, 464.] It is this that
helps to explain the attention which the interior first gave to
making whiskey and raising live-stock; the former carried the crop
in a small bulk with high value, while the live-stock could walk to
a market. Until after the War of 1812, the cattle of the Ohio Valley
were driven to the seaboard, chiefly to Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Travelers were astonished to see on the highway droves of four or
five thousand hogs, going to an eastern market. It was estimated
that over a hundred thousand hogs were driven east annually from
Kentucky alone. Kentucky hog-drivers also passed into Tennessee,
Virginia, and the Carolinas with their droves. [Footnote: Life of
Ephraim Cutler, 89; Birkbeck, Journey, 24.; Blane, Excursion through
U. S. (London, 1824), 90; Atlantic Monthly, XXVI., 170.] The swine
lived on the nuts and acorns of the forest; thus they were
peculiarly suited to pioneer conditions. At first the cattle were
taken to the plantations of the Potomac to fatten for Baltimore and
Philadelphia, much in the same way that, in recent times, the cattle
of the Great Plains are brought to the feeding-grounds in the corn
belt of Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa.
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