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Title: The Paths of Inland Commerce
A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway,
Volume 21 of The Chronicles of America Series
Author: Archer B. Hulbert
Release Date: February 28, 2009 [EBook #3098]
Last Updated: September 31, 2006
Language: English
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Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's University, Alev
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The Paths of Inland Commerce
By Archer B. Hulbert
A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway
Volume 21 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys
Abraham Lincoln Edition
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1920
Copyright, 1920
by Yale University Press
PREFACE
If the great American novel is ever written, I hazard the guess that its
plot will be woven around the theme of American transportation, for that
has been the vital factor in the national development of the United
States. Every problem in the building of the Republic has been, in the
last analysis, a problem in transportation. The author of such a novel
will find a rich fund of material in the perpetual rivalries of
pack-horseman and wagoner, of riverman and canal boatman, of steamboat
promoter and railway capitalist. He will find at every point the old
jostling and challenging the new: pack-horsemen demolishing wagons in
the early days of the Alleghany traffic; wagoners deriding Clinton's
Ditch; angry boatmen anxious to ram the paddle wheels of Fulton's
Clermont, which threatened their monopoly. Such opposition has always
been an incident of progress; and even in this new country, receptive as
it was to new ideas, the Washingtons, the Fitches, the Fultons, the
Coopers, and the Whitneys, who saw visions and dreamed dreams, all had
to face scepticism and hostility from those whom they would serve.
A. B. H.
Worcester, Mass.,
June, 1919.
The Paths of Inland Commerce
Chapter Chapter Title Page
Preface vii
I. The Man Who Caught The Vision 1
II. The Red Man's Trail 14
III. The Mastery Of The Rivers 30
IV. A Nation On Wheels 44
V. The Flatboat Age 62
VI. The Passing Show Of 1800 81
VII. The Birth Of The Steamboat 100
VIII. The Conquest Of The Alleghanies 116
IX. The Dawn Of The Iron Age 134
X. The Pathway of the Lakes 154
XI. The Steamboat And The West 174
Bibliographical Note 197
Index 203
THE PATHS OF INLAND COMMERCE
∴
CHAPTER I.
The Man Who Caught the Vision
Inland America, at the birth of the Republic, was as great a mystery to
the average dweller on the Atlantic seaboard as the elephant was to the
blind men of Hindustan. The reports of those who had penetrated this
wilderness--of those who had seen the barren ranges of the Alleghanies,
the fertile uplands of the Unakas, the luxuriant blue-grass regions, the
rich bottom lands of the Ohio and Mississippi, the wide shores of the
inland seas, or the stretches of prairie increasing in width beyond the
Wabash--seemed strangely contradictory, and no one had been able to
patch these reports together and grasp the real proportions of the giant
inland empire that had become a part of the United States. It was a
pathless desert; it was a maze of trails, trodden out by deer, buffalo,
and Indian. Its great riverways were broad avenues for voyagers and
explorers; they were treacherous gorges filled with the plunder of a
million floods. It was a rich soil, a land of plenty; the natives were
seldom more than a day removed from starvation. Within its broad
confines could dwell a great people; but it was as inaccessible as the
interior of China. It had a great commercial future; yet its gigantic
distances and natural obstructions defied all known means of
transportation.
Such were the varied and contradictory stories told by the men who had
entered the portals of inland America. It is not surprising, therefore,
that theories and prophecies about the interior were vague and
conflicting nor that most of the schemes of statesmen and financiers for
the development of the West were all parts and no whole. They all agreed
as to the vast richness of that inland realm and took for granted an
immense commerce therein that was certain to yield enormous profits. In
faraway Paris, the ingenious diplomat, Silas Deane, writing to the
Secret Committee of Congress in 1776, pictured the Old
Northwest--bounded by the Ohio, the Alleghanies, the Great Lakes, and
the Mississippi--as paying the whole expense of the Revolutionary War. ¹
Thomas Paine in 1780 drew specifications for a State of from twenty to
thirty millions of acres lying west of Virginia and south of the Ohio
River, the sale of which land would pay the cost of three years of the
war. ² On the other hand, Pelatiah Webster, patriotic economist that he
was, decried in 1781 all schemes to "pawn" this vast westward region; he
likened such plans to "killing the goose that laid an egg every day, in
order to tear out at once all that was in her belly." He advocated the
township system of compact and regular settlement; and he argued that
any State making a cession of land would reap great benefit "from the
produce and trade" of the newly created settlements.
¹ Deane's plan was to grant a tract two hundred miles square at the
junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi to a company on the condition
that a thousand families should be settled on it within seven years. He
added that, as this company would be in a great degree commercial, the
establishing of commerce at the junction of those large rivers would
immediately give a value to all the lands situated on or near them.
² Paine thought that while the new State could send its exports
southward down the Mississippi, its imports must necessarily come from
the East through Chesapeake Bay because the current of the Mississippi
was too strong to be overcome by any means of navigation then known.
There were mooted many other schemes. General Rufus Putnam, for example,
advocated the Pickering or "Army" plan of occupying the West; he wanted
a fortified line to the Great Lakes, in case of war with England, and
fortifications on the Ohio and the Mississippi, in case Spain should
interrupt the national commerce on these waterways. And Thomas Jefferson
theorized in his study over the toy states of Metropotamia and
Polypotamia--brought his
... trees and houses out
And planted cities all about.
But it remained for George Washington, the Virginia planter, to catch,
in something of its actual grandeur, the vision of a Republic stretching
towards the setting sun, bound and unified by paths of inland commerce.
It was Washington who traversed the long ranges of the Alleghanies,
slept in the snows of Deer Park with no covering but his greatcoat,
inquired eagerly of trapper and trader and herder concerning the courses
of the Cheat, the Monongahela, and the Little Kanawha, and who drew from
these personal explorations a clear and accurate picture of the future
trade routes by which the country could be economically, socially, and
nationally united.
Washington's experience had peculiarly fitted him to catch this vision.
Fortune had turned him westward as he left his mother's knee. First as a
surveyor for Lord Fairfax in the Shenandoah Valley and later, under
Braddock and Forbes, in the armies fighting for the Ohio against the
French he had come to know the interior as it was known by no other man
of his standing. His own landed property lay largely along the upper
Potomac and in and beyond the Alleghanies. Washington's interest in this
property was very real. Those who attempt to explain his early concern
with the West as purely altruistic must misread his numerous letters and
diaries. Nothing in his unofficial character shows more plainly than his
business enterprise and acumen. On one occasion he wrote to his agent,
Crawford, concerning a proposed land speculation: "I recommend that you
keep this whole matter a secret or trust it only to those in whom you
can confide. If the scheme I am now proposing to you were known, it
might give alarm to others, and by putting them on a plan of the same
nature, before we could lay a proper foundation for success ourselves,
set the different interests clashing and in the end overturn the whole."
Nor can it be denied that Washington's attitude to the commercial
development of the West was characterized in his early days by a narrow
colonial partisanship. He was a stout Virginian; and all stout
Virginians of that day refused to admit the pretensions of other
colonies to the land beyond the mountains.
But from no man could the shackles of self-interest and provincial
rivalry drop more quickly than they dropped from Washington when he
found his country free after the close of the Revolutionary War. He then
began to consider how that country might grow and prosper. And he began
to preach the new doctrine of expansion and unity. This new doctrine
first appears in a letter which he wrote to the Marquis de Chastellux in
1783, after a tour from his camp at Newburg into central New York, where
he had explored the headwaters of the Mohawk and the Susquehanna: "I
could not help taking a more extensive view of the vast inland
navigation of these United States [the letter runs] and could not but be
struck by the immense extent and importance of it, and of the goodness
of that Providence which has dealt its favors to us with so profuse a
hand. Would to God we may have wisdom enough to improve them. I shall
not rest contented till I have explored the Western country, and
traversed those lines, or great part of them, which have given bounds to
a new empire."
"The vast inland navigation of these United States!" It is an
interesting fact that Washington should have had his first glimpse of
this vision from the strategic valley of the Mohawk, which was soon to
rival his beloved Potomac as an improved commercial route from the
seaboard to the West, and which was finally to achieve an unrivaled
superiority in the days of the Erie Canal and the Twentieth Century
Limited.
We may understand something of what the lure of the West meant to
Washington when we learn that in order to carry out his proposed journey
after the Revolution, he was compelled to refuse urgent invitations to
visit Europe and be the guest of France. "I found it indispensably
necessary," he writes, "to visit my Landed property West of the
Apalacheon Mountains.... One object of my journey being to obtain
information of the nearest and best communication between Eastern &
Western waters; & to facilitate as much as in me lay the Inland
Navigation of the Potomack."
On September 1, 1784, Washington set out from Mount Vernon on his
journey to the West. Even the least romantic mind must feel a thrill in
picturing this solitary horseman, the victor of Yorktown, threading the
trails of the Potomac, passing on by Cumberland and Fort Necessity and
Braddock's grave to the Monongahela. The man, now at the height of his
fame, is retracing the trails of his boyhood--covering ground over which
he had passed as a young officer in the last English and French war--but
he is seeing the land in so much larger perspective that, although his
diary is voluminous, the reader of those pages would not know that
Washington had been this way before. Concerning Great Meadows, where he
first saw the "bright face of danger" and which he once described
gleefully as "a charming place for an encounter," he now significantly
remarks: "The upland, East of the meadow, is good for grain." Changed
are the ardent dreams that filled the young man's heart when he wrote to
his mother from this region that singing bullets "have truly a charming
sound." Today, as he looks upon the flow of Youghiogheny, he sees it
reaching out its finger tips to Potomac's tributaries. He perceives a
similar movement all along the chain of the Alleghanies: on the west are
the Great Lakes and the Ohio, and reaching out towards them from the
east, waiting to be joined by portage road and canal, are the Hudson,
the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and the James. He foresees these streams
bearing to the Atlantic ports the golden produce of the interior and
carrying back to the interior the manufactured goods of the seaboard. He
foresees the Republic becoming homogeneous, rich, and happy. "Open all
the communication which nature has afforded," he wrote Henry Lee,
"between the Atlantic States and the Western territory, and encourage
the use of them to the utmost ... and sure I am there is no other tie by
which they will long form a link in the chain of Federal Union."
Crude as were the material methods by which Washington hoped to
accomplish this end, in spirit he saw the very America that we know
today; and he marked out accurately the actual pathways of inland
commerce that have played their part in the making of America. Taking
the city of Detroit as the key position, commercially, he traced the
main lines of internal trade. He foresaw New York improving her natural
line of communication by way of the Mohawk and the Niagara frontier on
Lake Erie--the present line of the Erie Canal and the New York Central
Railway. For Pennsylvania, he pointed out the importance of linking the
Schuylkill and the Susquehanna and of opening the two avenues westward
to Pittsburgh and to Lake Erie. In general, he thus forecast the
Pennsylvania Canal and the Pennsylvania and the Erie railways. For
Maryland and Virginia he indicated the Potomac route as the nearest for
all the trade of the Ohio Valley, with the route by way of the James and
the Great Kanawha as an alternative for the settlements on the lower
Ohio. His vision here was realized in a later day by the Potomac and the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the Cumberland Road, the Baltimore and Ohio
Railway, and by the James-Kanawha Turnpike and the Chesapeake and Ohio
Railway.
Washington's general conclusions are stated in a summary at the end of
his Journal, which was reproduced in his classic letter to Harrison,
written in 1784. His first point is that every State which had water
routes reaching westward could enhance the value of its lands, increase
its commerce, and quiet the democratic turbulence of its shut-in pioneer
communities by the improvement of its river transportation. Taking
Pennsylvania as a specific example, he declared that "there are one
hundred thousand souls West of the Laurel Hill, who are groaning under
the inconveniences of a long land transportation.... If this cannot be
made easy for them to Philadelphia ... they will seek a mart
elsewhere.... An opposition on the part of [that] government ... would
ultimately bring on a separation between its Eastern and Western
settlements; towards which there is not wanting a disposition at this
moment in that part of it beyond the mountains."
Washington's second proposal was the achievement of a new and lasting
conquest of the West by binding it to the seaboard with chains of
commerce. He thus states his point: "No well informed mind need be told
that the flanks and rear of the United territory are possessed by other
powers, and formidable ones too--nor how necessary it is to apply the
cement of interest to bind all parts of it together, by one indissoluble
bond--particularly the middle States with the Country immediately back
of them--for what ties let me ask, should we have upon those people; and
how entirely unconnected should we be with them if the Spaniards on
their right or Great Britain on their left, instead of throwing
stumbling blocks in their way as they do now, should invite their trade
and seek alliances with them?"
Some of the pictures in Washington's vision reveal, in the light of
subsequent events, an almost uncanny prescience. He very plainly
prophesied the international rivalry for the trade of the Great Lakes
zone, embodied today in the Welland and the Erie canals. He declared the
possibility of navigating with ocean-going vessels the tortuous
two-thousand-mile channel of the Ohio and the Mississippi River; and
within sixteen years ships left the Ohio, crossed the Atlantic, and
sailed into the Mediterranean. His description of a possible
insurrection of a western community might well have been written later;
it might almost indeed have made a page of his diary after he became
President of the United States and during the Whiskey Insurrection in
western Pennsylvania. He approved and encouraged Rumsey's mechanical
invention for propelling boats against the stream, showing that he had a
glimpse of what was to follow after Fitch, Rumsey, and Fulton should
have overcome the mighty currents of the Hudson and the Ohio with the
steamboat's paddle wheel. His proposal that Congress should undertake a
survey of western rivers for the purpose of giving people at large a
knowledge of their possible importance as avenues of commerce was a
forecast of the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as of the policy of
the Government today for the improvement of the great inland rivers and
harbors.
"The destinies of our country run east and west. Intercourse between the
mighty interior west and the sea coast is the great principle of our
commercial prosperity." These are the words of Edward Everett in
advocating the Boston and Albany Railroad. In effect Washington had
uttered those same words half a century earlier when he gave momentum to
an era filled with energetic but unsuccessful efforts to join with the
waters of the West the rivers reaching inland from the Atlantic. The
fact that American engineering science had not in his day reached a
point where it could cope with this problem successfully should in no
wise lessen our admiration for the man who had thus caught the vision of
a nation united and unified by improved methods of transportation.
CHAPTER II
The Red Man's Trail
For the beginnings of the paths of our inland commerce, we must look far
back into the dim prehistoric ages of America. The earliest routes that
threaded the continent were the streams and the tracks beaten out by the
heavier four-footed animals. The Indian hunter followed the migrations
of the animals and the streams that would float his light canoe. Today
the main lines of travel and transportation for the most part still
cling to these primeval pathways.
In their wanderings, man and beast alike sought the heights, the passes
that pierced the mountain chains, and the headwaters of navigable
rivers. On the ridges the forest growth was lightest and there was
little obstruction from fallen timber; rain and frost caused least
damage by erosion; and the winds swept the trails clear of leaves in
summer and of snow in winter. Here lay the easiest paths for the heavy,
blundering buffalo and the roving elk and moose and deer. Here, high up
in the sun, where the outlook was unobstructed and signal fires could be
seen from every direction, on the longest watersheds, curving around
river and swamp, ran the earliest travel routes of the aboriginal
inhabitants and of their successors, the red men of historic times. For
their encampments and towns these peoples seem to have preferred the
more sheltered ground along the smaller streams; but, when they fared
abroad to hunt, to trade, to wage war, to seek new material for pipe and
amulet, they followed in the main the highest ways.
If in imagination one surveys the eastern half of the North American
continent from one of the strategic passageways of the Alleghanies, say
from Cumberland Gap or from above Kittanning Gorge, the outstanding
feature in the picture will be the Appalachian barrier that separates
the interior from the Atlantic coast. To the north lie the Adirondacks
and the Berkshire Hills, hedging New England in close to the ocean. Two
glittering waterways lie east and west of these heights--the Connecticut
and the Hudson. Upon the valleys of these two rivers converged the two
deeply worn pathways of the Puritan, the Old Bay Path and the
Connecticut Path. By way of Westfield River, that silver tributary which
joins the Connecticut at Springfield, Massachusetts, the Bay Path
surmounted the Berkshire highlands and united old Massachusetts to the
upper Hudson Valley near Fort Orange, now Albany.
Here, north of the Catskills, the Appalachian barrier subsides and gives
New York a supreme advantage over all the other Atlantic States--a level
route to the Great Lakes and the West. The Mohawk River threads the
smiling landscape; beyond lies the "Finger Lake country" and the valley
of the Genesee. Through this romantic region ran the Mohawk Trail,
sending offshoots to Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence, to the
Susquehanna, and to the Allegheny. A few names have been altered in the
course of years--the Bay Path is now the Boston and Albany Railroad, the
Mohawk Trail is the New York Central, and Fort Orange is Albany--and
thus we may tell in a dozen words the story of three centuries.
Upon Fort Orange converged the score of land and water pathways of the
fur trade of our North. These Indian trade routes were slowly widened
into colonial roads, notably the Mohawk and Catskill turnpikes, and
these in turn were transformed into the Erie, Lehigh, Nickel Plate, and
New York Central railways. But from the day when the canoe and the keel
boat floated their bulky cargoes of pelts or the heavy laden Indian pony
trudged the trail, the routes of trade have been little or nothing
altered.
Traversing the line of the Alleghanies southward, the eye notes first
the break in the wall at the Delaware Water Gap, and then that long arm
of the Susquehanna, the Juniata, reaching out through dark Kittanning
Gorge to its silver playmate, the dancing Conemaugh. Here amid its leafy
aisles ran the brown and red Kittanning Trail, the main route of the
Pennsylvania traders from the rich region of York, Lancaster, and
Chambersburg. On this general alignment the Broadway Limited flies today
toward Pittsburgh and Chicago. A little to the south another important
pathway from the same region led, by way of Carlisle, Bedford, and
Ligonier, to the Ohio. The "Highland Trail" the Indian traders called
it, for it kept well on the watershed dividing the Allegheny tributaries
on the north from those of the Monongahela on the south.
Farther to the south the scene shows a change, for the Atlantic plain
widens considerably. The Potomac River, the James, the Pedee, and the
Savannah flow through valleys much longer than those of the northern
rivers. Here in the South commerce was carried on mainly by shallop and
pinnace. The trails of the Indian skirted the rivers and offered for
trader and explorer passageway to the West, especially to the towns of
the Cherokees in the southern Alleghanies or Unakas; but the waterways
and the roads over which the hogsheads of tobacco were rolled (hence
called "rolling roads") sufficed for the needs of the thin fringes of
population settled along the rivers. Trails from Winchester in Virginia
and Frederick in Maryland focused on Cumberland at the head of the
Potomac. Beyond, to the west, the finger tips of the Potomac interlocked
closely with the Monongahela and Youghiogheny, and through this network
of mountain and river valley, by the "Shades of Death" and Great
Meadows, coiled Nemacolin's Path to the Ohio. Even today this ancient
route is in part followed by the Baltimore and Ohio and the Western
Maryland Railway.
A bird's-eye view of the southern Alleghanies shows that, while the
Atlantic plain of Virginia and the Carolinas widens out, the mountain
chains increase in number, fold on fold, from the Blue Ridge to the
ragged ranges of the Cumberlands. Few trails led across this manifold
barrier. There was a connection at Balcony Falls between the James River
and the Great Kanawha; but as a trade route it was of no such value to
the men of its day as the Chesapeake and Ohio system over the same
course is to us. As in the North, so in the South, trade avoided
obstacles by taking a roundabout, and often the longest route. In order
to double the extremity of the Unakas, for instance, the trails reached
down by the Valley of Virginia and New River to the uplands of the
Tennessee, and here, near Elizabethton, they met the trails leading up
the Broad and the Yadkin rivers from Charleston, South Carolina.
To the west rise the somber heights of Cumberland Gap. Through this
portal ran the famous "Warrior's Path," known to wandering hunters, the
"trail of iron" from Fort Watauga and Fort Chiswell, which Daniel Boone
widened for the settlers of Kentucky. To the southwest lay the Blue
Grass region of Tennessee with its various trails converging on
Nashville from almost every direction. Today the Southern Railway enters
the "Sapphire Country," in which Asheville lies, by practically the same
route as the old Rutherfordton Trail which was used for generations by
red man and pioneer from the Carolina coast.
In our entire region of the Appalachians, from the Berkshire Hills
southward, practically every old-time pathway from the seaboard to the
trans-Alleghany country is now occupied by an important railway system,
with the exception of the Warrior's Trail through Cumberland Gap to
central Ohio and the Highland Trail across southern Pennsylvania. And
even Cumberland Gap is accessible by rail today, and a line across
southern Pennsylvania was once planned and partially constructed only to
be killed by jealous rivals.
These numerous keys to the Alleghanies were a challenge to the men of
the seaboard to seize upon the rich trade of the West which had been
early monopolized by the French in Canada. But the challenge brought its
difficult problems. What land canoes could compete with the flotillas
that brought their priceless cargoes of furs each year to Montreal and
Quebec? What race of landlubbers could vie with the picturesque bands of
fearless voyageurs who sang their songs on the Great Lakes, the Ohio,
the Illinois, and the Mississippi?
In the solution of this problem of diverting trade probably the factor
of greatest importance, next to open pathways through the mountain
barriers, was the rich stock-breeding ground lying between the Delaware
and the Susquehanna rivers, a region occupied by the settlers familiarly
known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. In this famous belt, running from
Pennsylvania into Virginia, originated the historic pack-horse trade
with the "far Indians" of the Ohio Valley. Here, in the first granary of
America, Germans, Scotch-Irish, and English bred horses worthy of the
name. "Brave fat Horses" an amazed officer under Braddock called the
mounts of five Quakers who unexpectedly rode into camp as though
straight "from the land of Goshen." These animals, crossed with the
Indian "pony" from New Spain, produced the wise, wiry, and sturdy
pack-horse, fit to transport nearly two hundred pounds of merchandise
across the rough and narrow Alleghany trails. This animal and the heavy
Conestoga horse from the same breeding ground revolutionized inland
commerce.
The first American cow pony was not without his cowboy. Though the
drivers were not all of the same type and though the proprietors, so to
speak, of the trans-Alleghany pack-horse trade came generally from the
older settlements, the bulk of the hard work was done by a lusty army of
men not reproduced again in America until the picturesque figure of the
cow-puncher appeared above the western horizon. This breed of men was
nurtured on the outer confines of civilization, along the headwaters of
the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the James, and the Broad--the country of
the "Cowpens." Rough as the wilderness they occupied, made strong by
their diet of meat and curds, these Tatars of the highlands played a
part in the commercial history of America that has never had its
historian. In their knowledge of Indian character, of horse and
packsaddle lore, of the forest and its trails in every season, these men
of the Cowpens were the kings of the old frontier.
An officer under Braddock has left us one of the few pictures of these
people ¹:
¹ Extracts of Letters from an Officer (London, 1755).
From the Heart of the Settlements we are now got into the Cow-pens; the
Keepers of these are very extraordinary Kind of Fellows, they drive up
their Herds on Horseback, and they had need do so, for their Cattle are
near as wild as Deer; a Cow-pen generally consists of a very large
Cottage or House in the Woods, with about four-score or one hundred
Acres, inclosed with high Rails and divided; a small Inclosure they keep
for Corn, for the family, the rest is the Pasture in which they keep
their calves; but the Manner is far different from any Thing you ever
saw; they may perhaps have a Stock of four or five hundred to a thousand
Head of Cattle belonging to a Cow-pen, these run as they please in the
Great Woods, where there are no Inclosures to stop them. In the Month of
March the Cows begin to drop their Calves, then the Cow-pen Master, with
all his Men, rides out to see and drive up the Cows with all their new
fallen Calves; they being weak cannot run away so as to escape,
therefore are easily drove up, and the Bulls and other Cattle follow
them; and they put these Calves into the Pasture, and every Morning and
Evening suffer the Cows to come and suckle them, which done they let the
Cows out into the great Woods to shift for their Food as well as they
can; whilst the Calf is sucking one Tit of the Cow, the Woman of the
Cow-Pen is milking one of the other Tits, so that she steals some Milk
from the Cow, who thinks she is giving it to the Calf; soon as the Cow
begins to go dry, and the Calf grows Strong, they mark them, if they are
Males they cut them, and let them go into the Wood. Every Year in
September and October they drive up the Market Steers, that are fat and
of a proper Age, and kill them; they say they are fat in October, but I
am sure they are not so in May, June and July; they reckon that out of
100 Head of Cattle they can kill about 10 or 12 steers, and four or five
Cows a Year; so they reckon that a Cow-Pen for every 100 Head of Cattle
brings about £40 Sterling per Year. The Keepers live chiefly upon Milk,
for out of their Vast Herds, they do condescend to tame Cows enough to
keep their Family in Milk, Whey, Curds, Cheese and Butter; they also
have Flesh in Abundance such as it is, for they eat the old Cows and
lean Calves that are like to die. The Cow-Pen Men are hardy People, are
almost continually on Horseback, being obliged to know the Haunts of
their Cattle.
