The decade from 1830 to 1840 witnessed a rush of people to the country of the Great Lakes. As pioneers had poured into New York State twenty years before and changed the wilderness into a settled country, so they came now by hundreds and thousands into Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, clearing away the forests and building villages, towns, and cities with amazing rapidity. The common phrase of gazetteers of that day about cities like Toledo, Michigan City, Chicago, and Milwaukee is that in 1830–1834 this place was “dense forest,” or “contained a solitary family,” or “was scarcely known,” but now in 1840 it has from two to three or four thousand inhabitants, as the case may be; and the tale might be repeated in a lesser way for all the villages and towns of the region. In a few years Buffalo and Cleveland changed from “remote settlements” to the well-built, luxurious eastern gateways through which rushed a swift and ever-increasing flood of emigrants. Mere words or even figures can hardly convey what this movement of population meant to the country. It was said that in 1838 five thousand people left Buffalo in one day to go up the lakes, and the larger part of them went to stay. In 1811 Michigan had only nine principal settlements, with a total population of under five thousand, four-fifths of whom were French; in 1837, when she was admitted as a state into the Union, she had a population of over 175,000, distributed over thirty-one counties, nearly two-thirds of whom were from New England and western New York. Together the five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin had come in 1837 to have nearly three million inhabitants.