Blane, Excursion through the U. S., 119.] The inventory of products
reveals the Mississippi Valley as a vast colonial society, producing
the raw materials of a simple and primitive agriculture. The
beginnings of manufacture in the cities, however, promised to bring
about a movement for industrial independence in the west. In spite
of evidences of growing wealth, there was such a decline in
agricultural prices that, for the farmer who did not live on the
highways of commerce, it was almost unprofitable to raise wheat for
the market.

An Ohio pioneer of this time relates that at the beginning of the
decade fifty cents a bushel was a great price for wheat at the
river; and as two horses and a man were required for four days to
make the journey of thirty-five miles to the Ohio, in good weather,
with thirty-five or forty bushels of wheat, and a great deal longer
if the roads were bad, it was not to be expected that the farmer
could realize more than twenty-five cents in cash for it. But there
was no sale for it in cash. The nominal price for it in trade was
usually thirty cents. [Footnote: Howells, Life in Ohio, 138; see
M'Culloch, Commercial Dictionary, I., 683,684; Hazard, U.S.
Commercial and Statistical Register, I., 251; O'Reilly, Sketches of
Rochester, 362.] When wheat brought twenty-five cents a bushel in
Illinois in 1825, it sold at over eighty cents in Petersburg,
Virginia, and flour was six dollars a barrel at Charleston, South
Carolina. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XXIX, 165.]

These are the economic conditions that assist in understanding the
political attitude of western leaders like Henry Clay and Andrew
Jackson. The cry of the east for protection to infant industries was
swelled by the little cities of the west, and the demand for a home