it was the
largest city of the west, with the exception of New Orleans. The
center of steamboat-building, it also received extensive imports of
goods from the east and exported the surplus crops of Ohio and
adjacent parts of Kentucky. Its principal industry, however, was
pork-packing, from which it won the name of "Porkopolis" [Footnote:
Drake and Mansfield, Cincinnati in 1826, p. 70; Winter in the West,
I., 115.] Louisville, at the falls of the Ohio, was an important
place of trans-shipment, and the export center for large quantities
of tobacco. There were considerable manufactures of rope and
bagging, products of the Kentucky hemp-fields; and new cotton and
woolen factories were struggling for existence. [Footnote: Durrett,
Centenary of Louisville (Filson Club, Publications, No. 8), 50-101;
Louisville Directory, 1832, p. 131.] St. Louis occupied a unique
position, as the entrepot of the important fur-trade of the upper
Mississippi and the vast water system of the Missouri, as well as
the outfitting-point for the Missouri settlements. It was the
capital of the far west, and the commercial center for Illinois. Its
population at the close of the decade was about six thousand.

Only a few villages lay along the Mississippi below St. Louis until
the traveler reached New Orleans, the emporium of the whole
Mississippi Valley. As yet the direct effect of the Erie Canal was
chiefly limited to the state of New York. The great bulk of western
exports passed down the tributaries of the Mississippi to this city,