In the year 1787, the Ohio Company purchased 1,500,000 acres of land from Congress. The total price agreed upon was nearly three and a half million dollars, but the payment was made in public securities worth only about twelve cents on the dollar.[141] Joel Barlow was sent to Europe to sell the lands, and a subordinate association, called the Scioto Company, was formed to aid him. Mr. Barlow made considerable sales to individuals and companies in France, and many emigrants came to this country, who would have been ruined by the bad faith of the Company, had not the government generously interfered in their behalf.[142] From 1790-1795 the Ohio Company expended more than $11,000 in defending their settlements, which was never repaid them by the United States.[143] J. C. Symmes of New Jersey in 1787, entered into a contract with Congress for the purchase of a million acres between the two Miami Rivers. He finally paid for about one third of it, for which he received a patent.[144] The early adventurers to the Northwest Territory were men who had spent the prime of their lives in the War of Independence. Many of them had exhausted their fortunes in maintaining the desperate struggle, and retired to the wilderness to conceal their poverty. Some of them were young men, descended from revolutionary patriots. Others were adverturous spirits to whom any change might be for the better.[145] The emigration westward, even in 1788, was very great, the commandant at Fort Harmar reporting forty-five hundred persons having passed that post between February and June of that year.[146] Emigrants were constantly passing down the Ohio for Kentucky in 1789.[147] Prior to the year 1795, the east side of the river, for about ten or twenty miles below Wheeling was generally well settled. There were few settlements on the opposite shore until the Muskingum River was reached, and from here to Limestone, "except at the mouth of the Great Kanhaway," the country on both sides of the river was a wilderness.[148] "Till the years 1796-1797 the banks of the Ohio were so little populated that they scarcely consisted of thirty families in a space of four hundred miles."[149]