Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/195

 and produce from twenty to thirty-five hundred weight of corn per acre. For the three first years after the ground is cleared, the corn springs up too strong, and scatters before it ears, so that they cannot sow in it for four or five years after, when the ground is cleared of the stumps and roots that were left in at first. The Americans in the interior cultivate corn rather through speculation to send the flour to the sea-ports, than for their own consumption; as nine tenths of them eat no other bread but that made from Indian corn; they make loaves of it from eight to ten pounds, which they bake in ovens, or small cakes baked on a board before the fire. This bread is generally eaten hot, and is not very palatable to those who are not used to it.

The peach is the only fruit tree that they have as yet cultivated, which thrives so rapidly that it produces fruit after the second year.

The price of the best land on the borders of the Ohio did not exceed three piastres per acre; at the same time it is not so dear on the left bank in the States of Virginia and Kentucky, where the settlements are not looked upon as quite so good.

The two banks of the Ohio, properly speaking, not having been inhabited above eight or nine years, {111} nor the borders of the rivers that run into it, the Americans who are settled there, share but very feebly in the commerce that is carried on through the channel of the Mississippi. This commerce consists at present in hams and salted pork, brandies distilled from corn and peaches, butter, hemp, skins and various sorts of flour. They send again cattle to the Atlantic States. Trades-*people who supply themselves at Pittsburgh and Wheeling, and go up and down the river in a canoe, convey