You see, Sir, what a wild set of Creatures Our English Men grow into,
when they lose Society, and it is surprising to think how many
Advantages they throw away, which our industrious Country-Men would be
glad of: Out of many hundred Cows they will not give themselves the
trouble of milking more than will maintain their Family.
With such a race of born horsemen, every whit as bold and resourceful as
the voyageurs, to bear the brunt of a new era of transportation, all
that was needed to challenge French trade beyond the Alleghanies was
competent and aggressive leadership. The situation called for men of
means, men of daring, men closely in touch with governors and assemblies
and acquainted with the web of politics that was being spun at
Philadelphia, Williamsburg, New York, London, and Paris. Generations of
tenacious struggle along the American frontier had developed such men.
The Weisers, Croghans, Gists, Washingtons, Franklins, Walkers, and
Cresaps were men of varied descent and nationality. They had the
cunning, the boldness, and the resources to undertake successfully the
task of conquering commercially the Great West. They were the first men
of the colonies to be unafraid of that bugbear of the trader, Distance.
We may aptly call them the first Americans because, though not a few
were actually born abroad, they were the first whose plans, spirit, and
very life were dominated by the vision of an America of continental
dimensions.
The long story of French and English rivalry and of the war which ended
it concerns us here chiefly as a commercial struggle. The French at
Niagara (1749) had access to the Ohio by way of Lake Erie and any one of
several rivers--the Allegheny, the Muskingum, the Scioto, or the Miami.
The main routes of the English were the Nemacolin and Kittanning paths.
The French, laboring under the disadvantages of the longer distance over
which their goods had to be transported to the Indians and of the higher
price necessarily demanded for them, had to meet the competition of the
traders from the rival colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia, each of
them jealous of and underbidding the other.
When Céloron de Blainville was sent to the Allegheny in 1749, by the
Governor of New France, his message was that "the Governor of Canada
desired his children on Ohio to turn away the English Traders from
amongst them and discharge them from ever coming to trade there again,
or on any of the Branches." He sent away all the traders whom he found,
giving them letters addressed to their respective governors denying
England's right to trade in the West. To offset this move, within two
years Pennsylvania sent goods to the value of nine hundred pounds in
order to hold the Indians constant. The Governor had already ordered the
traders to sell whiskey to the Indians at "5 Bucks" per cask and had
told the Indians, through his agent Conrad Weiser, that if any trader
refused to sell the liquor at that price they might "take it from him
and drink it for nothing." There was but one way for the French to meet
such competition. Without delay they fortified the Allegheny and began
to coerce the natives. Driving away the carpenters of the Ohio Company
from the present site of Pittsburgh, they built Fort Duquesne. The
beginning of the Old French War ended what we may call the first era of
the pack-horse trade.
The capture of Fort Duquesne by the English army under General Forbes in
1758 and the final conquest of New France two years later removed the
French barrier and opened the way to expansion beyond the Alleghanies.
Thereafter settlements in the Monongahela country grew apace.
Pittsburgh, Uniontown, Morgantown, Brownsville, Ligonier, Greensburg,
Connellsville--we give the modern names--became centers of a great
migration which was halted only for a season by Pontiac's Rebellion, the
aftermath of the French War, and was resumed immediately on the
suppression of that Indian rising. The pack-horse trade now entered its
final and most important era. The earlier period was one in which the
trade was confined chiefly to the Indians; the later phase was concerned
with supplying the needs of the white man in his rapidly developing
frontier settlements. Formerly the principal articles of merchandise for
the western trade were guns, ammunition, knives, kettles, and tools for
their repair, blankets, tobacco, hatchets, and liquor. In the new era
every known product of the East found a market in the thriving
communities of the upper Ohio. As time went on the West began to send to
the East, in addition to skins and pelts, whiskey that brought a dollar
a gallon. Each pony could carry sixteen gallons and every drop could be
sold for real money. On the return trip the pack-horses carried back
chiefly salt and iron.
Doddridge's Notes, one of the chief sources of our information, gives
this lively picture:
In the fall of the year, after seeding time, every family formed an
association with some of their neighbors, for starting the little
caravan. A master driver was to be selected from among them, who was to
be assisted by one or more young men and sometimes a boy or two. The
horses were fitted out with packsaddles, to the latter part of which was
fastened a pair of hobbles made of hickory withes,--a bell and collar
ornamented their necks. The bags provided for the conveyance of the salt
were filled with bread, jerk, boiled ham, and cheese furnished a
provision for the drivers. At night, after feeding, the horses, whether
put in pasture or turned out into the woods, were hobbled and the bells
were opened. The barter for salt and iron was made first at Baltimore;
Frederick, Hagerstown, Oldtown, and Fort Cumberland, in succession,
became the places of exchange. Each horse carried two bushels of alum
salt, weighing eighty-four pounds to the bushel. This, to be sure, was
not a heavy load for the horses, but it was enough, considering the
scanty subsistence allowed them on the journey. The common price of a
bushel of alum salt, at an early period, was a good cow and a calf.
Thus, with the English flag afloat at Fort Pitt, as Duquesne was renamed
after its capture, a new day dawned for the great region to the West.
Beyond the Alleghanies and as far as the Rockies, a new science of
transportation was now to be learned--the art of finding the dividing
ridge. Here the first routes, like the "Great Trail" from Pittsburgh to
Detroit, struck out with an assurance that is in marvelous agreement
with the findings of the surveyors of a later day. The railways, when
they came, found the valleys and penetrated with their tunnels the
watersheds from the heads of the streams of one drainage area to the
streams of another. Thus on the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio,
the Southern, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and other railroads, important
tunnels are to be found lying immediately under the Red Man's trail
which clung to the long ascending slope and held persistently to the
dividing ridges.
Even this necessarily brief survey shows plainly how that preëminently
American institution, the ridge road, came about. East and west, it was
the legitimate and natural successor to the ancient trail. With the
coming of the wagon, whose rattle was heard among the hills as early as
Braddock's campaign, the process of lowering these paths from the
heights was inevitably begun, and it was to the riverways that men first
looked for a solution of the difficult problems of inland commerce.
Eventually the paths of inland commerce constituted a vast network of
canals, roads, and railway lines in those very valleys to which
Washington had called the nation's attention in 1784.
CHAPTER III
The Mastery of the Rivers
It would perhaps have been well, in the light of later difficulties and
failures, if the men who at Washington's call undertook to master the
capricious rivers of the seaboard had studied a stately Spanish decree
which declared that, since God had not made the rivers of Spain
navigable, it were sacrilege for mortals to attempt to do so. Even
before the Revolution, Mayor Rhodes of Philadelphia was in
correspondence with Franklin in London concerning the experiences of
European engineers in harnessing foreign streams. That sage philosopher,
writing to Rhodes in 1772, uttered a clear word of warning: "rivers are
ungovernable things," he had said, and English engineers "seldom or
never use a River where it can be avoided." But it was the birthright of
New World democracy to make its own mistakes and in so doing to prove
for itself the errors of the Old World.
As energetic men all along the Atlantic Plain now took up the problem of
improving the inland rivers, they faced a storm of criticism and
ridicule that would have daunted any but such as Washington and Johnson
of Virginia or White and Hazard of Pennsylvania or Morris and Watson of
New York. Every imaginable objection to such projects was advanced--from
the inefficiency of the science of engineering to the probable
destruction of all the fish in the streams. In spite of these
discouragements, however, various men set themselves to form in rapid
succession the Potomac Company in 1785, the Society for Promoting the
Improvement of Inland Navigation in 1791, the Western Inland Lock
Navigation Company in 1792, and the Lehigh Coal Mine Company in 1793. A
brief review of these various enterprises will give a clear if not a
complete view of the first era of inland water commerce in America.
The Potomac Company, authorized in 1785 by the legislatures of Maryland
and Virginia, received an appropriation of $6666 from each State for
opening a road from the headwaters of the Potomac to either the Cheat or
the Monongahela, "as commissioners ... shall find most convenient and
beneficial to the Western settlers." This was the only public aid which
the enterprise received; and the stipulated purpose clearly indicates
the fact that, in the minds of its promoters, the transcontinental
character of the undertaking appeared to be vital. The remainder of the
money required for the work was raised by public subscription in the
principal cities of the two States. In this way £40,300 was subscribed,
Virginia men taking 266 shares and Maryland men 137 shares. The
stockholders elected George Washington as president of the company, at a
salary of thirty shillings a year, with four directors to aid him, and
they chose as general manager James Rumsey, the boat mechanician. These
men then proceeded to attack the chief impediments in the Potomac--the
Great Falls above Washington, the Seneca Falls at the mouth of Seneca
Creek, and the Shenandoah Falls at Harper's Ferry. But, as they had
difficulty in obtaining workmen and sufficient liquor to cheer them in
their herculean tasks, they made such slow progress that subscribers,
doubting Washington's optimistic prophecy that the stock would increase
in value twenty per cent, paid their assessments only after much
deliberation or not at all. Thirty-six years later, though $729,380 had
been spent and lock canals had been opened about the unnavigable
stretches of the Potomac River, a commission appointed to examine the
affairs of the company reported "that the floods and freshets
nevertheless gave the only navigation that was enjoyed." As for the road
between the Potomac and the Cheat or the Monongahela, the records at
hand do not show that the money voted for that enterprise had been used.
The Potomac Company nevertheless had accomplished something: it had
acquired an asset of the greatest value--a right of way up the strategic
Potomac Valley; and it had furnished an object lesson to men in other
States who were struggling with a similar problem. When, as will soon be
apparent, New York men undertook the improvement of the Mohawk waterway
there was no pattern of canal construction for them to follow in America
except the inadequate wooden locks erected along the Potomac. It is
interesting to know that Elkanah Watson, prominent in inland navigation
to the North, went down from New York in order to study these wooden
locks and that New Yorkers adopted them as models, though they changed
the material to brick and finally to stone.
Pennsylvania had been foremost among the colonies in canal building, for
it had surveyed as early as 1762 the first lock canal in America, from
near Reading on the Schuylkill to Middletown on the Susquehanna. Work,
however, had to be suspended when Pontiac's Rebellion threw the inland
country into a panic. But the enterprise of Maryland and Virginia in
1785 in developing the Potomac aroused the Pennsylvanians to renewed
activity. The Society for Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland
Navigation set forth a programme that was as broad as the Keystone State
itself. Their ultimate object was to capture the trade of the Great
Lakes. "If we turn our view," read the memorial which the Society
presented to the Legislature, "to the immense territories connected with
the Ohio and Mississippi waters, and bordering on the Great Lakes, it
will appear ... that our communication with those vast countries
(considering Fort Pitt as the port of entrance upon them) is as easy and
may be rendered as cheap, as to any other port on the Atlantic tide
waters."
Pennsylvania, lying between Virginia and New York, occupied a peculiar
position. Her Susquehanna Valley stretched northwest--not so directly
west as did the Potomac on the south and the Mohawk on the north. This
more northerly trend led these early Pennsylvania promoters to believe
that, while they might "only have a share in the trade of those [the
Ohio] waters," they could absolutely secure for themselves the trade of
the Great Lakes, "taking Presq'Isle [Erie, Pennsylvania] which is within
our own State, as the great mart or place of embarkation."
The plan which the Society proposed involved the improvement of water
and land routes by way of the Delaware to Lake Ontario and Lake Otsego,
and of eight routes by the Susquehanna drainage, north, northwest, and
west. A bill which passed the Legislature on April 13, 1791,
appropriated money for these improvements. Work was begun immediately on
the Schuylkill-Susquehanna Canal, but only four miles had been completed
by 1794, when the Lancaster Turnpike directed men's attention to
improved highways as an alternative more likely than canals to provide
the desired facilities for inland transportation. The work on the canal
was renewed, however, in 1821, when the rival Erie Canal was nearing
completion, and was finished in 1827. It became known as the Union Canal
and formed a link in the Pennsylvania canal system, the development of
which will be described in a later chapter.
In New York State, throughout the period of the Old French and the
Revolutionary wars, barges and keel boats had plied the Mohawk, Wood
Creek, and the Oswego to Lake Ontario. Around such obstructions as
Cohoes Falls, Little Falls, and the portage at Rome to Wood Creek,
wagons, sleds, and pack-horses had transferred the cargoes. To avoid
this labor and delay men soon conceived of conquering these obstacles by
locks and canals. As early as 1777 the brilliant Gouverneur Morris had a
vision of the economic development of his State when "the waters of the
great western inland seas would, by the aid of man, break through their
barriers and mingle with those of the Hudson."
Elkanah Watson was in many ways the Washington of New York. He had the
foresight, patience, and persistence of the Virginia planter. His
Journal of a tour up the Mohawk in 1788 and a pamphlet which he
published in 1791 may be said to be the ultimate sources in any history
of the internal commerce of New York. As a result, a company known as
"The President, Directors, and Company of the Western Inland Lock
Navigation in the State of New York," with a capital stock of $25,000,
was authorized by act of legislature in March, 1792, and the State
subscribed for $12,500 in stock. Many singular provisions were inserted
in this charter, but none more remarkable than one which stipulated that
all profits over fifteen per cent should revert to the State Treasury.
This hint concerning surplus profits, however, did not cause a stampede
when the books were opened for subscriptions in New York and Albany. In
later years, when the Erie Canal gave promise of a new era in American
inland commerce, Elkanah Watson recalled with a grim satisfaction the
efforts of these early days. The subscription books at the old Coffee
House in New York, he tells us, lay open three days without an entry,
and at Lewis's tavern in Albany, where the books were opened for a
similar period, "no mortal" had subscribed for more than two shares.
The system proposed for the improvement of the waterways of New York was
similar to that projected for the Potomac. A canal was to be cut from
the Mohawk to the Hudson in order to avoid Cohoes Falls; a canal with
locks would overcome the forty-foot drop at Little Falls; another canal
over five thousand feet in length was to connect the Mohawk and Wood
Creek at Rome; minor improvements were to be made between Schenectady
and the mouth of the Schoharie; and finally the Oswego Falls at
Rochester were to be circumvented also by canal. All the objections,
difficulties, and discouragements which had attended efforts to improve
waterways elsewhere in America confronted these New York promoters. They
began in 1793 at Little Falls but were soon forced to cease owing to the
failure of funds. Under the encouraging spur of a state subscription to
two hundred shares of stock, they renewed their efforts in 1794 but were
again forced to abandon the work before the year had passed. By
November, 1795, however, they had completed the canal and in thirty days
had received toll to the amount of about four hundred dollars.
The total actual work done is not clearly shown by the documents, but it
is evident that the measure of success achieved was not equaled
elsewhere on similar improvements on a large scale. From 1796 to 1804
the tolls received at Rome amounted to over fifteen thousand dollars,
and at Little Falls to over fifty-eight thousand dollars--a sum which
exceeded the original cost of construction. Dividends had crept up from
three per cent in 1798 to five and a half per cent in 1817, the year in
which work was begun on the Erie Canal.
No struggle for the mastery of an American river matches in certain
respects the effort of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company to bridle
the Lehigh and make it play its part in the commercial development of
Pennsylvania. The failures and trials of the promoters of this company
were no less remarkable than was the great success that eventually
crowned the effort. In 1793 the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was organized
and purchased some ten thousand acres in the Mauch Chunk anthracite
region, nine miles from the Lehigh River. It then appropriated a sum of
money to build a road from the mines to the river in the expectation
that the State would improve the navigation of the waterway, for which,
it has already been noted, an appropriation had been made in 1791, in
accordance with the programme of the Society for Promoting the
Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation. Nothing was done, however,
to improve the river, and the company, after various attempts at
shipping coal to Philadelphia, gave up the effort and allowed the
property, which was worth millions, to lie idle. In 1807 the Lehigh Coal
Mine Company, in another effort to get its wares before the public,
granted to Rowland and Butland, a private firm, free right to operate
one of its veins of coal; but this operation also resulted in failure.
In 1813 the company made a third attempt and granted to a private
concern a lease of the entire property on the condition that ten
thousand bushels of coal should be taken to market annually.
Difficulties immediately made themselves apparent. No contractor could
be found who would haul the output to the Lehigh River for less than
four dollars a ton, and the man who accepted those terms lost money. Of
five barges filled at Mauch Chunk three went to pieces on the way to
Philadelphia. Although the contents of the other two sold for twenty
dollars a ton, the proceeds failed to meet expenses, and the operating
company threw up the lease.
But it happened that White and Hazard, the wire manufacturers who
purchased this Lehigh coal, were greatly pleased with its quality.
Believing that coal could be obtained more cheaply from Mauch Chunk than
from the mines along the Schuylkill, White, Hauto, and Hazard formed a
company, entered into negotiation with the owners of the Lehigh mines,
and obtained the lease of their properties for a period of twenty years
at an annual rental of one ear of corn. The company agreed, moreover, to
ship every year at least forty thousand bushels of coal to Philadelphia
for its own consumption, to prove the value of the property.
White and his partners immediately applied to the Legislature for
permission to improve the navigation of the Lehigh, stating the purpose
of the improvement and citing the fact that their efforts would tend to
serve as a model for the improvement of other Pennsylvania streams. The
desired opportunity "to ruin themselves," as one member of the
Legislature put it, was granted by an act passed March 20, 1818. The
various powers applied for, and granted, embraced the whole range of
tried and untried methods for securing "a navigation downward once in
three days for boats loaded with one hundred barrels, or ten tons." The
State kept its weather eye open in this matter, however, for a small
minority felt that these men would not ruin themselves. Accordingly, the
act of grant reserved to the commonwealth the right to compel the
adoption of a complete system of slack-water navigation from Easton to
Stoddartsville if the service given by the company did not meet "the
wants of the country."
Capital was subscribed by a patriotic public on condition that a
committee of stockholders should go over the ground and pass judgment on
the probable success of the effort. The report was favorable, so far as
the improvement of the river was concerned; but the nine-mile road to
the mines was unanimously voted impracticable. "To give you an idea of
the country over which the road is to pass," wrote one of the
commissioners, "I need only tell you that I considered it quite an
easement when the wheel of my carriage struck a stump instead of a
stone." The public mind was divided. Some held that the attempt to
operate the coal mine was farcical, but that the improvement of the
Lehigh River was an undertaking of great value and of probable profit to
investors. Others were just as positive that the river improvement would
follow the fate of so many similar enterprises but that a fortune was in
store for those who invested in the Lehigh mines.
The direct result of the examiners' report and of the public debate it
provoked was the organization of the first interlocking companies in the
commercial history of America. The Lehigh Navigation Company was formed
with a capital stock of $150,000 and the Lehigh Coal Company with a
capital stock of $55,000. This incident forms one of the most striking
illustrations in American history of the dependence of a commercial
venture upon methods of inland transportation. The Lehigh Navigation
Company proceeded to build its dams and walls while the Lehigh Coal
Company constructed the first roadway in America built on the
principle--later adopted by the railways--of dividing the total distance
by the total descent in order to determine the grade. Not to be outdone
in point of ingenuity, the Lehigh Navigation Company, then suffering
from an unprecedented dearth of water, adopted White's invention of
sluice gates connecting with pools which could be filled with reserve
water to be drawn upon as navigation required. By 1819 the necessary
depth of water between Mauch Chunk and Easton was obtained. The two
companies were immediately amalgamated under the title of the Lehigh
Coal and Navigation Company and by 1823 had sent over two thousand tons
of coal to market.
As most of the efforts to improve the rivers, however, met with
indifferent success and many failures were recorded, the pendulum of
public confidence in this aid to inland commerce swung away, and highway
improvement by means of stone roads and toll road companies came into
favor in the interval between the nation's two eras of river improvement
and canal building.
CHAPTER IV
A Nation on Wheels
In early days the Indian had not only followed the watercourses in his
canoe but had made his way on foot over trails through the woods and
over the mountains. In colonial days, Englishman and Frenchman followed
the footsteps of the Indian, and as settlement increased and trade
developed, the forest path widened into the highway for wheeled
vehicles. Massachusetts began the work of road making in 1639 by passing
an act which decreed that "the ways" should be six to ten rods wide "in
common grounds," thus allowing sufficient room for more than one track.
Similar broad "ways" were authorized in New York and Pennsylvania in
1664; stumps and shrubs were to be cut close to the ground, and
"sufficient bridges" were to be built over streams and marshy places.
Virginia passed legislation for highways at an early date, but it was
not until 1662 that strict laws were enacted with a view to keeping the
roads in a permanently good condition. Under these laws surveyors were
appointed to establish in each county roads forty feet wide to the
church and to the courthouse. In 1700, Pennsylvania turned her local
roads over to the county justices, put the King's highway and the main
public roads under the care of the governor and his council, and ordered
each county to erect bridges over its streams.
The word "roadmaking" was capable of several interpretations. In
general, it meant outlining the course for the new thoroughfare,
clearing away fallen timber, blazing or notching the trees so that the
traveler might not miss the track, and building bridges or laying logs
"over all the marshy, swampy, and difficult dirty places."
The streams proved serious obstacles to early traffic. It has been shown
already that the earliest routes of animal or man sought the watersheds;
the trails therefore usually encountered one stream near its junction
with another. At first, of course, fording was the common method of
crossing water, and the most advantageous fording places were generally
found near the mouths of tributary streams, where bars and islands are
frequently formed and where the water is consequently shallow. When
ferries began to be used, they were usually situated just above or below
the fords; but when the bridge succeeded the ferry, the primitive bridge
builder went back to the old fording place in order to take advantage of
the shallower water, bars, and islands. With the advent of improved
engineering, the character of river banks and currents was more
frequently taken into consideration in choosing a site for a bridge than
was the case in the olden times, but despite this fact the bridges of
today, generally speaking, span the rivers where the deer or the buffalo
splashed his way across centuries ago.
On the broader streams, where fording was impossible and traffic was
perforce carried by ferry, the canoe and the keel boat of the earliest
days gave way in time to the ordinary "flat" or barge. At first the
obligation of the ferryman to the public, though recognized by English
law, was ignored in America by legislators and monopolists alike. Men
obtained the land on both sides of the rivers at the crossing places and
served the public only at their own convenience and at their own
charges. In many cases, to encourage the opening of roads or of ferries,
national and state authorities made grants of land on the same principle
followed in later days in the case of Western railroads. Such, for
instance, was the grant to Ebenezer Zane, at Zanesville, Lancaster, and
Chillicothe in the Northwest Territory. These monopolies sometimes were
extremely profitable: a descendant of the owners of the famous Ingles
ferry across New River, on the Wilderness Road to Kentucky, is
responsible for the statement that in the heyday of travel to the
Southwest the privilege was worth from $10,000 to $15,000 annually to
the family. But as local governments became more efficient, monopolies
were abolished and the collection of tolls was taken over by the
authorities. The awakening of inland trade is most clearly indicated
everywhere by the action of assemblies regarding the operation of
ferries, and in general, by the beginning of the eighteenth century,
tolls and ferries were being regulated by law.
But neither roads nor ferries were of themselves sufficient to put a
nation on wheels. The early polite society of the settled neighborhoods
traveled in horse litters, in sedan chairs, or on horseback, the women
seated on pillions or cushions behind the saddle riders, while oxcarts
and horse barrows brought to town the produce of the outlying farms.
Although carts and rude wagons could be built entirely of wood, there
could be no marked advance in transportation until the development of
mining in certain localities reduced the price of iron. With the
increase of travel and trade, the old world coach and chaise and wain
came into use, and iron for tire and brace became an imperative
necessity. The connection between the production of iron and the care of
highways was recognized by legislation as early as 1732, when Maryland
excused men and slaves in the ironworks from labor on the public roads,
though by the middle of the century owners of ironworks were obliged to
detail one man out of every ten in their employ for such work.
While the coastwise trade between the colonies was still preëminently
important as a means of transporting commodities, by the beginning of
the eighteenth century the land routes from New York to New England,
from New York across New Jersey to Philadelphia, and those radiating
from Philadelphia in every direction, were coming into general use. The
date of the opening of regular freight traffic between New York and
Philadelphia is set by the reply of the Governor of New Jersey in 1707
to a protest against monopolies granted on one of the old widened Indian
trails between Burlington and Amboy. "At present," he says, "everybody
is sure, once a fortnight, to have an opportunity of sending any
quantity of goods, great or small, at reasonable rates, without being in
danger of imposition; and the sending of this wagon is so far from being
a grievance or monopoly, that by this means and no other, a trade has
been carried on between Philadelphia, Burlington, Amboy, and New York,
which was never known before."
The long Philadelphia Road from the Lancaster region into the Valley of
Virginia, by way of Wadkins on the Potomac, was used by German and Irish
traders probably as early as 1700. In 1728 the people of Maryland were
petitioning for a road from the ford of the Monocacy to the home of
Nathan Wickham. Four years later Jost Heydt, leading an immigrant party
southward, broke open a road from the York Barrens toward the Potomac
two miles above Harper's Ferry. This avenue--by way of the Berkeley,
Staunton, Watauga, and Greenbrier regions to Tennessee and Kentucky--was
the longest and most important in America during the Revolutionary
period. The Virginia Assembly in 1779 appointed commissioners to view
this route and to report on the advisability of making it a wagon road
all the way to Kentucky. In 1795, efforts were made in Kentucky to turn
the Wilderness Trail into a wagon road, and in this same year the
Kentucky Legislature passed an act making the route from Crab Orchard to
Cumberland Gap a wagon road thirty feet in width.
