the country where I reside, not eighty miles from tidewater," said
Tucker, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Cong., I Sess., I., 1126.] of
Virginia, in 1818, "it takes the farmer one bushel of wheat to pay
the expense of carrying two to a seaport town."

The bulk of the crop, as compared with its value, practically
prevented transportation by land farther than a hundred miles.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, III., 464.] It is this that
helps to explain the attention which the interior first gave to
making whiskey and raising live-stock; the former carried the crop
in a small bulk with high value, while the live-stock could walk to
a market. Until after the War of 1812, the cattle of the Ohio Valley
were driven to the seaboard, chiefly to Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Travelers were astonished to see on the highway droves of four or
five thousand hogs, going to an eastern market. It was estimated
that over a hundred thousand hogs were driven east annually from
Kentucky alone. Kentucky hog-drivers also passed into Tennessee,
Virginia, and the Carolinas with their droves. [Footnote: Life of
Ephraim Cutler, 89; Birkbeck, Journey, 24.; Blane, Excursion through
U. S. (London, 1824), 90; Atlantic Monthly, XXVI., 170.] The swine
lived on the nuts and acorns of the forest; thus they were
peculiarly suited to pioneer conditions. At first the cattle were
taken to the plantations of the Potomac to fatten for Baltimore and
Philadelphia, much in the same way that, in recent times, the cattle
of the Great Plains are brought to the feeding-grounds in the corn
belt of Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. [Footnote: Michaux, Travels,
191: Palmer, Journal of Travels, 36] Towards the close of the
decade, however, the feeding-grounds shifted into Ohio, and the
pork-packing industry, as we have seen, found its center at
Cincinnati, [Footnote: Hall, Statistics of the West (1836), 145-