This little town, although built upwards of fifteen years, contains no kind of manufactory or public establishment; but there is a printing-office which publishes a newspaper once a week. They have also began to found a college, which has been presented with several benefactions for its endowment, but this establishment was only in its infancy, having but seven or eight students and one professor.[51]

The price of labour is higher in this town than at Lexinton, and the same disproportion exists between this price and that of provisions. There appeared to be from fifteen to twenty shops, which are supplied from Philadelphia and Baltimore, but they did not seem so well stocked as those at Lexinton, and the articles, though dearer, are of an inferior quality. The cause of their being so dear may be in some measure attributed to the expense of carriage, which is much greater on account of the amazing distance the boats destined for Tennessea have to go up the Ohio. In fact, after having passed by Limestone, the place where they unload for Kentucky, and which is four hundred and twenty miles from Pittsburgh, they have still to make a passage up the river of six {200} hundred and nineteen miles to reach the mouth of the river Cumberland, and a hundred and eighty miles to arrive at Nasheville, which, in the whole, comprises a space of one thousand five hundred and twenty-one miles from 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 adjoining parts, and which they are obliged to send to New Orleans.

I had a letter from Dr. Brown, of Lexinton, for Mr. William Peter Anderson, a gentleman of the law at Nasheville, who received me in the most obliging manner; I am also indebted to him for the acquaintance of several other gentlemen; among others was a Mr. Fisk, of New England, president of the college, with whom I had the pleasure of travelling to Knoxville.[52] The inhabitants are very engaging in their manners, and use but little ceremony. {202} On my arrival, I had scarcely alighted when several of them who were at the inn invited me to their plantations.

All the inhabitants of the western country who go by the river to New Orleans, return by land, pass through Nasheville, which is the first town beyond the Natches. The interval that separates them is about six hundred miles, and entirely uninhabited; which obliges them to carry their provisions on horseback to supply them on the road. It is true they have two or three little towns to cross, inhabited by the Chicasaws; but instead of recruiting their stock there, the natives themselves are so indifferently supplied, that travellers are obliged to be very cautious lest they should wish to share with them. Several persons who have been this road assured me, that for a space of four or five hundred miles beyond the Natches the country is very irregular, that the soil is very sandy, in some parts covered with pines, and not much adapted to any kind of culture; but that the borders of the river Tennessea are, on the contrary, very fertile, and even superior to the richest counties in Kentucky and Tennessea.

The settlement of the Natches, which is described by the name of the Mississippi Territory, daily acquires {203} a fresh degree of prosperity, notwithstanding the unhealthiness of the climate, which is such that three-fourths of the inhabitants are every year exposed to intermittent fevers during the summer and autumn; nevertheless, the great profits derived from the cotton entice an immense number of foreigners into that part. The population now amounts to five thousand whites and three thousand negro slaves.[53]

The road that leads to the Natches was only a path that serpentined through these boundless forests, but the federal government have just opened a road, which is on the point of being finished, and will be one of the finest in the United States, both on account of its breadth and the solidity of the bridges constructed over the small rivers that cut through it; to which advantages it will unite that of being shorter than the other by a hundred miles. Thus we may henceforth, on crossing the western country, go in a carriage from Boston to New Orleans, a distance of more than two thousand miles.