DEPARTMENT OF INDIAN INTERIORS |
| DIRECTOR Javier Coons |
ABOUT
The progress of the population of this country is without any example or parallel in the records of other colonies in ancient or modern times; not excepting even the annals of the advancement of the Atlantic country. We can remember, when all this country, except the ancient French colonies in it, was an unknown and an unpeopled wilderness. The first settlers encountered incredible hardships and dangers. But only open before Americans a fertile soil, and a mild climate, and their native enterprise, fostered by the stimulant effect of freedom and mild laws, will overcome every impediment. Sickness, solitude, mountains, the war-hoop, the merciless tomahawk, wolves, panthers, and bears, dear and distant homes, forsaken forever, will come over their waking thoughts, and revisit their dreams in vain, to prevent the young, florid, and unportioned pak from scaling remote mountains, descending long rivers,, and finally selecting their spot in the forests, and consecrating their solitary cabin with the dear and sacred name of bome.
The following synoptical view will show in a few wordsr the astonishing advance of this population. In 1790 the population of this valley, exclusive of the country west of the Mississippi and of Florida, which were not then within our territorial limits, was estimated by enumeration, at little more than one hundred thousand. In 1800 it was something short of three hundred and eighty thousand. In 1810 it was short of one million. In 1820, including the population west of the Mississippi, rating the population of Florida at twenty thousand, and that of the parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania included in this valley at three hundred thousand, and it will give the population of 1820 at two millions five hundred thousand. The present population may be rated at four millions. It will be perceived, that this is an increase, in more than a duplicate ratio in ten years.
Some considerable allowance must be made, of course, for the flood of immigration, which can not reasonably be expected to set this way for the future, as strongly as it has for the past. Ohio, with the largest and most dense population of any of the western states, has nearly doubled her number of inhabitants, between the census of 1820 and 1830. During that interval,.her gain by immigration has hardly equalled her loss by emigration; and ofViourse, is simply that of natural increase.. In the rapidity of. this increase, \ve believe, this state not only exceeds any other in the west, but in the world. It is the good natured jest of all, who travel through the western states, that however productive in other harvests, they are still more so in an unequalled crop of flaxen-headed children, the nobler growth our realms supply! We have a million more inhabitants than the thirteen good old United States, when, at the commencement of the revolutionary war, they threw down the gauntlet in the face of the parent country, then the most powerful empire on the globe.