large number of boats which are being enlarged. This branch of mechanical business is now carried on in Buffalo to as great an extent as in that of any other on the line of the Erie Canal. This increased tonnage of boat building in Buffalo, results from the completion of a line of enlarged locks on the Erie Canal, through from Lake Erie to the Hudson. These boats of the enlarged size run freely now through the whole length of the Erie Canal, carrying upon an average 25 to 35 tons more than the largest boats which can pass the old locks on the Oswego Canal.*

The commercial interests of Buffalo, as connected with the Lakes and Canals, are the very life-blood of her prosperity and success, and it is, therefore, a matter of pride and satisfaction to all that these branches have been prosperous during the past season. Notwithstanding the extreme pressure in the money market which prevailed during the fall, there was but one isolated case of failure in these departments of Commerce, and that one only temporary; and this fact speaks volumes for the high character and stability of those interested and engaged in them. Thus Buffalo takes a front rank among her sister cities, for the prudence, sagacity, and stability of those of her business men, who are identified with her chief and most prominent interests.

Art. IV. THE MINERAL AND OTHER RESOURCES OF THE WEST.

PERRY COUNTY, INDIANA.

To FREEMAN HUNT, Editor of the Merchants' Magazine.

CURIOSITY and business have, during the last five years, led me into nearly every region of the great Mississippi Valley, from the sugar regions on the Gulf, to the resorts of the lumbermen in the pineries of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Its agricultural and mineral resources-particularly the latterhave been the objects of attention and study. As I am no speculator in lands and mines, I can impart what knowledge I have gained without fear of personal loss.

The proposition proclaimed by Carey in opposition to the long-received theories of Ricardo and Malthus, and recently sustained by Mr. Smith in his Manual of Political Economy, that the inferior lands are first occupied by the pioneers, is a fact that strikes one throughout the whole West-at the South and the North. The oldest settlements are always found upon the thinly-wooded and comparatively barren hill lands, or upon the dry and upland prairies. The sandy plains and pine barrens of Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi, received the first emigrants. The first homes in Texas were built on the upland prairies-studded with their little islands of timber, that gave illimitable ranges to stock, and sustained here and there a small patch of corn. The smoke from the first log cabins on the Mississippi River ascended from the high clay and rocky bluffs on its shores, around which are now the poorest soils. In Arkansas and Missouri the first settlers are found among the pine lands and hills, still in the hunter state, their civilization and their lands but a little more, if any, advanced or improved than they were the day they became squatters thereon. On the Ohio, the truth. of the position is more apparent. The original pioneers selected Wheeling, Marietta, Limestone, North Bend, and Vevay, as their first town sites, in the poorest agricultural regions on the river; and the first population along the whole river spread itself over the hills, and cleared their first fields and

• For a statement of the imports and exports at Buffalo by Erie Canal, during 1833, see Merchants' Magazine, for February, 1854, vol. xxx., pages 254-256.

patches on the oak knobs and thin soils of the uplands, where twenty acres now are not worth one acre of the rich bottoms which the first settlers rejected at a price a little more than the surveyor's fees for locating. And now along the whole extent of the Lower Ohio, the deserted and falling log cabin of the first settler is found by the side of some gushing spring among the hills-his little patch grown up to briars and bushes, and surrounded by a forest as desolate and silent as when it was first disturbed with the stroke of the woodman's axe. Or, if it be still inhabited, it is encompassed by a sickly patch of corn, the soil of which is too poor to tempt the speculator to enter it over the squatter's head, which is still covered with a coon-skin cap, and his feet with moccasins.

This country has on its rugged hill sides hundreds of these crumbling and deserted memorials of the early pioneers. George Ewing, brother of the Hon. Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, was among the first settlers in this region, and located himself on a tract of land-when he had the selection of all the richest bottom lands in the country-which, at this day, is worth but little more than he paid the government for it, forty years ago; and the field where he buried the father and mother of one of the most eminent men of his country, is fast returning to its original wilderness state. And yet George Ewing was a man of intelligence, and of a sound judgment and sagacity, and though less cultivated, was in native powers not inferior to his brother. He with his father cut the first wagon path into Wheeling, and was among the first white men that crossed the Ohio. He lived first near the rich valley of Muskingum; then in sight of the teeming lands of the Scioto; and removed successively through the richest regions of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, always in advance of the tide of emigration, having the first choice of all the lands on the river; and yet, at his death, there was not an acre of any of the lands he had possessed worth double the price he had paid the government for it. These are remarkable facts in the history of the first settlers, and difficult to be accounted for except on the grounds assigned by Carey and Smith.

