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The West about 1820. In 1800 the region west of the Alleghenies had a population of about three hundred and twenty-five thousand. Twenty years later, when Mr. Floyd and a few others began to dream about expansion to the Pacific, the West already contained more than two million people, nearly one-tenth of whom (two hundred thousand) were living beyond the Mississippi. The country had entered upon a period of marvellous growth. Many thousands of emigrants were crossing the mountains each year, forests were levelled as if by a sort of magic, and a single season often saw great stretches of wild prairie transformed into fields of wheat and corn. In such pioneer states as Indiana and Illinois the wild game was rapidly disappearing from the river valleys as new settlers entered to make clearings and build homes. Many of the rude hamlets of twenty years before had given place to progressive and wealthy towns, thriving upon the business of the growing communities about them, Louisville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and St. Louis had already become places of note, and controlled the commerce of the West much as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore dominated the eastern section of the United