Many of the emigrants passed the Allegheny barrier, notwithstanding
the hardships of travel, to make homes in the new States and Territories
of the West and South-west. Birkbeck and his colony of Englishmen came
to southern Illinois. The Rappites planted the community of New Harmony
on the Wabash in Indiana. Congress granted land to a colony of refugees
in Alabama. Numerous towns were laid out on the upper Mississippi and
the Missouri in the Louisiana Purchase. Protecting garrisons were
established far up the Missouri River and at the Falls of St. Anthony,
near the headwaters of the Mississippi, "two thousand miles from the
sea." Buffalo and Erie, names not to be found upon the map before the
war, were now busy ports with a thriving lake commerce. Semi-weekly
posts were carried to Detroit, Green Bay, and far Michilimackinac.
These evidences of the vast extent of the national domain excited both
pride and fear. Unless the distant parts could be more closely cemented,
the days of Western unrest and foreign intrigue might come again. The
demand for government aid to public improvements sprang up anew.
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