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The trade route became efficient and profitable only with the development of river steamboats in the 1810s. After 1830 a new stream of migration reached the Northwest Territory from the northeastern states. Most of the new settlers were New Englanders who reached their new lands via New York's Erie Canal, Great Lakes steamboats, and other new forms of transportation. By the 1840s they were joined by immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Most of these were intensive commercial farmers. Rather than allow cattle and hogs to roam freely , they put their animals in pens. They also planted huge fields of grain and put up fences. In 1820 the Northwest Territory sent only 12 percent of its farm produce to markets outside the region-a sign that nearly all Northwestern farmers limited their economic lives to their families and neighbors. By 1840 exports accounted for 27 percent of what Northwestern farmers produced, and by 1860-with railroad connections to the east completed-the figure stood at 70 percent. The figures were even higher in the northern, grain-growing areas. Increasingly, the market for Northwestern farm products was not in Europe but in the towns and cities of the east as well as such local centers as Cincinnati, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois. In turn, these cities provided farmers with manufactured goods. Land that only a generation earlier had been occupied by independent Native American peoples was now the center of a great internal commercial revolution. The Southwest Equally dramatic was the rapid settlement of the trans-Appalachian South. At the conclusion of the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson forced the Creeks to cede huge territories in the Southwest. Settlers, often with the help of state governments, began pressuring the Cherokee, Choctaw, and other tribes to give up their lands. The land was eagerly sought by Southeastern whites who had small, worn-out farms, and who faced lives of tenancy and rural poverty. The best lands, however, were taken by planters who since the 1790s had been reaping huge profits from the cotton boom. Fertile land beside navigable rivers in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri became slave plantations devoted to cotton. These cotton farms were among the largest, the most intensely commercialized, and the most profitable business operations in the Western Hemisphere. Farmers who owned few or no slaves took higher, more isolated, and less fertile land in the same states. Like their cousins who settled north of the Ohio River, they practiced a mixed agriculture that included animals and plants , provided for themselves and their neighbors, and sold the surplus to outside markets. Some of those markets were reached by floating produce downriver to the seaports, while other markets were on plantations that grew only cotton and that bought food from farmers in their region.

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