Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/256

 Philadelphia, of which twelve hundred are by water. Some merchants get their goods also from New Orleans, whence the boats go up the Mississippi, the Ohio, and Cumberland. This last distance is about twelve hundred and forty-three miles; viz. a thousand miles from New Orleans to the embouchure of the Ohio, sixty-three miles from thence to Cumberland, and a hundred and eighty from this river to Nasheville.

There are very few cultivators who take upon themselves to export the produce of their labour, consisting chiefly of cotton; the major part of them sell it to the tradespeople at Nasheville, who send it by the river to New Orleans, where it is expedited to New York and Philadelphia, or exported direct to Europe. These tradesmen, like those of Lexinton, do not pay always in cash for the cotton they purchase, but make the cultivators take goods in exchange, which adds considerably to their profit. A great quantity of it is also sent by land to Kentucky, where each family is supplied with it to manufacture articles for their domestic wants.

{201} When I was there in 1802 they made the first attempt to send cottons by the Ohio to Pittsburgh, in order to be thence conveyed to the remote parts of Pennsylvania. I met several barges laden with them near Marietta; they were going up the river with a staff, and making about twenty miles a day. Thus are the remotest parts of the western states united by commercial interests, of which cotton is the basis, and the Ohio the tie of communication, the results of which must give a high degree of prosperity to this part of Tennessea, and insure its inhabitants a signal advantage over those of the Ohio and Kentucky, the territorial produce of which is not of a nature to meet with a great sale in the country or the ad