From Pennsylvania and from Virginia commerce westward bound followed in
the main the army roads hewn out by Braddock and Forbes in their
campaigns against Fort Duquesne. In 1755, Braddock, marching from
Alexandria by way of Fort Cumberland, had opened a passage for his
artillery and wagons to Laurel Hill, near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His
force included a corps of seamen equipped with block and tackle to raise
and lower his wagons in the steep inclines of the Alleghanies. Three
years later, Forbes, in his careful, dogged campaign, followed a more
northerly route. Advancing from Philadelphia and Carlisle, he
established Fort Bedford and Fort Ligonier as bases of supply and broke
a new road through the interminable forest which clothed the rugged
mountain ranges. From the first there was bitter rivalry between these
two routes, and the young Colonel Washington was roundly criticized by
both Forbes and Bouquet, his second in command, for his partisan effort
to "drive me down," as Forbes phrased it, into the Virginia or
Braddock's Road. This rivalry between the two routes continued when the
destruction of the French power over the roads in the interior threw
open to Pennsylvania and her southern neighbors alike the lucrative
trade of the Ohio country.
From the journals of the time may be caught faint glimpses of the toils
and dangers of travel through these wild hill regions. Let the traveler
of today, as he follows the track that once was Braddock's Road, picture
the scene of that earlier time when, in the face of every natural
obstacle, the army toiled across the mountain chains. Where the earth in
yonder ravine is whipped to a black froth, the engineers have thrown
down the timber cut in widening the trail and have constructed a
corduroy bridge, or rather a loose raft on a sea of muck. The wreck of
the last wagon which tried to pass gives some additional safety to the
next. Already the stench from the horse killed in the accident deadens
the heavy, heated air of the forest. The sailors, stripped to the waist,
are ready with ropes and tackle to let the next wagon down the incline;
the pulleys creak, the ropes groan. The horses, weak and
terror-stricken, plunge and rear; in the final crash to the level the
leg of the wheel horse is caught and broken; one of the soldiers shoots
the animal; the traces are unbuckled; another beast is substituted.
Beyond, the seamen are waiting with tackle attached to trees on the
ridge above to assist the horses on the cruel upgrade--and Braddock, the
deceived, maligned, misrepresented, and misjudged, creeps onward in his
brave conquest of the Alleghanies in a campaign that, in spite of its
military failure, deserves honorable mention among the achievements of
British arms.
Everywhere, north and south, the early American road was a veritable
Slough of Despond. Watery pits were to be encountered wherein horses
were drowned and loads sank from sight. Frequently traffic was stopped
for hours by wagons which had broken down and blocked the way. Thirteen
wagons at one time were stalled on Logan's Hill on the York Road.
Frightful accidents occurred in attempting to draw out loads. Jonathan
Tyson, for instance, in 1792, near Philadelphia saw a horse's lower jaw
torn off by the slipping of a chain. Save in the winter, when in the
northern colonies snow filled the ruts and frost built solid bridges
over the streams, travel on these early roads was never safe, rapid, nor
comfortable. The comparative ease of winter travel for the carriage of
heavy freight and for purposes of trade and social intercourse gave the
colder regions an advantage over the southern that was an important
factor in the development of the country.
No genuine improvement of roads and highways seems to have been
attempted until the era heralded by Washington's letter to Harrison in
1784. But the problem slowly forced itself upon all sections of the
country, and especially upon Pennsylvania and Maryland, whose
inhabitants began to fear lest New York, Alexandria, or Richmond should
snatch the Western trade from Philadelphia or Baltimore. The truth that
underlies the proverb that "history repeats itself" is well illustrated
by the fact that the first macadamized road in America was built in
Pennsylvania, for here also originated the pack-horse trade and the
Conestoga horse and wagon; here the first inland American canal was
built, the first roadbed was graded on the principle of dividing the
whole distance by the whole descent, and the first railway was operated.
Macadam and Telford had only begun to show the people of England how to
build roads of crushed stone--an art first developed by the French
engineer Trésaguet--when Pennsylvanians built the Lancaster Turnpike.
The Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Road Company was chartered April
9, 1792, as a part of the general plan of the Society for the
Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation already described. This road,
sixty-two miles in length, was built of stone at a cost of $465,000 and
was completed in two years. Never before had such a sum been invested in
internal improvement in the United States. The rapidity with which the
undertaking was carried through and the profits which accrued from the
investment were alike astonishing. The subscription books were opened at
eleven o'clock one morning and by midnight 2226 shares had been
subscribed, each purchaser paying down thirty dollars. At the same time
Elkanah Watson was despondently scanning the subscription books of his
Mohawk River enterprise at Albany where "no mortal" had risked more than
two shares.
The success of the Lancaster Turnpike was not achieved without a protest
against the monopoly which the new venture created. It is true that in
all the colonies the exercise of the right of eminent domain had been
conceded in a veiled way to officials to whose care the laying out of
roads had been delegated. As early as 1639 the General Court of
Massachusetts had ordered each town to choose men who, coöperating with
men from the adjoining town, should "lay out highways where they may be
most convenient, notwithstanding any man's property, or any corne
ground, so as it occasion not the pulling down of any man's house, or
laying open any garden or orchard." But the open and extended exercise
of these rights led to vigorous opposition in the case of this
Pennsylvania road. A public meeting was held at the Prince of Wales
Tavern in Philadelphia in 1793 to protest in round terms against the
monopolistic character of the Lancaster Turnpike. Blackstone and Edward
III were hurled at the heads of the "venal" legislators who had made
this "monstrosity" possible. The opposition died down, however, in the
face of the success which the new road instantly achieved. The Turnpike
was, indeed, admirably situated. Converging at the quaint old "borough
of Lancaster," the various routes--northeast from Virginia, east from
the Carlisle and Chambersburg region and the Alleghanies, and southeast
from the upper Susquehanna country--poured upon the Quaker City a trade
that profited every merchant, landholder, and laborer. The nine
tollgates, on the average a little less than seven miles apart, turned
in a revenue that allowed the "President and Managers" to declare
dividends to stockholders running, it is said, as high as fifteen per
cent.
The Lancaster Turnpike is interesting from three points of view: it
began a new period of American transportation; it ushered in an era of
speculation unheard of in the previous history of the country; and it
introduced American lawmakers to the great problem of controlling public
corporations.
Along this thirty-seven-foot road, of which twenty-four feet were laid
with stone, the new era of American inland travel progressed. The array
of two-wheeled private equipages and other family carriages, the
stagecoaches of bright color, and the carts, Dutch wagons, and
Conestogas, gave token of what was soon to be witnessed on the great
roads of a dozen States in the next generation. Here, probably, the
first distinction began to be drawn between the taverns for passengers
and those patronized by the drivers of freight. The colonial taverns,
comparatively few and far between, had up to this time served the
traveling public, high and low, rich and poor, alike. But in this new
era members of Congress and the élite of Philadelphia and neighboring
towns were not to be jostled at the table by burly hostlers, drivers,
wagoners, and hucksters. Two types of inns thus came quickly into
existence: the tavern entertained the stagecoach traffic, while the
democratic roadhouse served the established lines of Conestogas,
freighters, and all other vehicles which poured from every town,
village, and hamlet upon the great thoroughfare leading to the
metropolis on the Delaware.
Among American inventions the Conestoga wagon must forever be remembered
with respect. Originating in the Lancaster region of Pennsylvania and
taking its name either from the horses of the Conestoga Valley or from
the valley itself, this vehicle was unlike the old English wain or the
Dutch wagon because of the curve of its bed. This peculiarly shaped
bottom, higher by twelve inches or more at each end than in the middle,
made the vehicle a safer conveyance across the mountains and over all
rough country than the old straight-bed wagon. The Conestoga was covered
with canvas, as were other freight vehicles, but the lines of the bed
were also carried out in the framework above and gave the whole the
effect of a great ship swaying up and down the billowy hills. The wheels
of the Conestoga were heavily built and wore tires four and six inches
in width. The harness of the six horses attached to the wagon was
proportionately heavy, the back bands being fifteen inches wide, the hip
straps ten, and the traces consisting of ponderous iron chains. The
color of the original Conestoga wagons never varied: the underbody was
always blue and the upper parts were red. The wagoners and drivers who
manned this fleet on wheels were men of a type that finds no parallel
except in the boatmen on the western rivers who were almost their
contemporaries. Fit for the severest toil, weathered to the color of the
red man, at home under any roof that harbored a demijohn and a fiddle,
these hardy nomads of early commerce were the custodians of the largest
amount of traffic in their day.
The turnpike era overlaps the period of the building of national roads
and canals and the beginning of the railway age, but it is of greatest
interest during the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth century,
up to the time when the completion of the Erie Canal set new standards.
During this period roads were also constructed westward from Baltimore
and Albany to connect, as the Lancaster Turnpike did at its terminus,
with the thoroughfares from the trans-Alleghany country. The metropolis
of Maryland was quickly in the field to challenge the bid which the
Quaker City made for western trade. The Baltimore-Reisterstown and
Baltimore-Frederick turnpikes were built at a cost of $10,000 and $8000
a mile respectively; and the latter, connecting with roads to
Cumberland, linked itself with the great national road to Ohio which the
Government built between 1811 and 1817. These famous stone roads of
Maryland long kept Baltimore in the lead as the principal outlet for the
western trade. New York, too, proved her right to the title of Empire
State by a marvelous activity in improving her magnificent strategic
position. In the first seven years of the nineteenth century
eighty-eight incorporated road companies were formed with a total
capital of over $8,000,000. Twenty large bridges and more than three
thousand miles of turnpike were constructed. The movement, indeed,
extended from New England to Virginia and the Carolinas, and turnpike
companies built all kinds of roads--earth, corduroy, plank, and stone.
In many cases the kind of road to be constructed, the tolls to be
charged, and the amount of profit to be permitted, were laid down in the
charters. Thus new problems confronted the various legislatures, and
interesting principles of regulation were now established. In most cases
companies were allowed, on producing their books of receipts and
expenditures, to increase their tolls until they obtained a profit of
six per cent on the investment, though in a number of cases nine per
cent was permitted. When revenues increased beyond the six per cent
mark, however, the tendency was to reduce tolls or to use the extra
profit to purchase the stock for the State, with the expectation of
ultimately abolishing tollgates entirely. The theories of state
regulation of corporations and the obligations of public carriers,
extending even to the compensation of workmen in case of accident, were
developed to a considerable degree in this turnpike era; but, on the
other hand, the principle of permitting fair profit to corporations upon
public examination of their accounts was also recognized.
The stone roads, which were passable at all seasons, brought a new era
in correspondence and business. Lines of stages and wagons, as well
known at that time as are the great railways of today, plied the new
thoroughfares, provided some of the comforts of travel, and assured the
safer and more rapid delivery of goods. This period is sometimes known
in American history as "The Era of Good Feeling" and the turnpike
contributed in no small degree to make the phrase applicable not only to
the domain of politics but to all the relations of social and commercial
life.
While road building in the East gives a clear picture of the rise and
growth of commerce and trade in that section, it is to the rivers of the
trans-Alleghany country that we must look for a corresponding picture in
this early period. The canoe and pirogue could handle the packs and kegs
brought westward by the files of Indian ponies; but the heavy loads of
the Conestoga wagons demanded stancher craft. The flatboat and barge
therefore served the West and its commerce as the Conestoga and turnpike
served the East.
CHAPTER V
The Flatboat Age
In the early twenties of the last century one of the popular songs of
the day was The Hunters of Kentucky. Written by Samuel Woodworth, the
author of The Old Oaken Bucket, it had originally been printed in the
New York Mirror but had come into the hands of an actor named Ludlow,
who was playing in the old French theater in New Orleans. The poem
chants the praises of the Kentucky riflemen who fought with Jackson at
New Orleans and indubitably proved
That every man was half a horse
And half an alligator.
Ludlow knew his audience and he saw his chance. Setting the words to
Risk's tune, Love Laughs at Locksmiths, donning the costume of a Western
riverman, and arming himself with a long "squirrel" rifle, he presented
himself before the house. The rivermen who filled the pit received him,
it is related, with "a prolonged whoop, or howl, such as Indians give
when they are especially pleased." And to these sturdy men the words of
his song made a strong appeal:
We are a hardy, freeborn race,
Each man to fear a stranger;
Whate'er the game, we join in chase,
Despising toil and danger;
And if a daring foe annoys,
No matter what his force is,
We'll show him that Kentucky boys
Are Alligator-horses.
The title "alligator-horse," of which Western rivermen were very proud,
carried with it a suggestion of amphibious strength that made it both
apt and figuratively accurate. On all the American rivers, east and
west, a lusty crew, collected from the waning Indian trade and the
disbanded pioneer armies, found work to its taste in poling the long
keel boats, "cordelling" the bulky barges--that is, towing them by
pulling on a line attached to the shore--or steering the "broadhorns" or
flatboats that transported the first heavy inland river cargoes. Like
longshoremen of all ages, the American riverman was as rough as the work
which calloused his hands and transformed his muscles into bands of
tempered steel. Like all men given to hard but intermittent labor, he
employed his intervals of leisure in coarse and brutal recreation. Their
roistering exploits, indeed, have made these rivermen almost better
known at play than at work. One of them, the notorious Mike Fink, known
as "the Snag" on the Mississippi and as the "Snapping Turtle" on the
Ohio, has left the record, not that he could load a keel boat in a
certain length of time, or lift a barrel of whiskey with one arm, or
that no tumultuous current had ever compelled him to back water, but
that he could "out-run, out-hop, out-jump, throw down, drag out, and
lick any man in the country," and that he was "a Salt River roarer."
Such men and the craft they handled were known on the Atlantic rivers,
but it was on the Mississippi and its branches, especially the Ohio,
that they played their most important part in the history of American
inland commerce. Before the beginning of the nineteenth century wagons
and Conestogas were bringing great loads of merchandise to such points
on the headwaters as Brownsville, Pittsburgh, and Wheeling. As early as
1782, we are told, Jacob Yoder, a Pennsylvania German, set sail from the
Monongahela country with the first flatboat to descend the Ohio and
Mississippi. As the years passed, the number of such craft grew
constantly larger. The custom of fixing the widespreading horns of
cattle on the prow gave these boats the alternative name of
"broadhorns," but no accurate classification can be made of the various
kinds of craft engaged in this vast traffic. Everything that would
float, from rough rafts to finished barges, was commandeered into
service, and what was found unsuitable for the strenuous purposes of
commercial transportation was palmed off whenever possible on
unsuspecting emigrants en route to the lands of promise beyond.
Flour, salt, iron, cider and peach brandy were staple products of the
Ohio country which the South desired. In return they shipped molasses,
sugar, coffee, lead, and hides upon the few keel boats which crept
upstream or the blundering barges which were propelled northward by
means of oar, sail, and cordelle. It was not, however, until the
nineteenth century that the young West was producing any considerable
quantity of manufactured goods. Though the town of Pittsburgh had been
laid out in 1764, by the end of the Revolution it was still little more
than a collection of huts about a fort. A notable amount of local trade
was carried on, but the expense of transportation was very high even
after wagons began crossing the Alleghanies. For example, the cost from
Philadelphia and Baltimore was given by Arthur Lee, a member of
Congress, in 1784 as forty-five shillings a hundredweight, and a few
months later it is quoted at sixpence a pound when Johann D. Schoph
crossed the mountains in a chaise--a feat "which till now had been
considered quite impossible." Opinions differed widely as to the future
of the little town of five hundred inhabitants. The important product of
the region at first was Monongahela flour which long held a high place
in the New Orleans market. Coal was being mined as early as 1796 and was
worth locally threepence halfpenny a bushel, though within seven years
it was being sold at Philadelphia at thirty-seven and a half cents a
bushel. The fur trade with the Illinois country grew less important as
the century came to its close, but Maynard and Morrison, cooperating
with Guy Bryan at Philadelphia, sent a barge laden with merchandise to
Illinois annually between 1790 and 1796, which returned each season with
a cargo of skins and furs. Pittsburgh was thus a distributing center of
some importance; but the fact that no drayman or warehouse was to be
found in the town at this time is a significant commentary on the
undeveloped state of its commerce and manufacture.
After Wayne's victory at the battle of the Fallen Timber in 1794 and the
signing of the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which ended the earlier
Indian wars of the Old Northwest and opened for settlement the country
beyond the Ohio, a great migration followed into Ohio, Indiana, and
Kentucky, and the commercial activity of Pittsburgh rapidly increased.
By 1800 a score of profitable industries had arisen, and by 1803 the
first bar-iron foundry was, to quote the advertisement of its owner,
"sufficiently upheld by the hand of the Almighty" to supply in part the
demand for iron and castings. Glass factories were established, and
ropewalks, sail lofts, boatyards, anchor smithies, and brickyards, were
soon ready to supply the rapidly increasing demands of the infant cities
and the countryside on the lower Ohio. When the new century arrived the
Pittsburgh district had a population of upwards of two thousand.
One by one the other important centers of trade in the great valley
beyond began to show evidences of life. Marietta, Ohio, founded in 1788
by Revolutionary officers from New England, became the metropolis of the
rich Muskingum River district, which was presently sending many
flatboats southward. Cincinnati was founded in the same year as
Marietta, with the building of Fort Washington and the formal
organization of Hamilton County. The soil of the Miami country was as
"mellow as an ash heap" and in the first four months of 1802 over four
thousand barrels of flour were shipped southward to challenge the
prestige of the Monongahela product. Potters, brickmakers, gunsmiths,
cotton and wool weavers, coopers, turners, wheelwrights, dyers,
printers, and ropemakers were at work here within the next decade. A
brewery turned out five thousand barrels of beer and porter in 1811, and
by the next year the pork-packing business was thoroughly established.
Louisville, the "Little Falls" of the West, was the entrepôt of the Blue
Grass region. It had been a place of some importance since Revolutionary
days, for in seasons of low water the rapids in the Ohio at this point
gave employment to scores of laborers who assisted the flatboatmen in
hauling their cargoes around the obstruction which prevented the passage
of the heavily loaded barges. The town, which was incorporated in 1780,
soon showed signs of commercial activity. It was the proud possessor of
a drygoods house in 1783. The growth of its tobacco industry was rapid
from the first. The warehouses were under government supervision and
inspection as early as 1795, and innumerable flatboats were already
bearing cargoes of bright leaf southward in the last decade of the
century. The first brick house in Louisville was erected in 1789 with
materials brought from Pittsburgh. Yankees soon established the "Hope
Distillery"; and the manufacture of whiskey, which had long been a
staple industry conducted by individuals, became an incorporated
business of great promise in spite of objections raised against the
"creation of gigantic reservoirs of this damning drink."
Thus, about the year 1800, the great industries of the young West were
all established in the regions dominated by the growing cities of
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville. But, since the combined
population of these centers could not have been over three thousand in
the year 1800, it is evident that the adjacent rural population and the
people living in every neighboring creek and river valley were chiefly
responsible for the large trade that already existed between this corner
of the Mississippi basin and the South.
In this trade the riverman was the fundamental factor. Only by means of
his brawn and his genius for navigation could these innumerable tons of
flour, tobacco, and bacon have been kept from rotting on the shores. Yet
the man himself remains a legend grotesque and mysterious, one of the
shadowy figures of a time when history was being made too rapidly to be
written. If we ask how he loaded his flatboat or barge, we are told that
"one squint of his eye would blister a bull's heel." When we inquire how
he found the channel amid the shifting bars and floating islands of that
tortuous two-thousand-mile journey to New Orleans, we are informed that
he was "the very infant that turned from his mother's breast and called
out for a bottle of old rye." When we ask how he overcame the natural
difficulties of trade--lack of commission houses, varying standards of
money, want of systems of credit and low prices due to the glutting of
the market when hundreds of flatboats arrived in the South
simultaneously on the same freshet--we are informed that "Billy
Earthquake is the geniwine, double-acting engine, and can out-run,
out-swim, chaw more tobacco and spit less, drink more whiskey and keep
soberer than any other man in these localities."
The reason for this lack of information is that our descriptions of
flatboating and keel boating are written by travelers who, as is always
the case, are interested in what is unusual, not in what is typical and
commonplace. It is therefore only dimly, as through a mist, that we can
see the two lines of polemen pass from the prow to the stern on the
narrow running-board of a keel boat, lifting and setting their poles to
the cry of steersman or captain. The struggle in a swift "riffle" or
rapid is momentous. If the craft swerves, all is lost. Shoulders bend
with savage strength; poles quiver under the tension; the captain's
voice is raucous, and every other word is an oath; a pole breaks, and
the next man, though half-dazed in the mortal crisis, does for a few
moments the work of two. At last they reach the head of the rapid, and
the boat floats out on the placid pool above, while the
"alligator-horse" who had the mishap remarks to the scenery at large
that he'd be "fly-blowed before sun-down to a certingty" if that were
not the very pole with which he "pushed the broadhorn up Salt River
where the snags were so thick that a fish couldn't swim without rubbing
his scales off."
Audubon, the naturalist-merchant of the Mississippi, has left us a clear
picture of the process by which these heavy tubs, loaded with forty or
fifty tons of freight, were forced upstream against a swift current:
Wherever a point projected so as to render the course or bend below it
of some magnitude, there was an eddy, the returning current of which was
sometimes as strong as that of the middle of the great stream. The
bargemen, therefore, rowed up pretty close under the bank and had merely
to keep watch in the bow lest the boat should run against a planter or
sawyer. But the boat has reached the point, and there the current is to
all appearance of double strength and right against it. The men, who
have rested a few minutes, are ordered to take their stations and lay
hold of their oars, for the river must be crossed, it being seldom
possible to double such a point and proceed along the same shore. The
boat is crossing, its head slanting to the current, which is, however,
too strong for the rowers, and when the other side of the river has been
reached, it has drifted perhaps a quarter of a mile. The men are by this
time exhausted and, as we shall suppose it to be 12 o'clock, fasten the
boat to a tree on the shore. A small glass of whiskey is given to each,
when they cook and eat their dinner and, after resting from their
fatigue for an hour, recommence their labors. The boat is again seen
slowly advancing against the stream. It has reached the lower end of a
sandbar, along the edge of which it is propelled by means of long poles,
if the bottom be hard. Two men, called bowsmen, remain at the prow to
assist, in concert with the steersman, in managing the boat and keeping
its head right against the current. The rest place themselves on the
land side of the footway of the vessel, put one end of their poles on
the ground and the other against their shoulders and push with all their
might. As each of the men reaches the stern, he crosses to the other
side, runs along it and comes again to the landward side of the bow,
when he recommences operations. The barge in the meantime is ascending
at a rate not exceeding one mile in the hour.
Trustworthy statistics as to the amount and character of the Western
river trade have never been gathered. They are to be found, if anywhere,
in the reports of the collectors of customs located at the various
Western ports of entry and departure. Nothing indicates more definitely
the hour when the West awoke to its first era of big business than the
demand for the creation of "districts" and their respective ports, for
by no other means could merchandise and produce be shipped legally to
Spanish territory beyond or down the Mississippi or to English territory
on the northern shores of the Great Lakes.
Louisville is as old a port of the United States as New York or
Philadelphia, having been so created when our government was established
in 1789, but oddly enough the first returns to the National Treasury
(1798) are credited to the port of Palmyra, Tennessee, far inland on the
Cumberland River. In 1799 the following Western towns were made ports of
entry: Erie, Sandusky, Detroit, Mackinaw Island, and Columbia
(Cincinnati). The first port on the Ohio to make returns was Fort
Massac, Illinois, and it is from the collector at this point that we get
our first hint as to the character and volume of Western river traffic.
In the spring months of March, April, and May, 1800, cargoes to the
value of £28,581, Pennsylvania currency, went down the Ohio. This
included 22,714 barrels of flour, 1017 barrels of whiskey, 12,500 pounds
of pork, 18,710 pounds of bacon, 75,814 pounds of cordage, 3650 yards of
country linen, 700 bottles, and 700 barrels of potatoes. In the three
autumn months of 1800, for instance, twenty-one boats ascended the Ohio
by Fort Massac, with cargoes amounting to 36 hundredweight of lead and a
few hides. Descending the river at the same time, flatboats and barges
carried 245 hundredweight of drygoods valued at $32,550. When we compare
these spring and fall records of commerce downstream we reach the
natural conclusion that the bulk of the drygoods which went down in the
fall of the year had been brought over the mountains during the summer.
The fact that the Alleghany pack-horses and Conestogas were transporting
freight to supply the Spanish towns on the Mississippi River in the
first year of the nineteenth century seems proved beyond a doubt by
these reports from Fort Massac.
The most interesting phase of this era is the connection between western
trade and the politics of the Mississippi Valley which led up to the
Louisiana Purchase. By the Treaty of San Lorenzo in 1795 Spain made New
Orleans an open port, and in the next seven years the young West made
the most of its opportunity. But before the new century was two years
old the difficulties encountered were found to be serious. The lack of
commission merchants, of methods of credit, of information as to the
state of the market, all combined to handicap trade and to cause loss.
