From James L. Barton's reminiscences, for instance, we have clear pictures of the early struggle for business in this frontier town, which prove it to have been typically American. Mr. Barton owned a line of boats on the Lakes and canal but found it very difficult to find freight for the boats to carry down the State: A few tons of freight [he writes], was all that we could furnish each boat to carry to Albany. This they would take in, and fill up at Rochester, which place, situated in the heart of the wheat-growing district of Western New York, furnished nearly all the down freight that passed on the canal. Thus we lived and struggled on until 1830. Our population had increased largely, and that year numbered six thousand and thirty-one. In the fall of 1831, I received from Cleveland one thousand bushels of wheat. . . . The next winter I made arrangement with the late Colonel Ira A. Blossom, the resident agent of the Holland Land Company, to furnish storage for all the wheat the settlers should bring in, towards the payment on their land contracts with the company. The whole amount did not exceed three thousand bushels. . . . In 1833 the Ohio canal was completed, which gave us a little more business. Northern Ohio was then the only portion of the great West that had any surplus agricultural products to send to an eastern market. In 1833 a little stir commenced in land operations, which increased the next year, and in 1835 became a perfect fever and swallowed up almost everything else. Nearly every person who had any enterprise got rich from buying and selling land; using little money in these transactions, but paying and receiving in pay, bonds and mortgages to an illimitable amount. In 1837 the panic affected the young lake city as it did all parts of the land, but by 1840 the population of Buffalo had swelled to over eighteen thousand. The record of growth of the past century is a matter of figures strung on the faith of a great company of active, enterprising, far-sighted business men, until Buffalo ranks among the cities of half a million population, with a future unquestionably secure and brilliant.