Book: McCullough, David. John Adams, Simon & Schuster, 2001 p. 396, date: 1789 "The great majority of Americans lived and worked on farms, and fully two-thirds of the population was concentrated in a narrow band along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Spanish Florida. Nearly everything else was wilderness. The whole country, concluded one visitor, was 'a vast wood.' In Massachusetts it was thought that less than a third of the land had been cleared, and it was the same in New York and Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, at the end of the rough-hewn wagon road over the Allegheny Mountains, was the westernmost town of any consequence in the country and had fewer than 500 souls. "Down the same road Adams traveled that spring to New York came small caravans from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut - families with children and household belongings piled onto heavy wagons, bound for Ohio, a journey of more than 700 miles...George Washington himself, known to have great confidence in the future of the West, had landholdings on the Ohio River of more than 20,000 acres"