Pittsburgh shippers figured their loss already at $60,000 a year. In
consequence men began to look elsewhere, and an advocate of big business
wrote in 1802: "The country has received a shock; let us immediately
extend our views and direct our efforts to every foreign market."
One of the most remarkable plans for the capture of foreign trade to be
found in the annals of American commerce originated almost
simultaneously in the Muskingum and Monongahela regions. With a view to
making the American West independent of the Spanish middlemen, it was
proposed to build ocean-going vessels on the Ohio that should carry the
produce of the interior down the Mississippi and thence abroad through
the open port of New Orleans. The idea was typically Western in its
arrogant originality and confident self-assertion. Two vessels were
built: the brig St. Clair, of 110 tons, at Marietta, and the Monongahela
Farmer, of 250 tons, at Elizabeth on the Monongahela. The former reached
Cincinnati April 27, 1801; the latter, loaded with 750 barrels of flour,
passed Pittsburgh on the 13th of May. Eventually, the St. Clair reached
Havana and thus proved that Muskingum Valley black walnut, Ohio hemp,
and Marietta carpenters, anchor smiths, and skippers could defy the grip
of the Spaniard on the Mississippi. Other vessels followed these
adventurers, and shipbuilding immediately became an important industry
at Pittsburgh, Marietta, Cincinnati, and other points. The Duane of
Pittsburgh was said by the Liverpool Saturday Advertiser of July 9,
1803, to have been the "first vessel which ever came to Europe from the
western waters of the United States." Probably the Louisiana of Marietta
went as far afield as any of the one hundred odd ships built in these
years on the Ohio. The official papers of her voyage in 1805, dated at
New Orleans, Norfolk (Virginia), Liverpool, Messina, and Trieste at the
head of the Adriatic, are preserved today in the Marietta College
Library.
The growth of the shipbuilding industry necessitated a readjustment of
the districts for the collection of customs. Columbia (Cincinnati) at
first served the region of the upper Ohio; but in 1803 the district was
divided and Marietta was made the port for the Pittsburgh-Portsmouth
section of the river. In 1807 all the western districts were
amalgamated, and Pittsburgh, Charleston (Wellsburg), Marietta,
Cincinnati, Louisville, and Fort Massac were made ports of entry.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 gave a marked impulse to inland
shipbuilding; but the embargo of 1807, which prohibited foreign trade,
following so soon, killed the shipyards, which, for a few years, had
been so busy. The great new industry of the Ohio Valley was ruined.
By this time the successful voyage of Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont,
between New York and Albany, had demonstrated the possibilities of steam
navigation. Not a few men saw in the novel craft the beginning of a new
era in Western river traffic; but many doubted whether it was possible
to construct a vessel powerful enough to make its way upstream against
such sweeping currents as those of the Mississippi and the Ohio. Surely
no one for a moment dreamed that in hardly more than a generation the
Western rivers would carry a tonnage larger than that of the cities of
the Atlantic seaboard combined and larger than that of Great Britain!
As early as 1805, two years before the trip of the Clermont, Captain
Keever built a "steamboat" on the Ohio, and sent her down to New Orleans
where her engine was to be installed. But it was not until 1811 that the
Orleans, the first steamboat to ply the Western streams, was built at
Pittsburgh, from which point she sailed for New Orleans in October of
that year. The Comet and Vesuvius quickly followed, but all three
entered the New Orleans-Natchez trade on the lower river and were never
seen again at the headwaters. As yet the swift currents and flood tides
of the great river had not been mastered. It is true that in 1815 the
Enterprise had made two trips between New Orleans and Louisville, but
this was in time of high water, when counter currents and backwaters had
assisted her feeble engine. In 1816, however, Henry Shreve conceived the
idea of raising the engine out of the hold and constructing an
additional deck. The Washington, the first doubledecker, was the result.
The next year this steamboat made the round trip from Louisville to New
Orleans and back in forty-one days. The doubters were now convinced.
For a little while the quaint and original riverman held on in the new
age, only to disappear entirely when the colored roustabout became the
deckhand of post-bellum days. The riverman as a type was unknown except
on the larger rivers in the earlier years of water traffic. What an
experience it would be today to rouse one of those remarkable
individuals from his dreaming, as Davy Crockett did, with an oar, and
hear him howl "Halloe stranger, who axed you to crack my lice?"--to tell
him in his own lingo to "shut his mouth or he would get his teeth
sunburnt"--to see him crook his neck and neigh like a stallion--to
answer his challenge in kind with a flapping of arms and a cock's
crow--to go to shore and have a scrimmage such as was never known on a
gridiron--and then to resolve with Crockett, during a period of
recuperation, that you would never "wake up a ring-tailed roarer with an
oar again."
The riverman, his art, his language, his traffic, seem to belong to days
as distant as those of which Homer sang.
CHAPTER VI
The Passing Show Of 1800
Foreign travelers who have come to the United States have always proved
of great interest to Americans. From Brissot to Arnold Bennett, while in
the country they have been fed and clothed and transported wheresoever
they would go--at the highest prevailing prices. And after they have
left, the records of their sojourn that these travelers have published
have made interesting reading for Americans all over the land. Some of
these trans-Atlantic visitors have been jaundiced, disgruntled, and
contemptuous; others have shown themselves of an open nature, discreet,
conscientious, and fair-minded.
One of the most amiable and clear-headed of such foreign guests was
Francis Baily, later in life president of the Royal Astronomical Society
of Great Britain, but at the time of his American tour a young man of
twenty-two. His journey in 1796-97 gave him a wide experience of stage,
flatboat, and pack-horse travel, and his genial disposition, his
observant eye, and his discriminating criticism, together with his
comments on the commercial features of the towns and regions he visited,
make his record particularly interesting and valuable to the historian.
¹ Using Baily's journal as a guide, therefore, one can today journey
with him across the country and note the passing show as he saw it in
this transitional period.
¹ Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797
by the late Francis Baily (London, 1856).
Landing at Norfolk, Virginia, Baily was immediately introduced to an
American tavern. Like most travelers, he was surprised to find that
American taverns were "boarding-places," frequented by crowds of "young,
able-bodied men who seemed to be as perfectly at leisure as the loungers
of ancient Europe." In those days of few newspapers, the tavern
everywhere in America was the center of information; in fact, it was a
common practice for travelers in the interior, after signing their names
in the register, to add on the same page any news of local interest
which they brought with them. The tavern habitués, Baily remarks, did
not sit and drink after meals but "wasted" their time at billiards and
cards. The passion for billiards was notorious, and taverns in the most
out-of-the-way places, though they lacked the most ordinary
conveniences, were nevertheless provided with billiard tables. This
custom seems to have been especially true in the South; and it is
significant that the first taxes in Tennessee levied before the
beginning of the nineteenth century were the poll tax and taxes on
billiard tables and studhorses!
From Norfolk Baily passed northward to Baltimore, paying a fare of ten
dollars, and from there he went on to Philadelphia, paying six dollars
more. On the way his stagecoach stuck fast in a bog and the passengers
were compelled to leave it until the next morning. This sixty-mile road
out of Baltimore was evidently one of the worst in the East. Ten years
prior to this date, Brissot, a keen French journalist, mentions the
great ruts in its heavy clay soil, the overturned trees which blocked
the way, and the unexampled skilfulness of the stage drivers. All
travelers in America, though differing on almost every other subject,
invariably praise the ability of these sturdy, weather-beaten American
drivers, their kindness to their horses, and their attention to their
passengers. Harriet Martineau stated that, in her experience, American
drivers as a class were marked by the merciful temper which accompanies
genius, and their perfection in their art, their fertility of resource,
and the gentleness with which they treated female fears and fretfulness,
were exemplary.
In the City of Brotherly Love Baily notes the geniality of the people,
who by many travelers are called aristocratic, and comments on Quaker
opposition to the theater and the inconsequence of the Peale Museum,
which travelers a generation later highly praise. Proceeding to New York
at a cost of six dollars, he is struck by the uncouthness of the public
buildings, churches excepted, the widespread passion for music, dancing,
and the theater, the craze for sleighing, and the promise which the
harbor gave of becoming the finest in America. Not a few travelers in
this early period gave expression to their belief in the future
greatness of New York City. These prophecies, taken in connection with
the investment of eight millions of dollars which New Yorkers made in
toll-roads in the first seven years of this new century, incline one to
believe that the influence of the Erie Canal as a factor in the
development of the city may have been unduly emphasized, great though it
was.
From New York Baily returned to Baltimore and went on to Washington. The
records of all travelers to the site of the new national capital give
much the same picture of the countryside. It was a land worn out by
tobacco culture and variously described as "dried up," "run down," and
"hung out to dry." Even George Washington, at Mount Vernon, was giving
up tobacco culture and was attempting new crops by a system of rotation.
Cotton was being grown in Maryland, but little care was given to its
culture and manufacture. Tobacco was graded in Virginia in accordance
with the rigidity of its inspection at Hanover Court House, Pittsburgh,
Richmond, and Cabin-Point: leaf worth sixteen shillings at Richmond was
worth twenty-one at Hanover Court House; if it was refused at all
places, it was smuggled to the West Indies or consumed in the country.
Meadows were rapidly taking the place of tobacco-fields, for the
planters preferred to clear new land rather than to enrich the old.
At Washington Baily found that lots to the value of $278,000 had been
sold, although only one-half of the proposed city had been "cleared." It
was to be forty years ere travelers could speak respectfully of what is
now the beautiful city of Washington. In these earlier days, the streets
were mudholes divided by vacant fields and "beautified by trees, swamps,
and cows."
Departing for the West by way of Frederick, Baily, like all travelers,
was intensely interested upon entering the rich limestone region which
stretched from Pennsylvania far down into Virginia. It was occupied in
part by the Pennsylvania Dutch and was so famous for its rich milk that
it was called by many travelers the "Bonnyclabber Country." Most
Englishmen were delighted with this region because they found here the
good old English breed of horses, that is, the English hunter developed
into a stout coach-horse. Of native breeds, Baily found animals of all
degrees of strength and size down to hackneys of fourteen hands, as well
as the "vile dog-horses," or pack-horses, whose faithful service to the
frontier could in no wise be appreciated by a foreigner.
This region of Pennsylvania was as noted for its wagons as for its
horses. It was this wheat-bearing belt that made the common
freight-wagon in its colors of red and blue a national institution. It
was in this region of rich, well-watered land that the maple tree gained
its reputation. Men even prophesied that its delightful sap would prove
a cure for slavery, for, if one family could make fifteen hundred pounds
of maple sugar in a season, eighty thousand families could, at the same
rate, equal the output of cane sugar each year from Santo Domingo!
The traveler at the beginning of the century noticed a change in the
temper of the people as well as a change in the soil when the
Bonnyclabber Country was reached. The time-serving attitude of the good
people of the East now gave place to a "consciousness of independence"
due, Baily remarks, to the fact that each man was self-sufficient and
passed his life "without regard to the smiles and frowns of men in
power." This spirit was handsomely illustrated in the case of one burly
Westerner who was "churched" for fighting. Showing a surly attitude to
the deacon-judges who sat on his case, he was threatened with civil
prosecution and imprisonment. "I don't want freedom," he is said to have
replied, bitterly; "I don't even want to live if I can't knock down a
man who calls me a liar."
Pushing on westward by way of historic Sideling Hill and Bedford to
Statlers, Baily found here a prosperous millstone quarry, which sold its
stones at from fifteen to thirty dollars a pair. Twelve years earlier
Washington had prophesied that the Alleghanies would soon be furnishing
millstones equal to the best English burr. As he crossed the mountains
Baily found that taverns charged the following schedule: breakfast,
eighteen pence; dinner and supper from two shillings to two shillings
and sixpence each. Traversing Laurel Hill, he reached Pittsburgh just at
the time when it was awakening to activity as the trading center of the
West.
In order to descend the Ohio, Baily obtained a flatboat, thirty-six feet
long and twelve feet broad, which drew eighteen inches of water and was
of ten tons burden. On the way downstream, Charleston and Wheeling were
the principal settlements which Baily first noted. Ebenezer Zane, the
founder of Wheeling, had just opened across Ohio the famous landward
route from the Monongahela country to Kentucky, which it entered at
Limestone, the present Maysville. This famous road, passing through
Zanesville, Lancaster, and Chillicothe, though at that time safe only
for men in parties, was a common route to and from Kentucky.
On such inland pathways as this, early travelers came to take for
granted a hospitality not to be found on more frequented thoroughfares.
In this hospitality, roughness and good will, cleanliness and filth,
attempts to ape the style of Eastern towns and habits of the most
primitive kind, were singularly blended. In one instance, the traveler
might be cordially assigned by the landlord to a good position in "the
first rush for a chance at the head of the table"; at the next stopping
place he might be coldly turned away because the proprietor "had the
gout" and his wife the "delicate blue-devils"; farther on, where "soap
was unknown, nothing clean but birds, nothing industrious but pigs, and
nothing happy but squirrels," Daniel Boone's daughter might be seen in
high-heeled shoes, attended by white servants whose wages were a dollar
a week, skirting muddy roads under a ten-dollar bonnet and a six-dollar
parasol. Or, he might emerge from a lonely forest in Ohio or Indiana and
come suddenly upon a party of neighbors at a dreary tavern, enjoying a
corn shucking or a harvest home. Immediately dubbed "Doctor," "Squire,"
or "Colonel" by the hospitable merrymakers, the passer-by would be
informed that he "should drink and lack no good thing." After he had
retired, as likely as not his quarters would be invaded at one or two
o'clock in the morning by the uproarious company, and the best
refreshment of the house would be forced upon him with a hilarity
"created by omnipotent whiskey." Sometimes, however, the traveler would
encounter pitiful instances of loneliness in the wide-spreading forests.
One man in passing a certain isolated cabin was implored by the woman
who inhabited it to rest awhile and talk, since she was, she confessed,
completely overwhelmed by "the lone!"
Every traveler has remarked upon the yellow pallor of the first
inhabitants of the western forests and doubtless correctly attributed
this sickly appearance to the effects of malaria and miasma. The psychic
influences of the forest wilderness also weighed heavily upon the
spirits of the settlers, although, as Baily notes, it was the newcomers
who felt the depression to an exaggerated degree. As he says:
It is a feeling of confinement, which begins to damp the spirits, from
this complete exclusion of distant objects. To travel day after day,
among trees of a hundred feet high, is oppressive to a degree which
those cannot conceive who have not experienced it; and it must depress
the spirits of the solitary settler to pass years in this state. His
visible horizon extends no farther than the tops of the trees which
bound his plantation--perhaps five hundred yards. Upwards he sees the
sun, and sky, and stars, but around him an eternal forest, from which he
can never hope to emerge:--not so in a thickly settled district; he
cannot there enjoy any freedom of prospect, yet there is variety, and
some scope for the imprisoned vision. In a hilly country a little more
range of view may occasionally be obtained; and a river is a stream of
light as well as of water, which feasts the eye with a delight
inconceivable to the inhabitants of open countries.
In direct contradiction to this longing for society was the passion
which the first generation of pioneers had for the wilderness. When the
population of one settlement became too thick, they were seized by an
irresistible impulse to "follow the migration," as the expression went.
The easy independence of the first hunter-agriculturalist was upset by
the advance of immigration. His range was curtailed, his freedom
limited. His very breath seems to have become difficult. So he sold out
at a phenomenal profit, put out his fire, shouldered his gun, called his
dog, and set off again in search of the solitude he craved.
Severe winter weather overtook Baily as he descended the Ohio River,
until below Grave Creek floating ice wrecked his boat and drove him
ashore. Here in the primeval forest, far from "Merrie England," Baily
spent the Christmas of 1796 in building a new flatboat. This task
completed, he resumed his journey. Passing Marietta, where the bad
condition of the winter roads prevented a visit to a famous Indian
mound, he reached Limestone. In due time he sighted Columbia, the
metropolis of the Miami country. According to Baily, the sale of
European goods in this part of the Ohio Valley netted the importers a
hundred per cent. Prices varied with the ease of navigation. When ice
blocked the Ohio the price of flour went up until it was eight dollars a
barrel; whiskey was a dollar a gallon; potatoes, a dollar a bushel; and
bacon, twelve cents a pound. At these prices, the total produce which
went by Fort Massac in the early months of 1800 would have been worth on
the Ohio River upwards of two hundred thousand dollars! In the preceding
summer Baily quoted flour at Norfolk as selling at sixty-three shillings
a barrel of 196 pounds, or double the price it was bringing on the
ice-gorged Ohio. It is by such comparisons that we get some inkling of
the value of western produce and of the rates in western trade.
After a short stay at Cincinnati, Baily set out for the South on an
"Orleans boat" loaded with four hundred barrels of flour. At the mouth
of Pigeon Creek he noted the famous path to "Post St. Vincent's"
(Vincennes), over which he saw emigrants driving cattle to that ancient
town on the Wabash. At Fort Massac he met Captain Zebulon M. Pike, whose
tact in dealing with intoxicated Indians he commended. At New Madrid
Baily made a stay of some days. This settlement, consisting of some two
hundred and fifty houses, was in the possession of Spain. It was within
the province of Louisiana, soon to be ceded to Napoleon. New Orleans
supplied this district with merchandise, but smuggling from the United
States was connived at by the Spanish officials.
From New Madrid Baily proceeded to Natchez, which then contained about
eighty-five houses. The town did not boast a tavern, but, as was true of
other places in the interior, this lack was made up for by the
hospitality of its inhabitants. Rice and tobacco were being grown, Baily
notes, and Georgian cotton was being raised in the neighborhood. Several
jennies were already at work, and their owners received a royalty of
one-eighth of the product. The cotton was sent to New Orleans, where it
usually sold for twenty dollars a hundred weight. From Natchez to New
Orleans the charge for transportation by flatboat was a dollar and a
half a bag. The bags contained from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
and fifty pounds, and each flatboat carried about two hundred and fifty
bags. Baily adds two items to the story of the development of the
mechanical operation of watercraft. He tells us that in the fall of 1796
a party of "Dutchmen," in the Pittsburgh region, fashioned a boat with
side paddle wheels which were turned by a treadmill worked by eight
horses under the deck. This strange boat, which passed Baily when he was
wrecked on the Ohio near Grave Creek, appeared "to go with prodigious
swiftness." Baily does not state how much business the boat did on its
downward trip to New Orleans but contents himself with remarking that
the owners expected the return trip to prove very profitable. When he
met the boat on its upward voyage at Natchez, it had covered three
hundred miles in six days. It was, however, not loaded, "so little
occasion was there for a vessel of this kind." As this run between New
Orleans and Natchez came to be one of the most profitable in the United
States in the early days of steamboating, less than fifteen years later,
the experience of these "Flying Dutchmen" affords a very pretty proof
that something more than a means of transportation is needed to create
commerce. The owners abandoned their craft at Natchez in disgust and
returned home across country, wiser and poorer.
Baily also noted that a Dr. Waters of New Madrid built a schooner "some
few years since" at the head of the Ohio and navigated it down the Ohio
and Mississippi and around to Philadelphia, "where it is now employed in
the commerce of the United States." It is thus apparent, solely from
this traveler's record, that an ocean-going vessel and a
side-paddle-wheel boat had been seen on the Western Waters of the United
States at least four years before the nineteenth century arrived.
Baily finally reached New Orleans. The city then contained about a
thousand houses and was not only the market for the produce of the river
plantations but also the center of an extensive Indian trade. The goods
for this trade were packed in little barrels which were carried into the
interior on pack-horses, three barrels to a horse. The traders traveled
for hundreds of miles through the woods, bartering with the Indians on
the way and receiving, in exchange for their goods, bear and deer skins,
beaver furs, and wild ponies which had been caught by lariat in the
neighboring Apalousa country.
Baily had intended to return to New York by sea, but on his arrival at
New Orleans he was unable to find a ship sailing to New York. He
therefore decided to proceed northward by way of the long and dangerous
Natchez Trace and the Tennessee Path. Though few Europeans had made this
laborious journey before 1800, the Natchez Trace had been for many years
the land route of thousands of returning rivermen who had descended the
Mississippi in flatboat and barge. In practically all cases these men
carried with them the proceeds of their investment, and, as on every
thoroughfare in the world traveled by those returning from market, so
here, too, highwaymen and desperadoes, red and white, built their lairs
and lay in wait. Some of the most revolting crimes of the American
frontier were committed on these northward pathways and their branches.
Joining a party bound for Natchez, a hundred and fifty miles distant
overland, Baily proceeded to Lake Pontchartrain and thence "north by
west through the woods," by way of the ford of the Tangipahoa, Cooper's
Plantation, Tickfaw River, Amite River, and the "Hurricane" (the path of
a tornado) to the beginning of the Apalousa country. This tangled region
of stunted growth was reputed to be seven miles in width from "shore to
shore" and three hundred miles in length. It took the party half a day
to reach the opposite "shore," and they had to quench their thirst on
the way with dew.
At Natchez, Baily organized a party which included the five "Dutchmen"
whose horse boat had proved a failure. For their twenty-one days'
journey to Nashville the party laid in the following provisions: 15
pounds of biscuit, 6 pounds of flour, 12 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of
dried beef, 3 pounds of rice, 1½ pounds of coffee, 4 pounds of sugar,
and a quantity of pounded corn, such as the Indians used on all their
journeys. After celebrating the Fourth of July, 1797, with "all the
inhabitants who were hostile to the Spanish Government," and bribing the
baker at the Spanish fort to bake them a quarter of a hundredweight of
bread, the party started on their northward journey.
They reached without incident the famous Grindstone Ford of Bayou
Pierre, where crayfishes had destroyed a pioneer dam. Beyond, at the
forks of the path where the Choctaw Trail bore off to the east the party
pursued the alternate Chickasaw Trail by Indian guidance, and soon noted
the change in the character of the soil from black loam to sandy gravel,
which indicated that they had reached the Piedmont region. Indian
marauders stole one horse from the camp, and three of the party fell
ill. The others, pressed for food, were compelled to leave the sick men
in an improvised camp and to hasten on, promising to send to their aid
the first Indian they should meet "who understood herbs." After
appalling hardships, they crossed the Tennessee and entered the
Nashville country, where the roads were good enough for coaches, for
they met two on the way. Thence Baily proceeded to Knoxville, seeing, as
he went, droves of cattle bound for the settlements of west Tennessee.
With his arrival at Knoxville, his journal ends abruptly; but from other
sources we learn that he sailed from New York on his return to England
in January, 1798. His interesting record, however, remained unpublished
until after his death in 1844.
Not only to Francis Baily but to scores of other travelers, even those
of unfriendly eyes, do modern readers owe a debt of gratitude. These men
have preserved a multitude of pictures and a wealth of data which would
otherwise have been lost. The men of America in those days were writing
the story of their deeds not on parchment or paper but on the virgin
soil of the wilderness. But though the stage driver, the tavern keeper,
and the burly riverman left no description of the life of their highways
and their commerce, these visitors from other lands have bequeathed to
us their thousands of pages full of the enterprising life of these
pioneer days in the history of American commerce.
CHAPTER VII
The Birth Of The Steamboat
The crowds who welcomed the successive stages in the development of
American transportation were much alike in essentials--they were all
optimistic, self-congratulatory, irrepressible in their enthusiasm, and
undaunted in their outlook. Dickens, perhaps, did not miss the truth
widely when, in speaking of stage driving, he said that the cry of "Go
Ahead!" in America and of "All Right!" in England were typical of the
civilizations of the two countries. Right or wrong, "Go Ahead!" has
always been the underlying passion of all men interested in the
development of commerce and transportation in these United States.
During the era of river improvement already described, men of
imagination were fascinated with the idea of propelling boats by
mechanical means. Even when Washington fared westward in 1784, he met at
Bath, Virginia, one of these early experimenters, James Rumsey, who
haled him forthwith to a neighboring meadow to watch a secret trial of a
boat moved by means of machinery which worked setting-poles similar to
the ironshod poles used by the rivermen to propel their boats upstream.
"The model," wrote Washington, "and its operation upon the water, which
had been made to run pretty swift, not only convinced me of what I
before thought next to, if not quite impracticable, but that it might be
to the greatest possible utility in inland navigation." Later he
mentions the "discovery" as one of those "circumstances which have
combined to render the present epoch favorable above all others for
securing a large portion of the produce of the western settlements, and
of the fur and peltry of the Lakes, also."
From that day forward, scarcely a week passed without some new
development in the long and difficult struggle to improve the means of
navigation. Among the scores of men who engaged in this engrossing but
discouraging work, there is one whom the world is coming to honor more
highly than in previous years--John Fitch, of Connecticut, Pennsylvania,
and Kentucky. As early as August, 1785, Fitch launched on a rivulet in
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a boat propelled by an engine which moved an
endless chain to which little paddles were attached. The next year,
Fitch's second boat, operated by twelve paddles, six on a side--an
arrangement suggesting the "side-wheeler" of the future--successfully
plied the Delaware off "Conjuror's Point," as the scene of Fitch's
labors was dubbed in whimsical amusement and derision. In 1787 Rumsey,
encouraged by Franklin, fashioned a boat propelled by a stream of water
taken in at the prow and ejected at the stern. In 1788 Fitch's third
boat traversed the distance from Philadelphia to Burlington on numerous
occasions and ran as a regular packet in 1790, covering over a thousand
miles. In this model Fitch shifted the paddles from the sides to the
rear, thus anticipating in principle the modern stern-wheeler.
