Shawneetown was a sort of center from which emigrants radiated to their destinations. It owed much to its location, being on the main route from the southern states to St. Louis and what was then called the Missouri, and being also the port for the salt works on Saline Creek. It was the seat of a land-office. The town thus had a business which was out of all proportion to the number of its permanent inhabitants. In 1817 it consisted of but about thirty log houses, a log bank, and a land-office. When a certain traveler came to the place from the South, in 1818, he found the number of wagons, horses, and passengers waiting to cross the Ohio, on the ferry, so great that he had to wait “a great part of the morning” for his turn.(301) During the latter part of the territorial period freight charges from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, by land, were from seven to ten dollars per hundredweight;(302) from Pittsburg to Shawneetown, one dollar; from Louisville to Shawneetown, thirty-seven cents; and from New Orleans to Shawneetown, four dollars and a half.(303) The use of arks was common. These were flat-bottomed boats of a tonnage of from twenty-five to thirty tons, covered, square at the ends, of a uniform size of fifty feet in length and fourteen in breadth, usually sold for seventy-five dollars, and would carry three or four families. A common practice was to re-sell them at a somewhat reduced price to someone going further down the river. Two dollars was the charge for piloting an ark over the falls of the Ohio.(304) There is much truth in the remarks made by a German traveler in 1818-19. He said: “The State of Illinois is from one thousand to twelve hundred miles distant from the sea ports. The journey thither is often as costly and tedious, for a man with a family, as the sea passage. Any father of a family, unless he is well-to-do, can certainly count on being impoverished upon his arrival in Illinois. At Williamsport, on the Susquehanna, I found a Swiss, who, with his wife and ten children, had spent one thousand French crown-dollars for their journey. In the village of Williamsport, an old German schoolmaster, who seems to have been formerly a merchant in Nassau, told me that the passage of himself and family had cost thirteen hundred dollars. For an adult the fare is seventy-five dollars—one dollar is equal to one thaler, ten groschen, Prussian—for children under twelve years, half so much, for children of two years, one-fourth so much, and only babes in arms go free.”(305)