Excerpt from Institutional and Economic History During the early decades of the present century, Cincinnati was the most important commercial center of the West. In 1820, Chicago had not yet come into existence, St. Louis was a mere trader's settlement, and Louisville a modest town of some four thousand inhabitants. The traffic of the entire region drained by the Mississippi river and its tributaries was transported by water, and Cincinnati was practically the only market in which the surplus products of the South and West could be exchanged for eastern and northern manufactures. The application of steam to river navigation in the decade between 1820 and 1830 greatly strengthened and developed these natural advantages. Louisville and St. Louis rose about the same time to commercial importance, but their competition only served to stimulate the growth of the older city. Population increased from in 1820 to in 1860, and remained throughout this entire period the largest of any city west of the seaboard.1 Commercial relations ex tended from Pittsburgh to Fort Benton, Montana, and from St. Paul to New Orleans. Particularly with the South, as a result of advantageous location and intimate acquaintance with the tastes and habits of southern merchants, a large and profitable business was enjoyed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.