It was doubtless Fitch's experiments in 1785 that led to the first plan
in America to operate a land vehicle by steam. Oliver Evans, a neighbor
and acquaintance of Fitch's, petitioned the Pennsylvania Legislature in
1786 for the right of operating wagons propelled by steam on the
highways of that State. This petition was derisively rejected; but a
similar one made to the Legislature of Maryland was granted on the
ground that such action could hurt nobody. Evans in 1802 took fiery
revenge on the scoffers by actually running his little five-horse-power
carriage through Philadelphia. The rate of speed, however, was so slow
that the idea of moving vehicles by steam was still considered useless
for practical purposes. Eight years later, Evans offered to wager $3000
that, on a level road, he could make a carriage driven by steam equal
the speed of the swiftest horse, but he found no response. In 1812 he
asserted that he was willing to wager that he could drive a steam
carriage on level rails at a rate of fifteen miles an hour. Evans thus
anticipated the belief of Stephenson that steam-driven vehicles would
travel best on railed tracks.
In the development of the steamboat almost all earlier means of
propulsion, natural and artificial, were used as models by the
inventors. The fins of fishes, the webbed feet of amphibious birds, the
paddles of the Indian, and the poles and oars of the riverman, were all
imitated by the patient inventors struggling with the problem. Rumsey's
first effort was a copy of the old setting-pole idea. Fitch's model of
1785 had side paddle wheels operated by an endless chain. Fitch's second
and third models were practically paddle-wheel models, one having the
paddles at the side and the other at the stern. Ormsbee of Connecticut
made a model, in 1792, on the plan of a duck's foot. Morey made what may
be called the first real stern-wheeler in 1794. Two years later Fitch
ran a veritable screw propeller on Collect Pond near New York City.
Although General Benjamin Tupper of Massachusetts had been fashioning
devices of this character eight years previously, Fitch was the first to
apply the idea effectively. In 1798 he evolved the strange, amphibious
creation known as his "model of 1798," which has never been adequately
explained. It was a steamboat on iron wheels provided with flanges, as
though it was intended to be run on submerged tracks. What may have been
the idea of its inventor, living out his last gloomy days in Kentucky,
may never be known; but it is possible to see in this anomalous machine
an anticipation of the locomotive not approached by any other American
of the time. Thus, prior to 1800 almost every type of mechanism for the
propulsion of steamboats had been suggested and tried; and in 1804,
Stevens's twin-screw propeller completed the list.
It is not alone Fitch's development of the devices of the endless chain,
paddle wheel, and screw propeller and of his puzzling earth-and-water
creature that gives luster to his name. His prophetic insight into the
future national importance of the steamboat and his conception, as an
inventor, of his moral obligations to the people at large were as
original and striking in the science of that age as were his models.
The early years of the national life of the United States were the
golden age of monopoly. Every colony, as a matter of course, had granted
to certain men special privileges, and, as has already been pointed out,
the questions of monopolies and combinations in restraint of trade had
arisen even so early as the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Interwoven inextricably with these problems was the whole problem of
colonial rivalry, which in its later form developed into an insistence
on state rights. Every improvement in the means of transportation, every
development of natural resources, every new invention was inevitably
considered from the standpoint of sectional interests and with a view to
its monopolistic possibilities. This was particularly true in the case
of the steamboat, because of its limitation to rivers and bays which
could be specifically enumerated and defined. For instance, Washington
in 1784 attests the fact that Rumsey operated his mechanical boat at
Bath in secret "until he saw the effect of an application he was about
to make to the Assembly of this State, for a reward." The application
was successful, and Rumsey was awarded a monopoly in Virginia waters for
ten years.
Fitch, on the other hand, when he applied to Congress in 1785, desired
merely to obtain official encouragement and intended to allow his
invention to be used by all comers. Meeting only with rebuff, he
realized that his only hope of organizing a company that could provide
working capital lay in securing monopolistic privileges. In 1786 he
accordingly applied to the individual States and secured the sole right
to operate steamboats on the waterways of New Jersey, Delaware, New
York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. How different would have been the
story of the steamboat if Congress had accepted Fitch at his word and
created a precedent against monopolistic rights on American rivers!
Fitch, in addition to the high purpose of devoting his new invention to
the good of the nation without personal considerations, must be credited
with perceiving at the very beginning the peculiar importance of the
steamboat to the American West. His original application to Congress in
1785 opened: "The subscriber begs leave to lay at the feet of Congress,
an attempt he has made to facilitate the internal Navigation of the
United States, adapted especially to the Waters of the Mississippi." At
another time with prophetic vision he wrote: "The Grand and Principle
object must be on the Atlantick, which would soon overspread the wild
forests of America with people, and make us the most oppulent Empire on
Earth. Pardon me, generous public, for suggesting ideas that cannot be
dijested at this day."
Foremost in exhibiting high civic and patriotic motives, Fitch was also
foremost in appreciating the importance of the steamboat in the
expansion of American trade. This significance was also clearly
perceived by his brilliant successor, Robert Fulton. That the West and
its commerce were always predominant in Fulton's great schemes is proved
by words which he addressed in 1803 to James Monroe, American Ambassador
to Great Britain: "You have perhaps heard of the success of my
experiments for navigating boats by steam engines and you will feel the
importance of establishing such boats on the Mississippi and other
rivers of the United States as soon as possible."
Robert Fulton had been interested in steamboats for a period not
definitely known, possibly since his sojourn in Philadelphia in the days
of Fitch's early efforts. That he profited by the other inventor's
efforts at the time, however, is not suggested by any of his
biographers. He subsequently went to London and gave himself up to the
study and practice of engineering. There he later met James Rumsey, who
came to England in 1788, and by him no doubt was informed, if he was not
already aware, of the experiments and models of Rumsey and Fitch. He
obtained the loan of Fitch's plans and drawings and made his own trial
of various existing devices, such as oars, paddles, duck's feet, and
Fitch's endless chain with "resisting-boards" attached. Meanwhile Fulton
was also devoting his attention to problems of canal construction and to
the development of submarine boats and submarine explosives. He was
engaged in these researches in France in 1801 when the new American
minister, Robert R. Livingston, arrived, and the two men soon formed a
friendship destined to have a vital and enduring influence upon the
development of steam navigation on the inland waterways of America.
Livingston already had no little experience in the same field of
invention as Fulton. In 1798 he had obtained, for a period of twenty
years, the right to operate steamboats on all the waters of the State of
New York, a monopoly which had just lapsed owing to the death of Fitch.
In the same year Livingston had built a steamboat which had made three
miles an hour on the Hudson. He had experimented with most of the models
then in existence--upright paddles at the side, endless-chain paddles,
and stern paddle wheels. Fulton was soon inspired to resume his efforts
by Livingston's account of his own experiments and of recent advances in
England, where a steamboat had navigated the Thames in 1801 and a year
later the famous stern-wheeler Charlotte Dundas had towed boats of 140
tons' burden on the Forth and Clyde Canal at the rate of five miles an
hour. In this same year Fulton and Livingston made successful
experiments on the Seine.
It is fortunate that, in one particular, Livingston's influence did not
prevail with Fulton, for the American Minister was distinctly prejudiced
against paddle wheels. Although Livingston had previously ridden as a
passenger on Morey's stern-wheeler at the rate of five miles an hour,
yet he had turned a deaf ear when his partner in experimentation,
Nicholas J. Roosevelt, had insisted strongly on "throwing wheels over
the sides." At the beginning, Fulton himself was inclined to agree with
Livingston in this respect; but, probably late in 1803, he began to
investigate more carefully the possibilities of the paddle wheel as used
twice in America by Morey and by four or five experimenters in Europe.
In 1804 an eight-mile trip which Fulton made on the Charlotte Dundas in
an hour and twenty minutes established his faith in the undeniable
superiority of two fundamental factors of early navigation--paddle
wheels and British engines. Fulton's splendid fame rests, and rightly
so, on his perception of the fact that no mere ingenuity of design could
counterbalance weakness, uncertainty, and inefficiency in the mechanism
which was intended to make a steamboat run and keep running. As early as
November, 1803, Fulton had written to Boulton and Watt of Birmingham
that he had "not confidence in any other engines" than theirs and that
he was seeking a means of getting one of those engines to America. "I
cannot establish the boat without the engine," he now emphatically wrote
to James Monroe, then Ambassador to the Court of St. James. "The
question then is shall we or shall we not have such boats."
But there were difficulties in the way. Though England forbade the
exportation of engines, Fulton knew that, in numerous instances, this
rule had not been enforced, and he had hopes of success. "The British
Government," Fulton wrote Monroe, "must have little friendship or even
civility toward America, if they refuse such a request." Before the
steamboat which Fulton and Livingston proposed to build in America could
be operated there was another obstacle to be surmounted. The rights of
steam navigation of New York waters which Livingston had obtained on the
death of Fitch in 1798 had lapsed because of his failure to run a
steamboat at the rate of four miles an hour, which was one provision of
the grant. In April, 1803, the grant was renewed to Livingston,
Roosevelt, and Fulton jointly for another period of twenty years, and
the date when the boat was to make the required four miles an hour was
extended finally to 1807.
Any one who is inclined to criticize the Livingston-Roosevelt-Fulton
monopoly which now came into existence should remember that the previous
state grants formed a precedent of no slight moment. The whole
proceeding was in perfect accord with the spirit of the times, for it
was an era of speculation and monopoly ushered in by the toll-road and
turnpike organizations, when probably no less than two hundred companies
were formed. It was young America showing itself in an unmistakable
manner--"conceived in liberty" and starting on the long road to learn
that obedience to law and respect for public rights constitute true
liberty. Finally, it must be pointed out that Fulton, like his famous
predecessor, Fitch, was impelled by motives far higher than the love of
personal gain. "I consider them [steamboats] of such infinite use in
America," he wrote Monroe, "that I should feel a culpable neglect toward
my country if I relaxed for a moment in pursuing every necessary measure
for carrying it into effect." And later, when repeating his argument, he
says: "I plead this not for myself alone but for our country."
It is now evident why the alliance of Fulton with Livingston was of such
epoch-making importance, for, although it may have in some brief measure
delayed Fulton's adoption of paddle wheels, it gave him an entry to the
waters of New York. Livingston and Fulton thus supplemented each other;
Livingston possessed a monopoly and Fulton a correct estimate of the
value of paddle wheels and, secondly, of Boulton and Watt engines. It
was a rare combination destined to crown with success a long period of
effort and discouragement in the history of navigation.
After considerable delay and difficulty, the two Americans obtained
permission to export the necessary engine from Great Britain and shipped
it to New York, whither Fulton himself proceeded to construct his
steamboat. The hull was built by Charles Brown, a New York shipbuilder,
and the Boulton and Watt machinery, set in masonry, was finally
installed.
The voyage to Albany, against a stiff wind, occupied thirty-two hours;
the return trip was made in thirty. H. Freeland, one of the spectators
who stood on the banks of the Hudson when the boat made its maiden
voyage in 1807, gives the following description:
Some imagined it to be a sea-monster whilst others did not hesitate to
express their belief that it was a sign of the approaching judgment.
What seemed strange in the vessel was the substitution of lofty and
straight smoke-pipes, rising from the deck, instead of the gracefully
tapered masts ... and, in place of the spars and rigging, the curious
play of the walking-beam and pistons, and the slow turning and splashing
of the huge and naked paddle-wheels, met the astonished gaze. The dense
clouds of smoke, as they rose, wave upon wave, added still more to the
wonderment of the rustics.... On her return trip the curiosity she
excited was scarcely less intense ... fishermen became terrified, and
rode homewards, and they saw nothing but destruction devastating their
fishing grounds, whilst the wreaths of black vapor and rushing noise of
the paddle-wheels, foaming with the stirred-up water, produced great
excitement....
With the launching of the Clermont on the Hudson a new era in American
history began. How quick with life it was many of the preceding pages
bear testimony. The infatuation of the public for building toll and
turnpike roads was now at its height. Only a few years before, a
comprehensive scheme of internal improvements had been outlined by
Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin. When a boy, it
is said, he had lain on the floor of a surveyor's cabin on the western
slopes of the Alleghanies and had heard Washington describe to a rough
crowd of Westerners his plan to unite the Great Lakes with the Potomac
in one mighty chain of inland commerce. Jefferson's Administration was
now about to devote the surplus in the Treasury to the construction of
national highways and canals. The Cumberland Road, to be built across
the Alleghanies by the War Department, was authorized by the President
in the same year in which the Clermont made her first trip; and Jesse
Hawley, at his table in a little room in a Pittsburgh boarding house,
was even now penning in a series of articles, published in the
Pittsburgh Commonwealth, beginning in January, 1807, the first clear
challenge to the Empire State to connect the Hudson and Lake Erie by a
canal. Thus the two next steps in the history of inland commerce in
America were ready to be taken.
CHAPTER VIII
The Conquest Of The Alleghanies
The two great thoroughfares of American commerce in the first half of
the nineteenth century were the Cumberland Road and the Erie Canal. The
first generation of the new century witnessed the great burst of
population into the West which at once gave Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, and Wisconsin a place of national importance which they have
never relinquished. So far as pathways of commerce contributed to the
creation of this veritable new republic in the Middle West, the
Cumberland Road and the Erie Canal, coöperating respectively with Ohio
River and Lake Erie steamboats, were of the utmost importance. The
national spirit, said to have arisen from the second war with England,
had its clearest manifestation in the throwing of a great macadamized
roadway across the Alleghanies to the Ohio River and the digging of the
Erie Canal through the swamps and wildernesses of New York.
Both of these pathways were essentially the fruition of the doctrine to
which Washington gave wide circulation in his letter to Harrison in
1784, wherein he pictured the vision of a vast Republic united by
commercial chains. Both were essentially Western enterprises. The
highway was built to fulfil the promise which the Government had made in
1802 to use a portion of the money accruing from the sale of public
lands in Ohio in order to connect that young State with Atlantic waters.
It was proposed to build the canal, according to one early plan, with
funds to be obtained by the sale of land in Michigan. So firmly did the
promoters believe in the national importance of this project that
subscriptions, according to another plan, were to be solicited as far
afield as Vermont in the North and Kentucky in the Southwest. All that
Washington had hoped for, and all that Aaron Burr is supposed to have
been hopeless of, were epitomized in these great works of internal
improvement. They bespoke coöperation of the highest existing types of
loyalty, optimism, financial skill, and engineering ability.
Yet, on the other hand, the contrasts between these undertakings were
great. The two enterprises, one the work of the nation and the other
that of a single State, were practically contemporaneous and were
therefore constantly inviting comparison. The Cumberland Road was, for
its day, a gigantic government undertaking involving problems of
finance, civil engineering, eminent domain, state rights, local
favoritism, and political machination. Its purpose was noble and its
successful construction a credit to the nation; but the paternalism to
which it gave rise and the conflicts which it precipitated in Congress
over questions of constitutionality were remembered soberly for a
century. The Erie Canal, after its projectors had failed to obtain
national aid, became the undertaking of one commonwealth conducted, amid
countless doubts and jeers, to a conclusion unbelievably successful. As
a result many States, foregoing Federal aid, attempted to duplicate the
successful feat of New York. In this respect the northern canal
resembled the Lancaster Turnpike and tempted scores of States and
corporations to expenditures which were unwise in circumstances less
favorable than those of the fruitful and strategic Empire State.
In the conception of both the roadway and the canal, it should be noted,
the old idea of making use of navigable rivers still persisted. The act
foreshadowing the Cumberland Road, passed in 1802, called for "making
public roads leading from the navigable waters emptying into the
Atlantic, to the Ohio, to said State Ohio and through the same"; and
Hawley's original plan was to build the Erie Canal from Utica to Buffalo
using the Mohawk from Utica to the Hudson.
Historic Cumberland, in Maryland, was chosen by Congress as the eastern
terminus of the great highway which should bind Ohio to the Old
Thirteen. Commissioners were appointed in 1806 to choose the best route
by which the great highway could reach the Ohio River between
Steubenville, Ohio and the mouth of Grave Creek; but difficulties of
navigation in the neighborhood of the Three Sister Islands near
Charlestown, or Wellsburg, West Virginia, led to the choice of Wheeling,
farther down, as a temporary western terminus.
The route selected was an excellent compromise between the long standing
rival claims of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to the trade of the
West. If Baltimore and Alexandria were to be better served than
Philadelphia, the advantage was slight; and Pennsylvania gained
compensation, ere the State gave the National Government permission to
build the road within its limits, by dictating that it should pass
through Uniontown and Washington. In this way Pennsylvania obtained,
without cost, unrivaled advantages for a portion of the State which
might otherwise have been long neglected.
The building of the road, however satisfactory in the main, was not
undertaken without arousing many sectional and personal hopes and
prejudices and jealousies, of which the echoes still linger in local
legends today. Land-owners, mine-owners, factory-owners, innkeepers and
countless townsmen and villagers anxiously watched the course of the
road and were bitterly disappointed if the new sixty-four-foot
thoroughfare did not pass immediately through their property. On the
other hand, promoters of toll and turnpike companies, who had promising
schemes and long lists of shareholders, were far from eager to have
their property taken for a national road. No one believed that, if it
proved successful, it would be the only work of its kind, and everywhere
men looked for the construction of government highways out of the
overflowing wealth of the treasury within the next few years.
In April, 1811, the first contracts were let for building the first ten
miles of the road from its eastern terminus and were completed in 1812.
More contracts were let in 1812, 1813, and 1815. Even in those days of
war when the drain on the national treasury was excessive, over a
quarter of a million dollars was appropriated for the construction of
the road. Onward it crawled, through the beautiful Cumberland gateway of
the Potomac, to Big Savage and Little Savage Mountains, to Little Pine
Run (the first "Western" water), to Red Hill (later called "Shades of
Death" because of the gloomy forest growth), to high-flung Negro
Mountain at an elevation of 2325 feet, and thence on to the
Youghiogheny, historic Great Meadows, Braddock's Grave, Laurel Hill,
Uniontown, and Brownsville, where it crossed the Monongahela. Thence, on
almost a straight line, it sped by way of Washington to Wheeling. Its
average cost was upwards of thirteen thousand dollars a mile from the
Potomac to the Ohio. The road was used in 1817, and in another year the
mail coaches of the United States were running from Washington to
Wheeling, West Virginia. Within five years one of the five commission
houses doing business at Wheeling is said to have handled over a
thousand wagons carrying freight of nearly two tons each.
The Cumberland Road at once leaped into a position of leadership, both
in volume of commerce and in popularity, and held its own for two famous
decades. The pulse of the nation beat to the steady throb of trade along
its highway. Maryland at once stretched out her eager arms, along stone
roads, through Frederick and Hagerstown to Cumberland, and thus formed a
single route from the Ohio to Baltimore. Great stagecoach and freight
lines were soon established, each patronizing its own stage house or
wagon stand in the thriving towns along the road. The primitive box
stage gave way to the oval or football type with curved top and bottom,
and this was displaced in turn by the more practical Concord coach of
national fame. The names of the important stagecoach companies were
quite as well known, a century ago, as those of our great railways
today. Chief among them were the National, Good Intent, June Bug, and
Pioneer lines. The coaches, drawn by four and sometimes six horses, were
usually painted in brilliant colors and were named after eminent
statesmen. The drivers of these gay chariots were characters quite as
famous locally as the personages whose names were borne by the coaches.
Westover and his record of forty-five minutes for the twenty miles
between Uniontown and Brownsville, and "Red" Bunting, with his drive of
a hundred and thirty-one miles in twelve hours with the declaration of
war against Mexico, will be long famous on the curving stretches of the
Cumberland Road.
Although the freight and express traffic of those days lacked the
picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so
conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long
lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced at
"unprecedented" speed across hill and vale. Searight, the local
historian of the road, describes these large, broad-wheeled wagons
covered with white canvas as
visible all the day long, at every point, making the highway look more
like a leading avenue of a great city than a road through rural
districts.... I have staid over night with William Cheets on Nigger
[Negro] Mountain when there were about thirty six-horse teams in the
wagon yard, a hundred Kentucky mules in an adjoining lot, a thousand
hogs in their enclosures, and as many fat cattle in adjoining fields.
The music made by this large number of hogs eating corn on a frosty
night I shall never forget. After supper and attention to the teams, the
wagoners would gather in the bar-room and listen to the music on the
violin furnished by one of their fellows, have a Virginia hoe-down, sing
songs, tell anecdotes, and hear the experiences of drivers and drovers
from all points of the road, and, when it was all over, unroll their
beds, lay them down on the floor before the bar-room fire side by side,
and sleep with their feet near the blaze as soundly as under the
parental roof.
Meanwhile New York, the other great rival for Western trade, was intent
on its own darling project, the Erie Canal. In 1808, three years before
the building of the Cumberland Road, Joshua Forman offered a bill in
favor of the canal in the Legislature of New York. In plain but
dignified language this document stated that New York possessed "the
best route of communication between the Atlantic and western waters,"
and that it held "the first commercial rank in the United States." The
bill also noted that, while "several of our sister States" were seeking
to secure "the trade of that wide extended country," their natural
advantages were "vastly inferior." Six hundred dollars was the amount
appropriated for a brief survey, and Congress was asked to vote aid for
the construction of the "Buffalo-Utica Canal." The matter was widely
talked about but action was delayed. Doubt as to the best route to be
pursued caused some discussion. If the western terminus were to be
located on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Oswego, as some advocated,
would produce not make its way to Montreal instead of to New York? In
1810 a new committee was appointed and, though their report favored the
paralleling of the course of the Mohawk and Oswego rivers, their
engineer, James Geddes, gave strength to the party which believed a
direct canal would best serve the interests of the State. It is worth
noting that Livingston and Fulton were added to the committee in 1811.
The hopes of outside aid from Congress and adjacent States met with
disappointment. In vain did the advocates of the canal in 1812 plead
that its construction would promote "a free and general intercourse
between different parts of the United States, tend to the aggrandizement
and prosperity of the country, and consolidate and strengthen the
Union." The plan to have the Government subsidize the canal by vesting
in the State of New York four million acres of Michigan land brought out
a protest from the West which is notable not so much because it records
the opposition of this section as because it illustrates the
shortsightedness of most of the arguments raised against the New York
enterprise. The purpose of the canal, the detractors asserted, was to
build up New York City to the detriment of Montreal, and the navigation
of Lake Ontario, whose beauty they touchingly described, was to be
abandoned for a "narrow, winding obstructed canal ... for an expense
which arithmetic dares not approach." It was, in their minds,
unquestionably a selfish object, and they believed that "both correct
science, and the dictates of patriotism and philanthropy [should] lead
to the adoption of more liberal principles." It was a shortsighted
object, "predicated on the eternal adhesion of the Canadas to England."
It would never give satisfaction since trade would always ignore
artificial and seek natural routes. The attempting of such comparatively
useless projects would discourage worthy schemes, relax the bonds of
Union, and depress the national character. But though these Westerners
thus misjudged the possibilities of the Erie Canal, we must doff our
hats to them for their foresight in suggesting that, instead of aiding
the Erie Canal, the nation ought to build canals at Niagara Falls and
Panama!
The War of 1812 suspended all talk of the canal, but the subject was
again brought up by Judge Platt in the autumn of 1816. With alacrity
strong men came to the aid of the measure. De Witt Clinton's Memorial of
1816 addressed to the State Legislature may well rank with Washington's
letter to Harrison in the documentary history of American commercial
development. It sums up the geographical position of New York with
reference to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, her relationship to the
West and to Canada, the feasibility of the proposed route from an
engineering standpoint, the timeliness of the moment for such a work of
improvement, the value that the canal would give to the state lands of
the interior, and the trade that it would bring to the towns along its
pathway.
The Erie Canal was born in the Act of April 14, 1817, but the decision
of the Council of Revision, which held the power of veto, was in doubt.
An anecdote related by Judge Platt tends to prove that fear of another
war with England was the straw that broke the camel's back of
opposition. Acting-Governor Taylor, Chief Justice Thompson, Chancellor
Kent, Judge Yates, and Judge Platt composed the Council. The two first
named were open opponents of the measure; Kent, Yates, and Platt were
warm advocates of the project, but one of them doubted if the time was
ripe to undertake it.
Taylor opposed the canal on the ground that the late treaty with England
was a mere truce and that the resources of the State should be husbanded
against renewed war.
"Do you think so, Sir?" Chancellor Kent is said to have asked the
Governor.
"Yes, Sir," was the reported reply. "England will never forgive us for
our victories, and, my word for it, we shall have another war with her
within two years."
The Chancellor rose to his feet with determination and sealed the fate
of the great enterprise in a word.
