The Daily Spy

RAPID PROSPERITY OF OHIO. OHIO WAS a wilderness exclusively occupied by the Indians until near the close of the last century. In 1800 its population amounted to 45,365, in the next ten years it had increased five fold, and in the ten which followed it again more than doubled. In 1840 it had reached 1,600,000 souls, all free and almost without any admixture of the colored race.

In this short interval the forest had been transformed into a land of steamboats, canals, and flourishing towns; and would have been still more populous had not thousands of its new settlers migrated still farther west into Indiana and Illinois. A portion of the public works which accelerated this marvellous prosperity were executed with foreign capital, but the interest of the whole had been punctually paid by direct taxes.

There is no other example in history, either in the old or new world, of so sudden a rise of a large country to opulence and power. The State contains nearly as wide an extent of arable land as England, all of moderate elevation so rich in its alluvial plains as to be cropped thirty or forty years without manure, having abundance of fine timber, a temperate climate, many large navigable rivers, a ready communication through Lake Erie with the north and east and by the Ohio with the south and west, and, lastly, abundance of coal in its eastern counties. I am informed that, in the beginning of the present year, 1842, the foremost bands of emigrants have reached the Platte river, a tributary to the Missouri.

This point is said to be the only half-way between the Atlantic and the Rocky Mountains and the country beyond the present is as fertile as that already occupied. De Tocqueville calculated that along the borders of the United States, from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, extending a distance of more than 1200 miles as the bird flies, the whites advance every year at a mean rate of 17 miles; and he truly observes that there is a grandeur and solemnity in this gradual and continuous march of the European race towards the Rocky Mountains. He compares it to "a deluge of men rising unabatedly and daily driven onwards by the hand of God."