It may be that this has been dealt with in more recent discussions than this resurrected one, but I'll just mention that the most comprehensive examination of this song and tune family is Bertrand Bronson's Samuel Hall's Family Tree (California Folklore Quarterly, I (1) 1942, and The Ballad as Song, University of California Press, 1969 18-36). G. W. Ross certainly popularised the song between 1845 and 1850, but whether he himself re-wrote it is not, I think, known. Sam Cowell was also associated with it at around the same time.