"If we must have war," he exclaimed, "I am in favor of the canal and I
cast my vote for this bill."
On July 4, 1817, work was formally inaugurated at Rome with simple
ceremonies. Thus the year 1817 was marked by three great undertakings:
the navigation of the Mississippi River upstream and down by steamboats,
the opening of the national road across the Alleghany Mountains, and the
beginning of the Erie Canal. No single year in the early history of the
United States witnessed three such important events in the material
progress of the country.
What days the ancient "Long House of the Iroquois" now saw! The
engineers of the Cumberland Road, now nearing the Ohio River, had
enjoyed the advantage of many precedents and examples; but the
Commissioners of the Erie Canal had been able to study only such crude
examples of canal-building as America then afforded. Never on any
continent had such an inaccessible region been pierced by such a
highway. The total length of the whole network of canals in Great
Britain did not equal that of the waterway which the New Yorkers now
undertook to build. The lack of roads, materials, vehicles, methods of
drilling and efficient business systems was overcome by sheer patience
and perseverance in experiment. The frozen winter roads saved the day by
making it possible to accumulate a proper supply of provisions and
materials. As tools of construction, the plough and scraper with their
greater capacity for work soon supplanted the shovel and the
wheelbarrow, which had been the chief implements for such construction
in Europe. Strange new machinery born of Mother Necessity was now heard
groaning in the dark swamps of New York. These giants, worked by means
of a cable, wheel, and endless screw, were made to hoist green stumps
bodily from the ground and, without the use of axe, to lay trees
prostrate, root and branch. A new plough was fashioned with which a yoke
of oxen could cut roots two inches in thickness well beneath the surface
of the ground.
Handicaps of various sorts wore the patience of commissioners,
engineers, and contractors. Lack of snow during one winter all but
stopped the work by cutting off the source of supplies. Pioneer
ailments, such as fever and ague, reaped great harvests, incapacitated
more than a thousand workmen at one time and for a brief while stopped
work completely.
For the most part, however, work was carried on simultaneously on all
the three great links or sections into which the enterprise was divided.
Local contractors were given preference by the commissioners, and
three-fourths of the work was done by natives of the State. Forward up
the Mohawk by Schenectady and Utica to Rome, thence bending southward to
Syracuse, and from there by way of Clyde, Lyons, and Palmyra, the canal
made its way to the giant viaduct over the Genesee River at Rochester.
Keeping close to the summit level on the dividing ridge between Lake
Ontario streams and the Valley of the Tonawanda, the line ran to
Lockport, where a series of locks placed the canal on the Lake Erie
level, 365 miles from and 564 feet above Albany. By June, 1823, the
canal was completed from Rochester to Schenectady; in October boats
passed into the tidewaters of the Hudson at Albany; and in the autumn of
1825 the canal was formally opened by the passage of a triumphant fleet
from Lake Erie to New York Bay. Here two kegs of lake water were emptied
into the Atlantic, while the Governor of the State of New York spoke
these words:
This solemnity, at this place, on the first arrival of vessels from Lake
Erie, is intended to indicate and commemorate the navigable
communication, which has been accomplished between our Mediterranean
Seas and the Atlantic Ocean, in about eight years, to the extent of more
than four hundred and twenty-five miles, by the wisdom, public spirit,
and energy of the people of the State of New York; and may the God of
the Heavens and the Earth smile most propitiously on this work, and
render it subservient to the best interests of the human race.
Throughout these last seven years, the West was subconsciously getting
ready to meet the East halfway by improving and extending her steamboat
operations. Steamboats were first run on the Great Lakes by enterprising
Buffalo citizens who, in 1818, secured rights from the Fulton-Livingston
monopoly to build the Walk-in-the-Water, the first of the great fleet of
ships that now whiten the inland seas of the United States. Regular
lines of steamboats were now formed on the Ohio to connect with the
Cumberland Road at Wheeling, although the steamboat monopoly threatened
to stifle the natural development of transportation on Western rivers.
The completion of the Erie Canal--coupled with the new appropriation by
Congress for extending the Cumberland Road from the Ohio River to
Missouri and the beginning of the Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake and
Ohio canals, reveal the importance of these concluding days of the first
quarter of the nineteenth century in the annals of American
transportation. Never since that time have men doubted the ability of
Americans to accomplish the physical domination of their continent. With
the conquest of the Alleghanies and of the forests and swamps of the
"Long House" by pick and plough and scraper, and the mastery of the
currents of the Mississippi by the paddle wheel, the vast plains beyond
seemed smaller and the Rockies less formidable. Men now looked forward
confidently, with an optimist of these days, to the time "when
circulation and association between the Atlantic and Pacific and the
Mexican Gulf shall be as free and perfect as they are at this moment in
England" between the extremities of that country. The vision of a nation
closely linked by well-worn paths of commerce was daily becoming
clearer. What further westward progress was soon to be made remains to
be seen.
CHAPTER IX
The Dawn Of The Iron Age
Despite the superiority of the new iron age that quickly followed the
widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and a chivalry
in the "good old days" of the stagecoach, the Conestoga, and the lazy
canal boat, which did not to an equal degree pervade the iron age of the
railroad. When machinery takes the place of human brawn and patience,
there is an indefinable eclipse of human interest. Somehow, cogs and
levers and differentials do not have the same appeal as fingers and eyes
and muscles. The old days of coach and canal boat had a picturesqueness
and a comradeship of their own. In the turmoil and confusion and odd
mixing of every kind of humanity along the lines of travel in the days
of the hurtling coach-and-six, a friendliness, a robust sympathy, a
ready interest in the successful and the unfortunate, a knowledge of how
the other half lives, and a familiarity with men as well as with mere
places, was common to all who took the road. As Thackeray so vividly
describes it:
The land rang yet with the tooting horns and rattling teams of
mail-coaches; a gay sight was the road in those days, before
steam-engines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over. To travel
in coaches, to know coachmen and guards, to be familiar with inns along
the road, to laugh with the jolly hostess in the bar, to chuck the
pretty chamber-maid under the chin, were the delight of men who were
young not very long ago. The road was an institution, the ring was an
institution. Men rallied around them; and, not without a kind of
conservatism expatiated on the benefits with which they endowed the
country, and the evils which would occur when they should be no
more:--decay of British spirit, decay of manly pluck, ruin of the breed
of horses, and so forth and so forth. To give and take a black eye was
not unusual nor derogatory in a gentleman: to drive a stage-coach the
enjoyment, the emulation, of generous youth. Is there any young fellow
of the present time, who aspires to take the place of a stoker? One sees
occasionally in the country a dismal old drag with a lonely driver.
Where are you, charioteers? Where are you, O rattling Quicksilver, O
swift Defiance? You are passed by racers stronger and swifter than you.
Your lamps are out, and the music of your horns has died away.
Behind this change from the older and more picturesque days which is
thus lamented there lay potent economic forces and a strong commercial
rivalry between different parts of the country. The Atlantic States were
all rivals of each other, reaching out by one bold stroke after another
across forest, mountain, and river to the gigantic and fruitful West.
Step after step the inevitable conquest went on. Foremost in time
marched the sturdy pack-horsemen, blazing the way for the heavier forces
quietly biding their time in the rear--the Conestogas, the steamboat,
the canal boat, and, last and greatest of them all, the locomotive.
Through a long preliminary period the principal center of interest was
the Potomac Valley, towards whose strategic head Virginia and Maryland,
by river-improvement and road-building, were directing their commercial
routes in amiable rivalry for the conquest of the Western trade.
Suddenly out from the southern region of the Middle Atlantic States went
the Cumberland National Road to the Ohio. New York instantly, in her
zone, took up the challenge and thrust her great Erie Canal across to
the Great Lakes. In rapid succession, Pennsylvania and Maryland and
Virginia, eager not to be outdone in winning the struggle for Western
trade, sent their canals into the Alleghanies toward the Ohio.
It soon developed, however, that Baltimore, both powerful and ambitious,
was seriously handicapped. In order to retain her commanding position as
the metropolis of Western trade she was compelled to resort to a new and
untried method of transportation which marks an era in American history.
It seems plain that the Southern rivals of New York City--Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Alexandria--had relied for a while on the deterring
effect of a host of critics who warned all men that a canal of such
proportions as the Erie was not practicable, that no State could bear
the financial drain which its construction would involve, that theories
which had proved practical on a small scale would fail in so large an
undertaking, that the canal would be clogged by floods or frozen up for
half of each year, and that commerce would ignore artificial courses and
cling to natural channels. But the answer of the Empire State to her
rivals was the homely but triumphant cry "Low Bridge!"--the warning to
passengers on the decks of canal boats as they approached the numerous
bridges which spanned the route. When this cry passed into a byword it
afforded positive proof that the Erie Canal traffic was firmly
established. The words rang in the counting-houses of Philadelphia and
out and along the Lancaster and the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh
turnpikes--"Low Bridge! Low Bridge!" Pennsylvania had granted, it has
been pointed out, that her Southern neighbors might have their share of
the Ohio Valley trade but maintained that the splendid commerce of the
Great Lakes was her own peculiar heritage. Men of Baltimore who had
dominated the energetic policy of stone-road building in their State
heard this alarming challenge from the North. The echo ran "Low Bridge!"
in the poor decaying locks of the Potomac Company where, according to
the committee once appointed to examine that enterprise, flood-tides
"gave the only navigation that was enjoyed." Were their efforts to keep
the Chesapeake metropolis in the lead to be set at naught?
There could be but one answer to the challenge, and that was to rival
canal with canal. These more southerly States, confronted by the
towering ranges of the Alleghanies to the westward, showed a courage
which was superb, although, as time proved in the case of Maryland, they
might well have taken more counsel of their fears. Pennsylvania acted
swiftly. Though its western waterway--the roaring Juniata, which entered
the Susquehanna near Harrisburg--had a drop from head to mouth greater
than that of the entire New York canal, and, though the mountains of the
Altoona region loomed straight up nearly three thousand feet,
Pennsylvania overcame the lowlands by main strength and the mountain
peaks by strategy and was sending canal boats from Philadelphia to
Pittsburgh within nine years of the completion of the Erie Canal.
The eastern division of the Pennsylvania Canal, known as the Union
Canal, from Reading on the Schuylkill to Middletown on the Susquehanna,
was completed in 1827. The Juniata section was then driven on up to
Hollidaysburg. Beyond the mountain barrier, the Conemaugh, the
Kiskiminitas, and the Allegheny were followed to Pittsburgh. But the
greatest feat in the whole enterprise was the conquest of the mountain
section, from Hollidaysburg to Johnstown. This was accomplished by the
building of five inclined planes on each slope, each plane averaging
about 2300 feet in length and 200 feet in height. Up or down these
slopes and along the intermediate level sections cars and giant cradles
(built to be lowered into locks where they could take an entire canal
boat as a load) were to be hauled or lowered by horsepower, and later,
by steam. After the plans had been drawn up by Sylvester Welch and
Moncure Robinson, the Pennsylvania Legislature authorized the work in
1831, and traffic over this aerial route was begun in March, 1834. In
autumn of that year, the stanch boat Hit or Miss, from the Lackawanna
country, owned by Jesse Crisman and captained by Major Williams, made
the journey across the whole length of the canal. It rested for a night
on the Alleghany summit "like Noah's Ark on Ararat," wrote Sherman Day,
"descended the next morning into the Valley of the Mississippi, and
sailed for St. Louis."
Well did Robert Stephenson, the famous English engineer, say that, in
boldness of design and difficulty of execution, this Pennsylvania scheme
of mastering the Alleghanies could be compared with no modern triumph
short of the feats performed at the Simplon Pass and Mont Cenis. Before
long this line of communication became a very popular thoroughfare; even
Charles Dickens "heartily enjoyed" it--in retrospect--and left
interesting impressions of his journey over it:
Even the running up, bare-necked, at five o'clock in the morning from
the tainted cabin to the dirty deck; scooping up the icy water, plunging
one's head into it, and drawing it out, all fresh and glowing with the
cold; was a good thing. The fast, brisk walk upon the towing-path,
between that time and breakfast, when every vein and artery seemed to
tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light
came gleaming off from everything; the lazy motion of the boat, when one
lay idly on the deck, looking through, rather than at, the deep blue
sky; the gliding on, at night, so noiselessly, past frowning hills,
sullen with dark trees, and sometimes angry in one red burning spot high
up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the shining out of the
bright stars, undisturbed by noise of wheels or steam, or any other
sound than the liquid rippling of the water as the boat went on; all
these were pure delights. ¹
¹ American Notes (Gadshill Edition), pp. 180-181.
Dickens also thus graphically depicts the unique experience of being
carried over the mountain peaks on the aerial railway:
There are ten inclined planes; five ascending and five descending; the
carriages are dragged up the former, and let slowly down the latter, by
means of stationary engines; the comparatively level spaces between
being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes by engine power, as
the case demands. Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge
of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveler
gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the
mountain depths below. The journey is very carefully made, however; only
two carriages traveling together; and while proper precautions are
taken, is not to be dreaded for its dangers.
It was very pretty traveling thus, at a rapid pace along the heights of
the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light
and softness; catching glimpses, through the tree-tops, of scattered
cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom
we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homewards;
families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a
stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their
unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow's work; and we riding onward,
high above them, like a whirl-wind. It was amusing, too, when we had
dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other motive power than
the weight of the carriages themselves, to see the engine released, long
after us, come buzzing down alone, like a great insect, its back of
green and gold so shining in the sun, that if it had spread a pair of
wings and soared away, no one would have had occasion, as I fancied, for
the least surprise. But it stopped short of us in a very business-like
manner when we reached the canal; and, before we left the wharf, went
panting up this hill again, with the passengers who had waited our
arrival for the means of traversing the road by which we had come. ¹
¹ Op. cit.
This Pennsylvania route was likewise famous because it included the
first tunnel in America; but with the advance of years, tunnel, planes,
and canal were supplanted by what was to become in time the Pennsylvania
Railroad, the pride of the State and one of the great highways of the
nation.
In the year before Pennsylvania investigated her western water route, a
joint bill was introduced into the legislatures of the Potomac Valley
States, proposing a Potomac Canal Company which should construct a
Chesapeake and Ohio canal at the expense of Maryland, Virginia, and the
District of Columbia. The plan was of vital moment to Alexandria and
Georgetown on the Potomac, but unless a lateral canal could be built to
Baltimore, that city--which paid a third of Maryland's taxes--would be
called on to supply a great sum to benefit only her chief rivals. The
bitter struggle which now developed is one of the most significant in
commercial history because of its sequel.
The conditions underlying this rivalry must not be lost sight of.
Baltimore had done more than any other Eastern city to ally herself with
the West and to obtain its trade. She had instinctively responded to
every move made by her rivals in the great game. If Pennsylvania
promoted a Lancaster Turnpike, Baltimore threw out her superb
Baltimore-Reisterstown boulevard, though her northern road to
Philadelphia remained the slough that Brissot and Baily had found it. If
New York projected an Erie Canal, Baltimore successfully championed the
building of a Cumberland Road by a governmental godmother. So thoroughly
and quickly, indeed, did she link her system of stone roads to that
great artery, that even today many well-informed writers seem to be
under the impression that the Cumberland Road ran from the Ohio to
Washington and Baltimore. Now, with canals building to the north of her
and canals to the south of her, what of her prestige and future?
For the moment Baltimore compromised by agreeing to a Chesapeake and
Ohio canal which, by a lateral branch, should still lead to her market
square. Her scheme embraced a vision of conquest regal in its sweep,
beyond that of any rival, and comprehending two ideas worthy of the most
farseeing strategist and the most astute politician. It called not only
for the building of a transmontane canal to the Ohio but also for a
connecting canal from the Ohio to the Great Lakes. Not only would the
trade of the Northwest be secured by this means--for this southerly
route would not be affected by winter frosts as would those of
Pennsylvania and New York--but the good godmother at Washington would be
almost certain to champion it and help to build it since the proposed
route was so thoroughly interstate in character. With the backing of
Maryland, Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and probably several
States bordering the Inland Lakes, government aid in the undertaking
seemed feasible and proper.
Theoretically the daring scheme captured the admiration of all who were
to be benefited by it. At a great banquet at Washington, late in 1823,
the project was launched. Adams, Clay, and Calhoun took the opportunity
to ally themselves with it by robustly declaring themselves in favor of
widespread internal improvements. Even the godmother smiled upon it for,
following Monroe's recommendation, Congress without hesitation voted
thirty thousand dollars for the preliminary survey from Washington to
Pittsburgh. Quickly the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company and the
connecting Maryland Canal Company were formed, and steps were taken to
have Ohio promote an Ohio and Lake Erie Company.
As high as were the hopes awakened by this movement, just so deep was
the dejection and chagrin into which its advocates were thrown upon
receiving the report of the engineers who made the preliminary survey.
The estimated cost ran towards a quarter of a billion, four times the
capital stock of the company; and there were not lacking those who
pointed out that the Erie Canal had cost more than double the original
appropriation made for it.
The situation was aggravated for Baltimore by the fact that Maryland and
Virginia were willing to take half a loaf if they could not get a whole
one: in other words, they were willing to build the canal up the Potomac
to Cumberland and stop there. Baltimore, even if linked to this partial
scheme, would lose her water connection with the West, the one prized
asset which the project had held out, and her Potomac Valley rivals
would, on this contracted plan, be in a particularly advantageous
position to surpass her. But the last blow was yet to come. Engineers
reported that a lateral canal connecting the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay
was not feasible. It was consequently of little moment whether the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal could be built across the Alleghanies or not,
for, even if it could have been carried through the Great Plains or to
the Pacific, Baltimore was, for topographical reasons, out of the
running.
The men of Baltimore now gave one of the most striking illustrations of
spirit and pluck ever exhibited by the people of any city. They refused
to accept defeat. If engineering science held a means of overcoming the
natural disadvantages of their position, they were determined to adopt
that means, come what would of hardship, difficulty, and expenditure. If
roads and canals would not serve the city on the Chesapeake, what of the
railroad on which so many experiments were being made in England?
The idea of controlling the trade of the West by railroads was not new.
As early as February, 1825, certain astute Pennsylvanians had advocated
building a railroad to Pittsburgh instead of a canal, and in a memorial
to the Legislature they had set forth the theory that a railroad could
be built in one-third of the time and could be operated with one-third
of the number of employees required by a canal, that it would never be
frozen, and that its cost of construction would be less. But these
arguments did not influence the majority, who felt that to follow the
line of least resistance and to do as others had done would involve the
least hazard. But Baltimore, with her back against the wall, did not
have the alternative of a canal. It was a leap into the unknown for her
or commercial stagnation.
It is regrettable that, as Baltimore began to break this fresh track,
she should have had political as well as physical and mechanical
obstacles to overcome. The conquest of the natural difficulties alone
required superhuman effort and endurance. But Baltimore had also to
fight a miserable internecine warfare in her own State, for Maryland
immediately subscribed half a million to the canal as well as to the
newly formed Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In rival pageants, both
companies broke ground on July 4, 1828, and the race to the Ohio was on.
The canal company clung doggedly to the idle belief that their
enterprise was still of continental proportions, since it would connect
at Cumberland with the Cumberland Road. This exaggerated estimate of the
importance of the undertaking shines out in the pompous words of
President Mercer, at the time when construction was begun:
There are moments in the progress of time, which are counters of whole
ages. There are events, the monuments of which, surviving every other
memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to whose history they
belong, after all other vestiges of its glory have disappeared from the
globe. At such a moment have we now arrived.
This oracular language lacks the simple but winning straightforwardness
of the words which Director Morris uttered on the same day near
Baltimore and which prove how distinctly Western the new railway project
was held to be:
We are about opening a channel through which the commerce of the mighty
country beyond the Allegheny must seek the ocean--we are about affording
facilities of intercourse between the East and West, which will bind the
one more closely to the other, beyond the power of an increased
population or sectional differences to disunite.
The difficulties which faced the Baltimore enthusiasts in their task of
keeping their city "on the map" would have daunted men of less heroic
mold. Every conceivable trial and test which nature and machinery could
seemingly devise was a part of their day's work for twelve
years--struggles with grades, locomotives, rails, cars. As Rumsey,
Fitch, and Fulton in their experiments with boats had floundered
despondently with endless chains, oars, paddles, duck's feet, so now
Thomas and Brown in their efforts to make the railroad effective
wandered in a maze of difficulties testing out such absurd and
impossible ideas as cars propelled by sails and cars operated by horse
treadmills. By May, 1830, however, cars on rails, running by "brigades"
and drawn by horses, were in operation in America. It was only in this
year that in England locomotives were used with any marked success on
the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad; yet in August of this year Peter
Cooper's engine, Tom Thumb, built in Baltimore in 1829, traversed the
twelve miles between that city and Ellicott's Mills in seventy-two
minutes. Steel springs came in 1832, together with car wheels of
cylindrical and conical section which made it easier to turn curves.
The railroad was just beginning to master its mechanical problems when a
new obstacle confronted it in the Potomac Valley. It could not cross
Maryland to the Cumberland mountain gateway unless it could follow the
Potomac. But its rival, the canal, had inherited from the old Potomac
Company the only earthly asset it possessed of any value--the right of
way up the Maryland shore. Five years of quarreling now ensued, and the
contest, though it may not have seriously delayed either enterprise,
aroused much bitterness and involved the usual train of lawsuits and
injunctions.
In 1833 the canal company yielded the railroad a right of way through
the Point of Rocks--the Potomac chasm through the Blue Ridge wall, just
below Harper's Ferry--on condition that the railroad should not build
beyond Harper's Ferry until the canal was completed to Cumberland. But
probably nothing but the financial helplessness of the canal company
could have brought a solution satisfactory to all concerned. A
settlement of the long quarrel by compromise was the price paid for
state aid, and, in 1835 Maryland subsidized to a large degree both canal
and railroad by her famous eight million dollar bill. The railroad
received three millions from the State, and the city of Baltimore was
permitted to subscribe an equal amount of stock. With this support and a
free right of way, the railroad pushed on up the Potomac. Though delayed
by the financial disasters of 1837, in 1842 it was at Hancock; in 1851,
at Piedmont; in 1852, at Fairmont; and the next year it reached the Ohio
River at Wheeling.
Spurred by the enterprise shown by these Southerners, Pennsylvania and
New York now took immediate steps to parallel their own canals by
railways. The line of the Union Canal in Pennsylvania was paralleled by
a railroad in 1834, the same year in which the Allegheny Portage Railway
was constructed. New York lines reached Buffalo in 1842. The
Pennsylvania Railroad, which was incorporated in 1846, was completed to
Pittsburgh in 1854.
It is thus obvious that, with the completion of these lines and the
building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway through the "Sapphire
Country" of the Southern Alleghanies, the new railway era pursued its
paths of conquest through the very same mountain passageways that had
been previously used by pack-horseman and Conestoga and, in three
instances out of four, by the canal boat. If one motors today in the
Juniata Valley in Pennsylvania, he can survey near Newport a scene full
of meaning to one who has a taste for history. Traveling along the
heights on the highway that was once the red man's trail, he can enjoy a
wide prospect from this vantage point. Deep in the valley glitters the
little Juniata, route of the ancient canoe and the blundering barge.
Beside it lies a long lagoon, an abandoned portion of the Pennsylvania
Canal. Beside this again, as though some monster had passed leaving a
track clear of trees, stretches the right of way of the first
"Pennsylvania," and a little nearer swings the magnificent
double-tracked bed of the railroad of today. Between these lines of
travel may be read the history of the past two centuries of American
commerce, for the vital factors in the development of the nation have
been the evolution of transportation and its manifold and far-reaching
influence upon the expansion of population and commerce and upon the
rise of new industries.
Thus all the rivals in the great contest for the trade of the West
speedily reached their goal, New York with the Erie and the New York
Central, and Pennsylvania and Maryland with the Pennsylvania and the
Baltimore and Ohio. But what of this West for whose commerce the great
struggle was being waged? When the railheads of these eager Atlantic
promoters were laid down at Buffalo on Lake Erie and at Pittsburgh on
the Ohio they looked out on a new world. The centaurs of the Western
rivers were no less things of the far past than the tinkling bells borne
by the ancient ponies of the pack-horse trade. The sons of this new West
had their eyes riveted on the commerce of the Great Lakes and the
Mississippi Valley. With road, canal, steamboat, and railway, they were
renewing the struggle of their fathers but for prizes greater than their
fathers ever knew.
New York again proved the favored State. Her Mohawk pathway gave her
easiest access to the West and here, at her back door on the Niagara
frontier, lay her path by way of the Great Lakes to the North and the
Northwest.
CHAPTER X
The Pathway of the Lakes
As one stands in imagination at the early railheads of the West--on the
Ohio River at the end of the Cumberland Road, or at Buffalo, the
terminus of the Erie Canal--the vision which Washington caught breaks
upon him and the dream of a nation made strong by trans-Alleghany routes
of commerce. Link by link the great interior is being connected with the
sea. Behind him all lines of transportation lead eastward to the cities
of the coast. Before him lies the giant valley where the Father of
Waters throws out his two splendid arms, the Ohio and the Missouri, one
reaching to the Alleghanies and the other to the Rockies. Northward, at
the end of the Erie Canal, lies the empire of the Great Lakes, inland
seas that wash the shores of a Northland having a coastline longer than
that of the Atlantic from Maine to Mexico.