These hills, whose limpid springs, babbling brooks, and thin forests, first attracted the attention of the early emigrant from the mountain and hill sides of the North, and which have been passed by by the second tide of wealthier emigration, and which, till recently, have cast the dark shadows of their unbroken forests over the placid bosom of the Ohio, in moonlight and sunshine, while the rich bottom lands at their base have become cleared and populous, and high priced-are now in their turn attracting the attention of that class that follow when the farmer has prepared the way of life, and whose advent makes a new stage in the progress of wealth and civilization. The manufacturer and mechanic are coming, and are looking to these hills, not for their soil nor running streams, but for the elements of a power and wealth buried in their bowels, more valuable than the deepest soils of the fattest lands.

The hills that gave a solitary home to the first pioneer and the hunter and which have been neglected by all who followed them; whose recesses up to this day could be penetrated only through unbroken forests or by rugged bridle paths, are about to be intersected by railways, and their sides begin to gleam with the fires of the furnace, the forge, workshop, and factory, and these valleys will become the seats of thrifty manufacturing towns. What vast developments of power and wealth have the progress of the arts and sciences within the last fifty years made! If they but continue to ad

vance with the same step for the next half century, the powers of the imagination, in its most uncontrolled flights, will form no conception of the happy condition of the millions that will be spread over these hills and along the rich alluvials of the Ohio. Our present wealth, luxury, and refinement— proud as we are of it-will seem to the men of the coming generation as the coarse poverty and barbarism of the people of England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries do now to us.

There is no higher display of God's munificence on earth than is exhibited in the natural resources of the Ohio Valley. Have they been reserved and hidden from the sight of men till the time had come when science, and knowledge, and experience, had rendered man capable of drawing from them all their riches and benefits? If there was a Providence-as Mr. Everett says--in reserving this continent from the knowledge of the Old World through the long past, till man had attained a stage in his progress which fitted him to fill the new sphere which God designed him to act on this new-found land, we may read perhaps a like care in the superintending government of man's advancement, in reserving these riches till he was fitted to use them aright.

From the remotest sources of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers, to the mouth of the Scioto, and from a short distance below the Falls to near the mouth of the Ohio, along more than a thousand miles of navigable waters, and through a country capable of producing more human food than any region of equal extent on the globe, the earth is filled with the richest deposits of coal and iron, the great elements of material power and wealth. There is no formula of figures by which to calculate the growth of wealth for a given period; nor is it in the power of numbers, if we could state the quantities, to predict the sum of wealth and population that half a century will bring to these mineral regions.

And here, too, is to be demonstrated, and the great moral question settled, by a display in collateral lines, the difference between free educated labor and ignorant and involuntary service. Rude agricultural labor on virgin soils affords but poor means of comparison between the classes of labor; but as communities advance, and their prosperity and progress depend upon labor in the mechanical arts and a scientific agriculture, which are themselves advancing and requiring increased skill and knowledge, the difference between intelligent educated labor and ignorant degraded labor will become more manifest. Both sides of the river being equally favored by the gifts of nature, the argument of facts, which will soon be made, along the opposite banks of the Ohio, will carry irresistible conviction to the country, and the discussions of economists, moralists, and politicians will have little weight against the practical settlement of the question to be made here within the next ten years. Cannot the enthusiasts summon patience to wait in silence for the result?

Perry, with the roughest surface and thinnest soil, perhaps of any county in the State of Indiana, which, till within eight or ten years, has supported a sparse population of about 400 voters, in the rudest mode of life and comfort, with 14 small stores, and a capital of $15,000 employed in merchandising, promises soon to become one of the wealthiest and most populous counties in the State. Its hills are filled with rich deposits of coal and iron that are attracting the skill and capital of New England, while the emigrant from the Rhine is clothing their sides with small farms and vineyards. Cannelton, a few years since, contained but a few rude dwellings erected

for the shelter of some forty or fifty of that rough, hearty, and nomadic race of English coal diggers, who, in all their moral characteristics and roving and improvident habits, resemble sailors, and seldom make a permanent home in any locality: and the town might be said to be without any fixed population. Now it has a population of near 3,500, and there are 700 children enrolled on the trustees' books as admissible to the public schools. There are now five extensive coal mines in operation. It has the largest and best built cotton factory west of the mountains, which has been two years in very successful operation, demonstrating the advantages of the West over the East for the production of the heavier cloths. The difference in the cost of the cotton delivered for this mill and the cost of the raw material for a mill of the same capacity making the same description of cloth at Lowell, was found, by the books of the two establishments at the end of the last year, to have been about $27,000 in favor of the Western mill. The difference in the cost of fuel was about $1,200 in favor of the same mill. These admissions were made by Eastern capitalists who were stockholders in both mills.

