Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/186

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it in raising unmarketable commodities, but turn it, if possible, into other channels.

Fat fowls are here one dollar per dozen; pork and beef four cents, or two pence per pound; bacon {181} 10 to 12 cents per pound, 50 per cent. being gained by smoking and drying. Two years old steers, fat and good, for 12 dollars each.

The qualifications for voting at an election in Ohio are, that the voter must be a citizen, resident two years in the state, one year in the county, and 21 years of age. Sometimes he is known to vote from three to six times at one and the same election, and sometimes strangers are brought in to vote.

Corn and wheat are here prodigiously cheap; the first is 10d., and the latter 2s. 3d. sterling per bushel. Seventy-five bushels of corn per acre cost only six and a quarter cents, three pence half-penny per bushel. Three men and three horses here raise 100 acres, if they will, or 30 acres commonly. Nothing is reckoned for land; land is nothing; labour every thing. In England it was almost vice versâ, ten years since.

I saw an ancient mound of huge circumference and great altitude,[51] and a large bricked house (a rare thing here) split, and its position altered by the earthquake which visited Ohio in 1815. The buildings generally vibrated from four to five inches. Sugar loaves and tin vessels suspended from the ceilings of shops and stores, violently struck each other, and palpably shewed the exact vibration. "It shook people," says my friend, the Chilicothé squire, "out of their beds, knocked down brick chimneys, and made the old log {182} houses crack