Ships and conditions of navigation were much the same on the lakes as on
the ocean. It was therefore possible to imagine the rise of a coasting
trade between Illinois and Ohio as profitable as that between
Massachusetts and New York. Yet the older colonies on the Atlantic had
an outlet for trade, whereas the Great Lakes had none for craft of any
size, since their northern shores lay beyond the international boundary.
If there had been danger from Spain in the Southwest, what of the danger
of Canada's control of the St. Lawrence River and of the trade of the
Northwest through the Welland Canal which was to join Lake Ontario to
Lake Erie? But in those days the possibility of Canadian rivalry was not
treated with great seriousness, and many men failed to see that the West
was soon to contain a very large population. The editor of a newspaper
at Munroe, New York, commenting in 1827 on a proposed canal to connect
Lake Erie with the Mississippi by way of the Ohio, believed that the
rate of Western development was such that this waterway could be
expected only "some hundred of years hence." Even so gifted a man as
Henry Clay spoke of the proposed canal between Lake Michigan and Lake
Superior in 1825 as one relating to a region beyond the pale of
civilization "if not in the moon." Yet in twenty-five years Michigan,
which had numbered one thousand inhabitants in 1812, had gained two
hundredfold, and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had their hundreds of
thousands who were clamoring for ways and means of sending their surplus
products to market.
Early in the century representatives of the Fulton-Livingston monopoly
were at the shores of Lake Ontario to prove that their steamboats could
master the waves of the inland sea and serve commerce there as well as
in tidewater rivers. True, the luckless Ontario, built in 1817 at
Sackett's Harbor, proved unseaworthy when the waves lifted the shaft of
her paddle wheels off their bearings and caused them to demolish the
wooden covering built for their protection; but the Walk-in-the-Water,
completed at Black Rock (Buffalo) in August, 1818, plied successfully as
far as Mackinac Island until her destruction three years later. Her
engines were then inherited by the Superior of stronger build, and with
the launching of such boats as the Niagara, the Henry Clay, and the
Pioneer, the fleet builders of Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit proved
themselves not unworthy fellow-countrymen of the old seafarers of Salem
and Philadelphia.
But how were cargoes to reach these vessels from the vast regions beyond
the Great Lakes? Those thousands of settlers who poured into the
Northwest had cargoes ready to fill every manner of craft in so short a
space of time that it seems as if they must have resorted to arts of
necromancy. It was not magic, however, but perseverance that had
triumphed. The story of the creating of the main lakeward-reaching
canals is long and involved. A period of agitation and campaigning
preceded every such undertaking; and when construction was once begun,
financial woes usually brought disappointing delays. When a canal was
completed after many vicissitudes and doubts, traffic overwhelmed every
method provided to handle it: locks proved altogether too small; boats
were inadequate; wharfs became congested; blockades which occurred at
locks entailed long delay. In the end only lines and double lines of
steel rails could solve the problem of rapid and adequate
transportation, but the story of the railroad builders is told
elsewhere. ¹
¹ See The Railroad Builders, by John Moody (in The Chronicles of
America).
Ohio and Illinois caught the canal fever even before the Erie Canal was
completed, and the Ohio Canal and the Illinois-Michigan Canal saw
preliminary surveying done in 1822 and 1824 respectively. Ohio
particularly had cause to seek a northern outlet to Eastern markets by
way of Lake Erie. The valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami rivers
were producing wheat in large quantities as early as 1802, when Ohio was
admitted to the Union. Flour which brought $3.50 a barrel in Cincinnati
was worth $8 in New York. There were difficulties in the way of
transportation. Sometimes ice prevented produce and merchandise from
descending the Ohio to Cincinnati. At other times merchants of that city
had as many as a hundred thousand barrels awaiting a rise in the river
which would make it possible for boats to go over the falls at
Louisville. As these conditions involved a delay which often seemed
intolerable, the project to build canals to Lake Erie met with generous
acclaim. A northward route, though it might be blocked by ice for a few
months each winter, had an additional value in the eyes of numerous
merchants whose wheat, sent in bulk to New Orleans, had soured either in
the long delay at Louisville or in the semi-tropical heat of the
Southern port.
The Ohio Legislature in 1822 authorized the survey of all possible
routes for canals which would give Ohio an outlet for its produce on
Lake Erie. The three wheat zones which have been mentioned were favored
in the proposed construction of two canals which, together, should
satisfy the need of increased transportation: the Ohio Canal to connect
Portsmouth on the Ohio River with Cleveland on Lake Erie and to traverse
the richest parts of the Scioto and Muskingum valleys, and to the west
the Miami Canal to pierce the fruitful Miami and Maumee valleys and join
Cincinnati with Toledo. De Witt Clinton, the presiding genius of the
Erie Canal, was invited to Ohio to play godfather to these northward
arteries which should ultimately swell the profits of the commission
merchants of New York City, and amid the cheers of thousands he lifted
the first spadefuls of earth in each undertaking.
The Ohio Canal, which was opened in 1833, had a marked effect upon the
commerce of Lake Erie. Before that date the largest amount of wheat
obtained from Cleveland by a Buffalo firm had been a thousand bushels;
but in the first year of its operation the Ohio Canal brought to the
village of Cleveland over a quarter of a million bushels of wheat, fifty
thousand barrels of flour, and over a million pounds of butter and lard.
In return, the markets of the world sent into Ohio by canal in this same
year thirty thousand barrels of salt and above five million pounds of
general merchandise.
Ever since the time when the Erie Canal was begun, Canadian statesmen
had been alive to the strong bid New York was making for the trade of
the Great Lakes. Their answer to the Erie Canal was the Welland Canal,
built between 1824 and 1832 and connecting Lake Erie with Lake Ontario
by a series of twenty-seven locks with a drop of three hundred feet in
twenty-six miles. This undertaking prepared the way for the subsequent
opening of the St. Lawrence canal system (183 miles) and of the Rideau
system by way of the Ottawa River (246 miles). There was thus provided
an ocean outlet to the north, although it was not until 1856 that an
American vessel reached London by way of the St. Lawrence.
With the Hudson and the St. Lawrence in the East thus competing for the
trade of the Great Lakes, it is not surprising that the call of the
Mississippi for improved highways was presently heard. From the period
of the War of 1812 onward the position of the Mississippi River in
relation to Lake Michigan was often referred to as holding possibilities
of great importance in the development of Western commerce. Already the
old portage-path links between the Fox and Wisconsin and the Chicago and
Illinois rivers had been worn deep by the fur traders of many
generations, and with the dawning of the new era enthusiasts of Illinois
were pointing out the strategic position of the latter route for a great
trade between Lake Michigan and the Gulf of Mexico. Thus the wave of
enthusiasm for canal construction that had swept New York and Ohio now
reached Indiana and Illinois. Indian ownership of land in the latter
State for a moment seemed to block the promotion of the proposed
Illinois and Michigan Canal, but a handsome grant of a quarter of a
million acres by the Federal Government in 1827 came as a signal
recognition of the growing importance of the Northwest; and an
appropriation for the lighting and improving of the harbor of the little
village of Chicago was hailed by ardent promoters as sure proof that the
wedding of Lake Michigan and the Mississippi was but a matter of months.
All the difficulties encountered by the advocates of earlier works of
this character, in the valleys of the Potomac, the Susquehanna, and the
Mohawk, were the portion of these dogged promoters of Illinois. Here, as
elsewhere, there were rival routes and methods of construction,
opposition of jealous sections not immediately benefited, estimates
which had to be reconsidered and augmented, and so on. The land grants
pledged to pay the bonds were at first of small value, and their advance
in price depended on the success of the canal itself, which could not be
built--unless the State underwrote the whole enterprise--if the lands
were not worth the bonds. Thus the argument ran in a circle, and no one
could foresee the splendid traffic and receipts from tolls that would
result from the completed canal.
The commissioners in charge of the project performed one interesting
service in these early days by putting Chicago on the map; but the two
terminals, Ottawa on the Illinois and Chicago on Lake Michigan--both
plotted in 1830--were very largely figures of speech at that time. The
day of miracles was at hand, however, for the little town of one hundred
people at the foot of Lake Michigan. The purchase of the lands of the
Potawatomies, the Black Hawk War in 1832, which brought steamboats to
Chicago for the first time, and the decision of Illinois in 1836 to
pledge her good name in favor of the Illinois and Michigan Canal made
Chicago a city of four thousand people by the panic year of 1837. So
absorbed were these Chicago folk in the building of their canal and in
wresting from their lake firm foothold for a city (reclaiming four
hundred feet of lake bed in two years) that the panic affected their
town less than it did many a rival. Although the canal enterprise came
to an ominous pause in 1842, after the expenditure of five millions, the
pledge of the State stood the enterprise in good stead. Local
financiers, together with New York and Boston promoters, advanced about
a quarter of a million, while French and English bankers, notably Baring
Brothers, contributed about three-quarters of a million. With this
assistance the work was carried to a successful ending. On April 10,
1848, the first boat passed over the ninety-mile route from Chicago to
Ottawa, and the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin were united by
this Erie Canal of the West. Though its days of greatest value were soon
over, no one can exaggerate the importance of this waterway in the
growth and prosperity of Chicago between 1848 and 1860. By 1857 Chicago
was sending north and south annually by boat over twenty million bushels
of wheat and corn.
The awakening of the lands behind Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake
Michigan brought forth innumerable demands for roads, canals, and
railways to the ports of Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Milwaukee,
and Chicago. There were actually hundreds of these enterprises
undertaken. The development of the land behind Lake Superior was
particularly spectacular and important, not only because of its general
effect on the industrial world but also because out of it came the St.
Mary's River Ship Canal. Nowhere in the zone of the Great Lakes has any
region produced such unexpected changes in American industrial and
commercial life as did the region of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota
contributory to Lake Superior. If, as the story goes, Benjamin Franklin
said, when he drew at Paris the international boundary line through Lake
Superior, that this was his greatest service to America, he did not
exaggerate. The line running north of Isle Royale and thence to the Lake
of the Woods gave the United States the lion's share of that great
inland seaboard and the inestimably rich deposits of copper and iron
that have revolutionized American industry.
From earliest days rumors of deposits of bright copper in the land
behind Lake Superior had been reported by Indians to fur traders who in
turn had passed the story on to fur company agents and thus to the
outside world. As a result of her "Toledo War"--as her boundary dispute
was called--Michigan had reluctantly accepted the northern peninsula
lying between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan in lieu of the strip of
Ohio territory which she believed to be hers. If Michigan felt that she
had lost by this compromise, her state geologist, Douglass Houghton,
soon found a splendid jewel in the toad's head of defeat, for the report
of his survey of 1840 confirmed the story of the existence of large
copper deposits, and the first rush to El Dorado followed. Amid the
usual chaos, conflict, and failure incident to such stampedes, order and
system at last triumphed and the richest copper mines of the New World
were uncovered. Then came the unexpected finding of the mammoth iron-ore
beds by William A. Burt, inventor of the solar compass. The circumstance
of this discovery is of such national importance that a contemporary
description by a member of Burt's party which was surveying a line near
Marquette, Michigan, is worth quoting:
I shall never forget the excitement of the old gentleman when viewing
the changes of the variation. He kept changing his position to take
observations, all the time saying "How would they survey this country
without my compass" and "What could be done here without my compass." At
length the compassman called for us all to "come and see a variation
which will beat them all." As we looked at the instrument, to our
astonishment, the north end of the needle was traversing a few degrees
to the south west. Mr. Burt called out "Boys, look around and see what
you can find." We all left the line, some going to the east, some going
to the west, and all of us returned with specimens of iron ore.
But it was not enough that this Aladdin's Land in the Northwest should
revolutionize the copper and steel industry of the world, for as soon as
the soil took to its bosom an enterprising race of agriculturists it
bade fair to play as equally important a part in the grain industry.
Copper and iron no less came out of the blue of this cold northern
region than did the mighty crops of Minnesota wheat, corn, and oats. In
the decade preceding the Civil War the export of wheat from Lake
Superior rose from fourteen hundred bushels to three and a quarter
millions of bushels, while in 1859 nearly seven million bushels of corn
and oats were sent out to the world.
The commerce of Lake Superior could not await the building of a canal
around the foaming rapids of the St. Mary's River, its one outlet to the
lower lakes. In the decade following the discovery of copper and iron
more than a dozen ships, one even of as much as five hundred tons, were
hauled bodily across the portage between Lake Huron and Lake Superior.
The last link of navigation in the Great Lake system, however, was made
possible in 1852 by a grant by Congress of 750,000 acres of Michigan
land. Although only a mile in length, the work proved to be of unusual
difficulty since the pathway for the canal had to be blasted throughout
practically its whole length out of solid rock. It was completed in
1855, and the princely empire "in the moon" was in a position to make
its terms with the coal fields of Pennsylvania and to usher in the iron
age of transportation and construction.
It is only in the light of this awakening of the lands around the Great
Lakes that one can see plainly the task which fell to the lot of the
successors of the frail Walk-in-the-Water and sturdier Superior of the
early twenties. For the first fifteen years the steamboat found its
mission in carrying the thousands of emigrants pouring into the
Northwest, a heterogeneous multitude which made the Lake Erie boats
seem, to one traveler at least, filled with "men, women and children,
beds, cradles, kettles, and frying pans." These craft were built after
the pattern of the Walk-in-the-Water--side-wheelers with a steering
wheel at the stern. No cabins or staterooms on deck were provided; and
amid such freight as the thriving young towns provided were to be found
the twenty or thirty cords of wood which the engines required as fuel.
The second period of steamboating began with the opening of the Ohio
Canal and the Welland Canal about 1834 and extended another fifteen
years to the middle of the century, when it underwent a transformation
owing to the great development of Chicago, the completion of the
Illinois and Michigan and St. Mary's canals, and the new railways. This
second period was marked by the building of such steamers as the
Michigan, the Great Western, and the Illinois. These were the first
boats with an upper cabin and were looked upon with marked suspicion by
those best acquainted with the severe storms upon the Great Lakes. The
Michigan, of 475 tons, built by Oliver Newberry at Detroit in 1833, is
said to have been the first ship of this type. These boats proved their
seaworthiness and caused a revolution in the construction of lake craft.
Later in this period freight transportation saw an equally radical
advance with the building of the first propellers. The sloop-rigged
Vandalia, built by Sylvester Doolittle at Oswego on Lake Ontario in
1841-42, was the first of the propeller type and was soon followed by
the Hercules, the Samson, and the Detroit.
One very great handicap in lake commerce up to this time had been the
lack of harbors. Detroit alone of the lake ports was distinctly favored
in this respect. The harbors of Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and
Chicago were improved slowly, but it was not until the great Chicago
convention of 1846 that the nation's attention was focused on the needs
of Western rivers and harbors, and there dawned a new era of lighthouses
and buoys, breakwaters and piers, and dredged channels. Another handicap
to the volume of business which the lake boats handled in the period
just previous to the Civil War was the inadequacy of the feeders, the
roads, riverways, and canals. The Erie Canal was declared too small
almost before the cries of its virulent opponents had died away, and the
enlargement of its locks was soon undertaken. The same thing proved true
of the Ohio and Illinois canals. The failure of the Welland Canal was
similarly a very serious handicap. Although its locks were enlarged in
1841, it was found by 1850 that despite the improvements it could not
admit more than about one-third of the grain-carrying boats, while only
one in four of the new propellers could enter its locks.
As late as the middle forties men did not in the least grasp the
commercial situation which now confronted the Northwest nor could they
foresee that the land behind the Great Lakes was about to deluge the
country with an output of produce and manufactures of which the roads,
canals, ships, wharfs, or warehouses in existence could handle not a
tenth part. They did not yet understand that this trade was to become
national. It was well on in the forties before the Galena lead mines,
for instance, were given up as the terminal of the Illinois Central
Railroad and the main line was directed to Chicago. The middle of the
century was reached before the Lake Shore was considered at Cleveland or
Chicago as important commercially as the neighboring portage paths which
by the Ordinance of 1787 had been created "common highways forever
free." The idea of joining Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago with the
interior--an idea as old as the Indian trails thither--still dominated
men's minds even in the early part of the railroad epoch. Chicago
desired to be connected with Cairo, the ice-free port on the
Mississippi; and Cleveland was eager to be joined to Columbus and
Cincinnati. The enthusiastic railway promoters of Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois drew splendid plans for uniting all parts of those States by
railway lines; but the strategic position of the cities on the
continental alignment from New York to the Pacific by way of South Pass
never came within their horizon. The ten million dollar Illinois scheme
did not even contemplate a railway running eastward from Chicago. But
the future of the commerce of the Great Lakes depended absolutely upon
this development. There was no hope of any canals being able to handle
the traffic of the mighty empire which was now awake and fully conscious
of its power. The solution lay in joining the cities to each other and
to the Atlantic world markets by iron rails running east and west.
This railroad expansion is what makes the last decade before the Civil
War such a remarkable series of years in the West. In the half decade,
1850-55, the Baltimore and Ohio and Pennsylvania railways reached the
Ohio River; the links of the present Lake Shore system between Buffalo
and Chicago by way of Cleveland and Toledo were constructed; and the
Pennsylvania line was put through from Pittsburgh to Chicago. The place
of the lake country on the continental alignment and the imperial
situation of Chicago, and later of Omaha, came to be realized. The new
view transformed men's conceptions of every port on the Great Lakes in
the chain from Buffalo to Chicago. At a dozen southern ports on Ontario,
Erie, Huron, and Michigan, commerce now touched the swiftest and most
economical means of transcontinental traffic. This development
culminated in the miracle we call Chicago. In 1847 not a line of rail
entered the town; its population then numbered about twenty-five
thousand and its property valuation approximated seven millions. Ten
years later four thousand miles of railway connected with all four
points of the compass a city of nearly one hundred thousand people, and
property valuation had increased five hundred per cent. The growth of
Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit during this period was also phenomenal.
When the crisis of 1861 came, the service performed by the
Walk-in-the-Water and her successors was seen in its true light. The
Great Lakes as avenues of migration had played a providential part in
filling a northern empire with a proud and loyal race; from farm and
factory regiment on regiment marched forth to fight for unity; from
fields without number produce to sustain a nation on trial poured forth
in abundance; enormous quantities of iron were at hand for the casting
of cannon and cannon balls; and, finally, pathways of water and steel
were in readiness in the nick of time to carry these resources where
they would count tremendously in the four long years of conflict.
CHAPTER XI
The Steamboat And The West
Two great fields of service lay open before those who were to achieve by
steam the mastery of the inland waterways. On the one hand the cotton
kingdom of the South, now demanding great stores of manufactured goods,
produce, and machinery, was waiting to be linked to the valleys and
industrial cities of the Middle West; and, on the other hand, along
those great eastward and westward rivers, the Ohio and Missouri, lay the
commerce of the prairies and the Great Plains. But before the steamboat
could serve the inland commerce of the West, it had to be constructed on
new lines. The craft brought from the seaboard were of too deep draft to
navigate shallow streams which ran through this more level country.
The task of constructing a great inland river marine to play the dual
rôle of serving the cotton empire and of extending American migration
and commerce into the trans-Mississippi region was solved by Henry
Shreve when he built the Washington at Wheeling in 1816. Shreve was the
American John Hawkins. Hawkins, that sturdy old admiral of Elizabethan
days, took the English ship of his time, trimmed down the high stern and
poop decks, and cut away the deep-lying prow and stern, after the
fashion of our modern cup defenders, and in a day gave England the key
to sea mastery in the shape of a new ship that would take sail and
answer her rudder beyond anything the maritime world until then had
known. Shreve, like Hawkins, flagrantly ignoring the conventional wisdom
of his day and craft, built the Washington to sail on the water instead
of in it, doing away altogether with a hold and supplying an upper deck
in its place.
To few inventors, indeed, does America owe a greater debt of thanks than
to this Ohio River shipbuilder. A dozen men were on the way to produce a
Clermont had Fulton failed; but Shreve had no rival in his plan to build
a flat-bottomed steamboat. The remarkable success of his design is
attested by the fact that in two decades the boats built on his model
outweighed in tonnage all the ships of the Atlantic seaboard and Great
Lakes combined. Immediately the Ohio became in effect the western
extension of the great national highway and opened an easy pathway for
immigration to the eastern as well as the western lands of the
Mississippi Basin. The story goes that an old phlegmatic negro watched
the approach of one of the first steamboats to the wharf of a Southern
city. Like many others, he had doubted the practicability of this
new-fangled Yankee notion. The boat, however, came and went with ease
and dispatch. The old negro was converted. "By golly," he shouted,
waving his cap, "the Mississippi's got her Massa now."
The Mississippi had indeed found her master, but only by slow degrees
and after intervals of protracted rebellion did she succumb to that
master. Luckily, however, there was at hand an army of unusual men--the
"alligator-horses" of the flatboat era--upon whom the steamboat could
call with supreme confidence that they would not fail. Theodore
Roosevelt has said of the Western pioneers that they "had to be good and
strong--especially, strong." If these men upon whom the success of the
steamboat depended were not always good, they were beyond any doubt
behemoths in strength.
The task before them, however, was a task worthy of Hercules. The great
river boldly fought its conquerors, asking and giving no quarter, biding
its time when opposed by the brave but crushing the fearful on sight. In
one respect alone could it be depended upon--it was never the same. It
is said to bring down annually four hundred million tons of mud, but its
eccentricity in deciding where to wash away and where to deposit its
load is still the despair of river pilots. The great river could destroy
islands and build new ones overnight with the nonchalance of a child
playing with clay. It could shorten itself thirty miles at a single
lunge. It could move inland towns to its banks and leave river towns far
inland. It transferred the town of Delta, for instance, from three miles
below Vicksburg to two miles above it. Men have gone to sleep in one
State and have wakened unharmed in another, because the river decided in
the night to alter the boundary line. In this way the village of Hard
Times, the original site of which was in Louisiana, found itself
eventually in Mississippi. Were La Salle to descend the river today by
the route he traversed two and a half centuries ago, he would follow dry
ground most of the way, for the river now lies practically everywhere
either to the right or left of its old course.
If the Mississippi could perform such miracles upon its whole course
without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding
canal through its center called by pilots the "channel"? The flatboatmen
had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West
through this mazy, shifting channel, but as steamboats developed in size
and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman. He
needed to be. He must know the stage of water anywhere by a glance at
the river banks. He must guess correctly the amount of "fill" at the
head of dangerous chutes, detect bars "working down," distinguish
between bars and "sand reefs" or "wind reefs" or "bluff reefs" by night
as well as by day, avoid the "breaks" in the "graveyard" behind Goose
Island, navigate the Hat Island chutes, or find the "middle crossing" at
Hole-in-the-Wall. He must navigate his craft in fogs, in storms, in the
face of treacherous winds, on black nights, with thousands of dollars'
worth of cargo and hundreds of lives at stake.
As the golfer knows each knoll and tuft of grass on his home links, so
the pilot learned his river by heart. Said one of these pilots to an
apprentice:
You see this has got to be learned.... A clear starlight night throws
such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore
perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber because you
would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you
would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You
would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within
fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you
know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you
are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a
very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a
starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty
dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines only you know
better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid,
straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve
there) and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your
gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly,
gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray
mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well,
then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in
different ways.... You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn
it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape
that's in your head and never mind the one that's before your eyes. ¹
¹ Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, pp. 103-04.
No wonder that the two hundred miles of the Mississippi from the mouth
of the Ohio to St. Louis in time contained the wrecks of two hundred
steamboats.
The river trade reached its zenith between 1840 and 1860, in the two
decades previous to the Civil War, that period before the railroads
began to parallel the great rivers. It was a time which saw the rise of
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas, and which
witnessed the spread of the cotton kingdom into the Southwest. The story
of King Cotton's conquest of the Mississippi South is best told in
statistics. In 1811, the year of the first voyage which the New Orleans
made down the Ohio River, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi exported
five million pounds of cotton. In 1834 these same States exported almost
two hundred million pounds of cotton. To take care of this crop and to
supply the cotton country, which was becoming wealthy, with the
necessaries and luxuries of life, more and more steamboats were needed.
The great shipyards situated, because of the proximity of suitable
timber, at St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville became busy hives, not
since paralleled except by such centers of shipbuilding as Hog Island in
1917-18, during the time of the Great War. The steamboat tonnage of the
Mississippi Valley (exclusive of New Orleans) in the hustling forties
exceeded that of the Atlantic ports (exclusive of New York City) by
15,000 tons. The steamboat tonnage of New Orleans alone in 1843 was more
than double that of New York City.
