mighty current 'as things of life,' bearing speculators, merchants,
dandies, fine ladies, every thing real, and every thing affected, in
the form of humanity, with pianos, and stocks of novels, and cards,
and dice, and flirting, and love-making, and drinking, and
champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred fellows, who have
seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor gun-powder. A
steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest villages
of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little Paris, a
section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the
minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and
finery. Within a day's journey of us, three distinct canals are in
respectable progress towards completion. . . . Cincinnati will soon
be the center of the 'celestial empire,' as the Chinese say; and
instead of encountering the storms, the sea sickness, and dangers of
a passage from the gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, whenever the Erie
canal shall be completed, the opulent southern planters will take
their families, their dogs and parrots, through a world of forests,
from New Orleans to New York, giving us a call by the way. When they
are more acquainted with us, their voyage will often terminate
here."

By 1830 the produce which reached New Orleans from the Mississippi
Valley amounted to about twenty-six million dollars. [Footnote:
Quarterly Journal of Economics, XVII., 20; Pitkin, Statistical View
(ed. of 1835), 534-536.] In 1822 three million dollars' worth of
goods was estimated to have passed the Falls of the Ohio on the way
to market, representing much of the surplus of the Ohio Valley. Of
this, pork amounted to $1,000,000 in value; flour to $900,000;
tobacco to $600,000; and whiskey to $500,000. [Footnote: National
Republican, March 7, 1823; cf. National Gazette, September 26, 1823;