in the Mississippi, two hundred beyond the place whence these rivers flow; that is to say, six hundred and fifty leagues from the sea; as their bed in the appointed space is as deep as that of the Ohio at Pittsburgh; in consequence of which it must be a wrong conjecture to suppose that the immense tract of country watered by these rivers cannot be populous enough to execute such undertakings. The rapid population of the three new western states, under less favourable circumstances, proves this assertion to be true.[26] Those states, where thirty years ago there was scarcely three hundred inhabitants, are now computed to contain upwards of a hundred thousand; and although the plantations on the roads are scarcely four miles distant from each other, it is very rare to find one, even among {65} the most flourishing, where one cannot with confidence ask the owner, whence he has emigrated; or, according to the trivial manner of the Americans, "What part of the world do you come from?" as if these immense and fertile regions were to be the asylum common to all the inhabitants of the globe. Now if we consider these astonishing and rapid ameliorations, what ideas must we not form of the height of prosperity to which the western country is rising, and of the recent spring that the commerce, population and culture of the country is taking by uniting Louisiana to the American territory.
The river Monongahela derives its source in Virginia, at the foot of Laurel Mountain, which comprises a part of the chain of the Alleghanies; bending its course toward the west, it runs into Pennsylvania, and before it reaches Alleghany it receives in its current the rivers Chéat and Youghiogheny, which proceed from the south west.