Another factory has been begun on a tract of land near Cannelton, entered by Robert Fulton in 1813, and the company, who are Eastern capitalists, have assumed the name of the Fulton Manufacturing and Coal Company. These large establishments will be succeeded by others, and workshops of different kinds are growing up within it; and the town, if characterized by the enterprise and spirit which have brought it forth from the wilderness, will be the Lowell of the West.

Cannelton, however, has but few, if any natural resources, more than many points above and below her; but she has got the start-she has secured an invested interest among those who will not allow her to remain stationary. Her men know how to make money, by spending it freely. The investments already made are to be made to pay larger dividends still, by further installments to be paid on the capital stock. She has also gathered the skill and labor adapted to her interests, and fixed them around her by making them homes.

Hawesville, opposite, has all the resources of Cannelton, but her enterprise, industry and skill is limited to coal digging. The mechanical labor from the free States does not incline to the south side of the Obio.

In the rear of Cloverport, twelve miles above Hawesville in Kentucky, is a most remarkable vein of coal. The deposit is found in the neighborhood of the Pretoleum, or Tar Springs, and is from three to four feet in thickness. It has the external appearance of Cannel coal, but from its peculiar qualities it seen.s like indurated bitumen or pretoleum. It is highly inflammable, and a large lump of it will take fire from a taper. The coal has been known to the inhabitants of the vicinity for many years, but its location of seven miles from the river discouraged all enterprises to bring it into market, till it attracted the attention of some gentlemen who had been to school at the coal business in the Alleghany mountains of Pennsylvania, who were not frightened at the obstacles of a few hills intervening between the mines and the river. They have now a railway winding around the hills, nine miles in length, nearly completed. Their possessions cover over 6,000 acres of land, and after an expenditure of near half a million of dollars to develop the buried wealth, they will before next autumn offer for sale in New York a most remarkable and entirely new variety of bituminous coal. It is to be sent by the way of New Orleans, and will cost the proprietors, laid down in

New York, seven dollars per ton. It will not be sold to consumers for less, it is said, than $15. It is designed especially for the use of the Upper Ten. Gas lights can be dispensed with in a room where this coal is burnt in an open grate, for its flame eclipses all other light.

Owensboro', below Hawesville, in Davies County, is equal to any of its rivals in mineral wealth, and excels them in agricultural resources, yet she does not advance in the industrial interests. A most painful illustration of the difference in the prosperity of the two places, on opposite sides of the river, is exhibited in the fact, that while these lines are being written, a large, well built, well filled, and well equipped cotton factory, located on the banks of the river, at the mouth of a coal mine, surrounded by every local and natural advantage, with machinery built by the best mechanics at the East, and which has never run over six months, after having been closed two years, without finding a purchaser or lessee on any terms, is now being dismantled, and the building turned into a tobacco stemery, while the Cannelton Cotton Mill is paying a very large per cent profit to its stockholders. There is certainly something in the genius of the place, or of the people, that shapes these different destinies of the two localities.

Still further down the river, coal develops itself at Newburg, on the banks of the river, and iron ore is found a few miles in the rear. Ten miles below, in the immediate vicinity of Evansville, coal has just been discovered, and along the banks of the canal, at a distance of twenty to fifty miles from the city, the richest beds of iron ore in the West have been discovered, in digging the canal, in the immediate vicinity of good coal. But at present the citizens of Evansville are too much absorbed in the pursuits of trade to give attention to the more durable, though slower gains of mechanical and manufacturing industry.

Henderson, yet further down, has coal beds recently discovered, but no iron ore, in her immediate vicinity. On the Saline and Tradewater are extensive coal mines, that have been worked for many years; are well known, and are in the midst of rich and abundant iron ore deposits. But none of these places, except Cannelton, have drawn around them the labor and skill to develop their wealth; their resources lie almost as unproductive as when the Indian trod the soil. Cannelton has gained so great an advance of all of them in population, and the varied skill and experience of her labor, that she will in the future have no rival.

But there is a country, on Green River, whose deep waters are of as pure an emerald hue as the grass on its banks, that surpasses all the other localities in mineral wealth, yet undeveloped, and almost unknown beyond the limits of its own region. The river has been locked, and dammed, and made navigable for steamers of 400 tons for more than 200 miles into the heart and richest district of Kentucky. Its banks, for 130 miles from the Ohio, exhibit the outcrop of three distinct veins of excellent bituminous coal, one three and a half feet in thickness and another seven feet thick. A few miles back from the river, to the west, extensive beds of rich iron ore have been opened. Where the coal and sandstone cease, as the traveler passes up the river, the blue limestone appears and forms a surface and soil equal in beauty and fertility to the lovely regions about Lexington. Between the waters of Barren River and the Cumberland, there is a tract of country embracing five or six counties, that in the charms of its landscapes and the fertility of the soil is unequaled even at the West.

The banks of Green River are sparsely peopled; for distances of ten and