The inhabitants in the neighbourhood of the Falls have been visited by attacks of bilious fever and ague. A considerable number of persons have been carried off by the former of these complaints, and the convalescent of both are much debilitated. A surmise lately appeared in a Louisville newspaper, that many poor people had suffered from the want of medical assistance, and hazarded the opinion, that a number had died in cases where seasonable applications might have been efficacious. Accounts from Vincennes [141] say, that about a third part of the people there are confined to bed by sickness, and that much of the Wabash country, both in Indiana and Illinois, are now subject to the same evil. Reports from the settlements on the lower parts of White river represent that sickness prevails there and along other water courses. There are many {262} people who act as if they were not sufficiently sensible of the disadvantages resulting from settling in unhealthy situations. Fertility of soil and commercial advantages are the great attractions, but men who look to these as primary considerations, obviously undervalue some of the strongest checks to population and public prosperity. The endemical distempers of this country, so far from being chiefly confined to the weak and the aged, seem to commit their greatest devastations amongst the young and the strong. Surviving sufferers are frequently rendered unfit for labour for a third or fourth part of the year, and receive an irreparable injury to their constitutions; regimen and medicine become almost as indispensable as food; productive labour is thus diminished, and an additional cost imposed on life. Tavern-keepers observe that travellers are not nearly so numerous as they were last year. The change is to be imputed solely to the decline in trade, and to depression in the price of lands. The fact shows that a proportion of the populace remains at home through necessity or economical motives. Happy it is for them, that the pressure of the times does not, as in certain other countries, turn out a numerous class in the condition of houseless poor. Travellers, however, are still so numerous, that a stranger, not fully aware of the rapidity with which new settlements are forming, and of the great populace of eastern States, might be apt to imagine that Americans are a singularly volatile people.