The country on the south side of the Ohio, including the northerly parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Tennessee, together with the whole of Kentucky, abounds in hills elevated, in the vicinity of the Ohio, from four to eight hundred or a thousand feet above the water-table of the river, and rising many hundred feet higher in the neighbourhood of the Alleghany mountains. This section is watered by many streams of considerable magnitude tributary to the Ohio, the most important of which are the Monongahela, Kenhawa, Great Sandy, Licking, Kentucky, Salt, Green, Cumberland, and Tennessee. These rivers are all navigable for keel-boats, and many of them for steam-boats, some hundreds of miles, during the boating season, which generally commences about the 20th February and terminates early in June. Occasional freshets contribute to render them navigable during short portions of the other months of the year; but no reliance can be placed in periodical returns of freshets, excepting those of the spring season. Upon these rivers are extensive and valuable tracts of bottom land covered with deep and heavy forests, and possessed of a soil adapted to the cultivation of all the variety of vegetable products common to the various climates in which they are situated. The highlands, back of the bottoms, although variegated with hills and vallies alternating with each other in quick succession, are generally possessed of a surface susceptible of being tilled, and in many instances of a soil equally rich and prolific with that of the bottoms. {200} In many parts of the country, however, the hills are abrupt and stony to such a degree as renders them unfit for tillage. The average produce per acre, upon the farming lands of this section, may be estimated at the following rates: viz. Indian corn or maize, forty bushels; wheat, twenty-two; rye, twenty-six; oats, thirty-five; barley, thirty; tobacco, from twelve to fifteen cwt., and cotton from five to seven cwt. In regard to the products last mentioned, viz. cotton and tobacco, it should be observed, that they are cultivated only in the south-westerly parts of this section, and that oats and barley are seldom cultivated except in the upper or north-easterly parts. Of the population of this section, if we except the towns and villages and their immediate vicinities, as also a large portion of country surrounding Lexington, Kentucky, and another of considerable extent, including Nashville, Tennessee, it is yet but thinly inhabited, affording room for a population far more numerous and more widely diffused. There are extensive tracts of country between the Alleghany mountains and the Ohio as yet almost entirely destitute of inhabitants, the most considerable of which are situated in the vicinity of the mountains, also the country generally between Tennessee river and the Mississippi. As this section of country is pretty generally well known, the foregoing outline of its topography will suffice.