Those who, if the old story is true, ran in fear to the hills when the
little New Orleans went puffing down the Ohio, in 1811, would have been
doubly amazed at the splendid development in the art of boat building,
could they have seen the stately Sultana or Southern Belle of the
fifties sweep swiftly by. After a period of gaudy ornamentation
(1830-40) steamboat architecture settled down, as has that of Pullman
cars today, to sane and practical lines, and the boats gained in length
and strength, though they contained less weight of timber. The value of
one of the greater boats of this era would be about fifty thousand
dollars. When Captain Bixby made his celebrated night crossing at Hat
Island a quarter of a million dollars in ship and cargo would have been
the price of an error in judgment, according to Mark Twain, ¹ a good
authority.
¹ Op. cit., p. 101.
The Yorktown, built in 1844 for the Ohio-Mississippi trade, was typical
of that epoch of inland commerce. Her length was 182 feet, breadth of
beam 31 feet, and the diameter of wheels 28 feet. Though her hold was 8
feet in depth, yet she drew but 4 feet of water light and barely over 8
feet when loaded with 500 tons of freight. She had 4 boilers, 30 feet
long and 42 inches in diameter, double engines, and two 24-inch
cylinders. The stateroom cabin had come in with Captain Isaiah Sellers's
Prairie in 1836, the first boat with such luxuries ever seen in St.
Louis, according to Sellers. The Yorktown had 40 private cabins. It is
interesting to compare the Yorktown with The Queen of the West, the
giant British steamer built for the Falmouth-Calcutta trade in 1839. The
Queen of the West had a length of 310 feet, a beam of 31 feet, a draft
of 15 feet, and 16 private cabins. The building of this great vessel led
a writer in the New York American to say: "It would really seem that we
as a nation had no interest in this new application of steam power, or
no energy to appropriate it to our own use." The statement--written in a
day when the Mississippi steamboat tonnage exceeded that of the entire
British Empire--is one of the best examples of provincial ignorance
concerning the West.
On these steamboats there was a multiplicity of arrangements and
equipments for preventing and for fighting fire. One of the innovations
on the new boats in this particular was the substitution of wire for the
combustible rope formerly used to control the tiller, so that even in
time of fire the pilot could "hold her nozzle agin' the bank." Much of
the great loss of life in steamboat fires had been due to the
tiller-ropes being burned and the boats becoming unmanageable.
The arrival of the railroad at the head of the Ohio River in the early
fifties brought the East into an immediate touch with the Mississippi
Valley unknown before. But however bold railway engineers were in the
face of the ragged ranges of the Alleghanies, they could not then
out-guess the tricks of the Ohio, the Mississippi, or the Missouri, and
railway promoters could not afford to take chances on having their
stations and tracks unexpectedly isolated, if not actually carried away,
by swirling, yellow floods. The Mississippi, too, had been known at
times to achieve a width of seventy miles, and tributaries have
overflowed their banks to a proportionate extent. It was several decades
ere the Ohio was paralleled by a railway, and the Mississippi for long
distances even today has not yet heard the shrill cry of the locomotive.
So the steamboat entered its heyday and encountered little competition.
Until the Civil War the rivers of the West remained the great arteries
of trade, carrying grain and merchandise of every description southward
and bringing back cotton, rice, and sugar.
The rivalries of the great lines of packets established in these days of
the steamboat, however, equaled anything ever known in railway
competition, and, in the matter of fast time, became more spectacular
than anything of its kind in any line of transportation in our country.
With flags flying, boilers heated white with abundance of pine and
resin, and bold and skillful pilots at the steering wheels, no sport of
kings ever aroused the enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands to such a
pitch as did many of the old-time races northward from New Orleans.
The J. M. White and her performances stand out conspicuously in the
annals of the river. Her builder, familiarly known to a generation of
rivermen as Billy King, deserves to rank with Henry Shreve. Commissioned
in 1844 to build the J. M. White for J. M. Converse of St. Louis, with
funds supplied by Robert Chouteau of that city, King proceeded to put
into effect the knowledge which he had derived from a close study of the
swells made by steamboats when under way. When the boat was being built
in the famous shipyards at Elizabeth, on the Monongahela, the wheel
beams were set twenty feet farther back than was customary. Converse was
struck with this unheard-of radicalism in design, and balked; King was a
man given to few words; he was resolved to throw convention to the winds
and trust his judgment; he refused to build the boat on other lines.
Converse felt compelled to let Chouteau pass on the question; in time
the laconic answer came: "Let King put the beams where he pleases."
Thus the craft which Converse thought a monstrosity became known far and
wide for both its design and its speed. In 1844 the J. M. White made the
record of three days, twenty-three hours, and nine minutes between New
Orleans and St. Louis. ¹ Of course the secret of Billy King's success
soon became known. He had placed his paddle wheels where they would bite
into the swell produced by every boat just under its engines. He had
transformed what had been a handicap into a positive asset. It is said
that he attempted to shield his prize against competition by destroying
the model of the J. M. White, as well as to have refused large offers to
build a boat that would beat her. But it is said also that an exhibition
model of the boat was a cherished possession of E. M. Stanton, Secretary
of War, and that it hung in his office during Lincoln's administration.
¹ This performance is illustrated by the following comparative table
showing the best records of later years between New Orleans and St.
Louis, a distance estimated in 1844 as 1300 miles but in 1870 as 1218
miles, owing to the action of the river in shortening its course.
Year Boat Time
1844 J. M. White 3 d. 23 h. 9 m.
1849 Missouri 4 d. 19 h. --
1869 Dexter 4 d. 9 h. --
1870 Natchez 3 d. 21 h. 58 m.
1870 R. E. Lee 3 d. 18 h. 14 m.
The steamboat now extended its service to the West and North. The
ancient fur trade with the Indians of the upper Mississippi, the
Missouri, and the Arkansas, had its headquarters at St. Louis, whence
the notable band of men engaged in that trade were reaching out to the
Rockies. The roll includes Ashley, Campbell, Sublette, Manuel Lisa,
Perkins, Hempstead, William Clark, Labadie, the Chouteaus, and
Menard--men of different races and colors and alike only in their
energy, bravery, and initiative. Through them the village of St. Louis
had grown to a population of four thousand in 1819, when Major Long's
expedition passed up the Missouri in the first steamboat to ascend that
river. This boat, the Western Engineer, was built at Pittsburgh and was
modeled cunningly for its work. It was one of the first stern wheelers
built in the West; and the saving in width meant much on streams having
such narrow channels as the Missouri and the Platte, especially when
barges were to be towed. Then, too, its machinery, which was covered
over or boarded up, was shrouded in mystery. A fantastic figure
representing a serpent's open mouth contained the exhaust pipe. If the
New Orleans alarmed the population of the Ohio Valley, the sensation
caused among the red children of the Missouri at the sight of this
gigantic snake belching fire and smoke must have thoroughly satisfied
the whim of its designer.
The admission of Missouri to statehood and the independence of Mexico
mark the beginning of real commercial relations between St. Louis and
Santa Fé. In 1822 Captain William Becknell organized the first wagon
train which left the Missouri (at Franklin, near Independence) for the
long dangerous journey to the Arkansas and on to Santa Fé. In the
following year two expeditions set forth, carrying out cottons and other
drygoods to exchange for horses, mules, furs, and silver.
Despite the handicaps of Indian opposition and Mexican tariffs, the
Santa Fé trade became an important factor in the growth of St. Louis and
the Missouri River steamboat lines. In 1825 the pathway was "surveyed"
from Franklin to San Fernando, then in Mexico. This Santa Fé trade grew
from fifteen thousand pounds of freight in 1822 to nearly half a million
pounds twenty years later.
By 1826 steamboat traffic up the Missouri began to assume regularity.
The navigation was dangerous and difficult because the Missouri never
kept even an approximately constant head of water. In times of drought
it became very shallow, and in times of flood it tore its wayward course
open in any direction it chose. "Of all variable things in creation,"
wrote a Western editor, "the most uncertain are the action of a jury,
the state of a woman's mind, and the condition of the Missouri River." A
further handicap, and one which was unknown on the Ohio and rare on the
Mississippi, was the lack of forests to supply the necessary fuel. The
Missouri, it is true, had its cottonwoods, but in a green state they
were poor fuel, and along vast stretches they were not obtainable in any
quantity.
The steamboat linked St. Louis with that vital stretch of the river
lying between the mouth of the Kansas and the mouth of the Nebraska.
From this region the great Western trail ran on to California and
Oregon. In the early thirties Bonneville, Walker, Kelley, and Wyeth
successively essayed this Overland Trail by way of the Platte through
the South Pass of the Rockies to the Humboldt, Snake, and Columbia
rivers. From Independence on the Missouri this famous pathway led to
Fort Laramie, a distance of 672 miles; another 300-mile climb brought
the traveler through South Pass; and so, by way of Fort Bridger, Salt
Lake, and Sutter's Fort, to San Francisco. The route, well known by
hundreds of Oregon pioneers in the early forties, became a thoroughfare
in the eager days of the Forty-Niners. ¹
¹ For map see The Passing of the Frontier, by Emerson Hough (in The
Chronicles of America).
The earliest overland stage line to Great Salt Lake was established by
Hockaday and Liggett. After the founding of the famous Overland Stage
Company by Russell, Majors, and Waddell in 1858, stages were soon
ascending the Platte from the steamboat terminals on the Missouri and
making the twelve hundred miles from St. Joseph to Salt Lake City in ten
days. Stations were established from ten to fifteen miles apart, and the
line was soon extended on to Sacramento. The nineteen hundred miles from
St. Joseph to Sacramento were made in fifteen days, although the
government contract with the company for handling United States mail
allowed nineteen days. A host of employees was engaged in this exciting
but not very remunerative enterprise--station-agents and helpers,
drivers, conductors who had charge of passengers, in addition to mail
and express and road agents who acted as division superintendents. In
1862 the Overland Route was taken over by the renowned Ben Holliday, who
operated it until the railway was constructed seven years later. Freight
was hauled by the same company in wagons known as the "J. Murphy
wagons," which were made in St. Louis. These wagons went out from
Leavenworth loaded with six thousand pounds of freight each. A train
usually consisted of twenty-five wagons and was known, in the vernacular
of the plains, as a "bull-outfit"; the drivers were "bull-whackers"; and
the wagon master was the "bull-wagon boss."
The old story, however, was repeated again here on the boundless plains
of the West. The Western trails streaming out from the terminus of
steamboat traffic between Kansas City and Omaha had scarcely time to
become well known before the railway conquerors of the Atlantic and
Great Lakes regions were planning the conquest of the greater plains and
the Rockies beyond. The opening of the Chinese ports in 1844 turned
men's minds as never before to the Pacific coast. The acquisition of
Oregon within a few years and of California at the close of the Mexican
War opened the way for a newspaper and congressional discussion as to
whether the first railway to parallel the Santa Fé or the Overland Trail
should run from Memphis, St. Louis, or Chicago. The building of the
Union Pacific from Omaha westward assured the future of that city, and
it was soon joined to Chicago and the East by several lines which were
building toward Clinton, Rock Island, and Burlington.
But the construction of a few main lines of railway across the continent
could only partially satisfy the commercial needs of the West. True, the
overland trade was at once transferred to the railroad, but the enormous
equipment of stage and express companies previously employed in westward
overland trade was now devoted to joining the railway lines with the
vast regions to the north and the south. The rivers of the West could
not alone take care of this commerce and for many years these great
transportation companies went with their stages and their wagons into
the growing Dakota and Montana trade and opened up direct lines of
communication to the nearest railway. On the south the cattle industry
of Texas came northward into touch with the railways of Kansas.
Eventually lateral and trunk lines covered the West with their network
of lines and thus obliterated all rivalry and competition by providing
unmatched facilities for quick transportation.
In the last days previous to the opening of the first transcontinental
railway line a unique method of rapid transportation for mail and light
parcels was established when the famous "Pony Express" line was put into
operation between St. Joseph and San Francisco in 1860. By relays of
horsemen, who carried pouches not exceeding twenty pounds in weight, the
time was cut to nine days. The innovation was the new wonder of the
world for the time being and led to an outburst on the part of the
enthusiastic editor of the St. Joseph Free Democrat that deserves
reading because it breathes so fully the Western spirit of exultant
conquest:
Take down your map and trace the footprints of our quadrupedantic
animal: From St. Joseph, on the Missouri, to San Francisco, on the
Golden Horn--two thousand miles--more than half the distance across our
boundless continent; through Kansas, through Nebraska, by Fort Kearney,
along the Platte, by Fort Laramie, past the Buttes, over the Mountains,
through the narrow passes and along the steep defiles, Utah, Fort
Bridger, Salt Lake City, he witches Brigham with his swift
pony-ship--through the valleys, along the grassy slopes, into the snow,
into the sand, faster than Thor's Thialfi, away they go, rider and
horse--did you see them? They are in California, leaping over its golden
sands, treading its busy streets. The courser has unrolled to us the
great American panorama, allowed us to glance at the home of one million
people, and has put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes. Verily
the riding is like the riding of Jehu, the son of Nimshi for he rideth
furiously. Take out your watch. We are eight days from New York,
eighteen from London. The race is to the swift. ¹
¹ Quoted in Inman's The Great Salt Lake Trail, p. 171.
The lifetime of many and many a man has covered a period longer than
that interval of eighty-six years between 1783, when George Washington
had his vision of "the vast inland navigation of these United States,"
and the year 1869, when the two divisions of the Union Pacific were
joined by a golden spike at Promontory Point in Utah. In point of time,
those eighty-six years are as nothing; in point of accomplishment, they
stand unparalleled. When Washington's horse splashed across the
Youghiogheny in October, 1784, the boundary lines of the United States
were guarded with all the jealousy and provincial selfishness of
European kingdoms. But overnight, so to speak, these limitations became
no more than mere geometrical expressions. "Pennamite," "Erie," and
"Toledo" wars between the States, suggesting a world of bitterness and
recrimination, are remembered today, if at all, only by the cartoonist
and the playwright. The ancient false pride in mock values, so cherished
in Europe, has quite departed from the provincial areas of the United
States, and Americans can fly in a day, unwittingly, through many
States. Problems that would have cost Europe blood are settled without
turmoil in the solemn cloisters of that American "international
tribunal," the Supreme Court, and they appear only as items of passing
interest in our newspapers.
In unifying the nation the influence of the Supreme Court has been
priceless, for it has given to Americans, in place of the colonial or
provincial mind, a continental mind. But great is the debt of Americans
to the men who laid the foundations of interstate commerce. No antidote
served so well to counteract the poison of clannish rivalry as did their
enthusiasm and their constructive energy. These men, dreamers and
promoters, were building better than they knew. They thought to overcome
mountains, obliterate swamps, conquer stormy lakes, master great rivers
and endless plains; but, as their labors are judged today, the greater
service which these men rendered appears in its true light. They stifled
provincialism; they battered down Chinese Walls of prejudice and
separatism; they reduced the aimless rivalry of bickering provinces to a
businesslike common denominator; and, perhaps more than any class of
men, they made possible the wide-spreading and yet united Republic that
is honored and loved today.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The history of the early phase of American transportation is dealt with
in three general works. John Luther Ringwalt's Development of
Transportation Systems in the United States (1888) is a reliable summary
of the general subject at the time. Archer B. Hulbert's Historic
Highways of America, 16 vols. (1902-1905), is a collection of monographs
of varying quality written with youthful enthusiasm by the author, who
traversed in good part the main pioneer roads and canals of the eastern
portion of the United States; Indian trails, portage paths, the military
roads of the Old French War period, the Ohio River as a pathway of
migration, the Cumberland Road, and three of the canals which played a
part in the western movement, form the subject of the more valuable
volumes. The temptation of a writer on transportation to wander from his
subject is illustrated in this work, as it is illustrated afresh in
Seymour Dunbar's A History of Travel in America, 4 vols. (1915). The
reader will take great pleasure in this magnificently illustrated work,
which, in completer fashion than it has ever been attempted, gives a
readable running story of the whole subject for the whole country,
despite detours, which some will make around the many pages devoted to
Indian relations.
For almost every phase of the general topic books, monographs,
pamphlets, and articles are to be found in the corners of any great
library, ranging in character from such productions as William F.
Ganong's A Monograph of Historic Sites in the Province of New Brunswick
(Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Second
Series, vol. V, 1899) which treats of early travel in New England and
Canada, or St. George L. Sioussat's Highway Legislation in Maryland and
its Influence on the Economic Development of the State (Maryland
Geological Survey, III, 1899) treating of colonial road making and
legislation thereon, or Elbert J. Benton's The Wabash Trade Route in the
Development of the Old Northwest (Johns Hopkins University Studies in
Historical and Political Science, vol. XXI, 1903) and Julius Winden's
The Influence of the Erie Canal upon the Population along its Course
(University of Wisconsin, 1901), which treat of the economic and
political influence of the opening of inland water routes, to volumes of
a more popular character such as Francis W. Halsey's The Old New York
Frontier (1901), Frank H. Severance's Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier
(1903) for the North, and Charles A. Hanna's The Wilderness Trail, 2
vols. (1911), and Thomas Speed's The Wilderness Road (The Filson Club
Publications, vol. II, 1886) for Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky.
The value of Hanna's work deserves special mention.
For the early phases of inland navigation John Pickell's A New Chapter
in the Early Life of Washington (1856), is an excellent work of the
old-fashioned type, while in Herbert B. Adams's Maryland's Influence
upon Land Cessions to the United States (Johns Hopkins University
Studies in Historical and Political Science, Third Series, I, 1885) a
master-hand pays Washington his due for originating plans of
trans-Alleghany solidarity; this likewise is the theme of Archer B.
Hulbert's Washington and the West (1905) wherein is printed Washington's
Diary of September, 1784, containing the first and unexpurgated draft of
his classic letter to Harrison of that year. The publications of the
various societies for internal improvement and state boards of control
and a few books, such as Turner Camac's Facts and Arguments Respecting
the Great Utility of an Extensive Plan of Inland Navigation in America
(1805), give the student distinct impressions of the difficulties and
the ideals of the first great American promoters of inland commerce.
Elkanah Watson's History of the ... Western Canals in the State of New
York (1820), despite inaccuracies due to lapses of memory, should be
specially remarked.
For the rise and progress of turnpike building one must remember W.
Kingsford's History, Structure, and Statistics of Plank Roads (1852), a
reliable book by a careful writer. The Cumberland (National) Road has
its political influence carefully adjudged by Jeremiah S. Young in A
Political and Constitutional Study of the Cumberland Road (1904), while
the social and personal side is interestingly treated in county history
style in Thomas B. Searight's The Old Pike (1894). Motorists will
appreciate Robert Bruce's The National Road (1916), handsomely
illustrated and containing forty-odd sectional maps.
The best life of Fulton is H. W. Dickinson's Robert Fulton, Engineer and
Artist: His Life and Works (1913), while in Alice Crary Sutcliffe's
Robert Fulton and the "Clermont" (1909), the more intimate picture of a
family biography is given. For the controversy concerning the
Fulton-Livingston monopoly, note W. A. Duer's A Course of Lectures on
Constitutional Jurisprudence and his pamphlets addressed to Cadwallader
D. Colden. The life of that stranger to success, the forlorn John Fitch,
was written sympathetically and after assiduous research by Thompson
Westcott in his Life of John Fitch the Inventor of the Steamboat (1858).
For the pamphlet war between Fitch and Rumsey see Allibone's Dictionary.
The Great Lakes have not been adequately treated. E. Channing and M. F.
Lansing's The Story of the Great Lakes (1909) is reliable but deals very
largely with the routine history covered by the works of Parkman. J. O.
Curwood's The Great Lakes (1909) is stereotyped in its scope but has
certain chapters of interest to students of commercial development, as
has also The Story of the Great Lakes. The vast bulk of material of
value on the subject lies in the publications of the New York, Buffalo,
Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Chicago Historical Societies, whose
lists should be consulted. These publications also give much data on the
Mississippi River and western commercial development. S. L. Clemens's
Life on the Mississippi (in his Writings, vol. IX, 1869-1909) is
invaluable for its graphic pictures of steamboating in the heyday of
river traffic. A. B. Hulbert's Waterways of Western Expansion (Historic
Highways, vol. IX, 1903) and The Ohio River (1906) give chapters on
commerce and transportation. For the beginnings of traffic into the Far
West, H. Inman's The Old Santa Fé Trail (1897) and The Great Salt Lake
Trail (1914) may be consulted, together with the publications of the
various state historical societies of the trans-Mississippi States.
Various bibliographies on this general subject have been issued by the
Library of Congress. Seymour Dunbar gives a good bibliography in his A
History of Travel in America, 4 vols. (1915). The student will find
quantities of material in books of travel, in which connection he would
do well to consult Solon J. Buck's Travel and Description, 1765-1865
(Illinois State Historical Library Collections, vol. IX, 1914).
INDEX
A.
Adams, J. Q., and internal improvements, 145.
Albany, Old Bay Path to, 16; road to Baltimore, 58; Clermont's voyage
to, 113.
Alexandria (Va.), rival of New York City, 137.
Alleghanies, pathways across, 17-19, 116 et seq.
Allegheny Portage Railway, 151.
American, New York, quoted, 182.
Appalachian Mountains, pathways across, 15-21.
Arkansas, influence of river trade on, 180.
"Army" plan of occupying West, 4.
Ashley, fur trader, 186.
Audubon, J. J., description of barge journey, 72-73.
B.
Baily, Francis, journey in United States (1796-97), 81-98; quoted,
90-91.
Balcony Falls, trail between James and Great Kanawha Rivers at, 19.
Baltimore, road to Albany, 58; part in transportation development,
136-137, 143-151.
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 153; Washington's vision realized by, 10;
follows old trail, 18, 29; state appropriation, 148; contest with canal
company, 150-151; reaches Ohio, 151, 171.
Baltimore-Frederick Turnpike, 59.
Baltimore-Reisterstown Turnpike, 58-59, 143.
Baring Brothers contribute to canal work, 163.
Bay Path, see Old Bay Path.
Becknell, Captain William, organizes first wagon train for Sante Fé,
187.
Bedford, Fort, established, 50.
Bixby, Captain, at Hat Island, 181.
Black Hawk War (1832), 162.
Bonneville, Captain B. L. E., on Overland Trail, 189.
"Bonnyclabber Country," 86, 87.
Boone, Daniel, 19.
Bouquet, Colonel Henry, criticizes Washington, 50.
Boston and Albany Railroad, 13, 16.
Boulton and Watt of Birmingham, Fulton uses engine of, 110, 113.
Braddock's Road, 51.
Brissot, French traveler in America, 81, 83.
Broad River, trail on, 19.
Brown, Charles, builds hull of Clermont, 113.
Brown, George, and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 149.
Brownsville (Penn.) growth of, 26.
Bryan, Guy, of Philadelphia, 66.
Buffalo, demand for means of transportation, 164, 170; harbor
improvement, 169; growth, 172.
Buffalo-Utica Canal, 124; see also Erie Canal.
Bunting, "Red," stagecoach driver, 123.
Burt, W. A., discovers iron ore in Michigan, 165-166.
C.
Calhoun, J. C., and internal improvements, 145.
California, western trail to, 188; acquisition of, 191.
Campbell, fur trader, 186.
Canals, early projects, 37-38; inadequacy of, 157; in the West, 157 et
seq.; see also Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, Erie Canal, Welland Canal.
Catskill Turnpike, 16.
Céloron de Blainville sends English traders from Ohio country, 25-26.
Charleston (S. C.), trails to Tennessee from, 19.
Charleston (Wellsburg) made port of entry, 77.
Charlotte Dundas (steamboat), 109, 110.
Chastellux, Chevalier de, Washington's letter to, 6.
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, Washington's vision realized in, 10; plan
for, 132, 143, 144; Company formed, 145; engineering difficulties, 146;
state subscription, 148; contest with Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,
150-151.
Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, 19; Washington's vision realized in, 10;
follows old route, 152.
Chicago, harbor improvement, 161, 169; canal terminal, 162; growth,
162-163, 172; demand for means of transportation, 164, 170; convention
discusses rivers and harbors (1846), 169; Illinois Central Railroad to,
170.
Chickasaw Trail, 97.
Chillicothe (O.), grant to Zane at, 47.
China, influence on West of opening ports, 191.
Chiswell, Fort, "Warrior's Path" from, 19.
Choctaw Trail, 97.
Chouteau, Robert, 184.
Cincinnati, founded, 68; ship-building, 76, 180; made port of entry, 77;
see also Columbia.
Clark, William, fur trader, 186.
Clay, Henry, and internal improvements, 145; on Western canal project,
155.
Clermont (steamboat), 78, 113-114.
Cleveland, demand for means of transportation, 164, 170; harbor
improvement, 169; growth, 172.
Clinton, DeWitt, Memorial (1816), 127; and Ohio and Miami canals, 159.
Columbia (Cincinnati), port of entry, 74, 77; Baily at, 92; see also
Cincinnati.
Comet (steamboat), 78.
Conemaugh River, Kittanning Trail follows, 17.
Congress, Fitch appeals to, 106; appropriation for canal survey, 145.
Connecticut Path, 16.
Connecticut River, Old Bay Path, 15.
Connellsville (Penn.), growth of, 26.
Converse, J. M., 184.
Cooper, Peter, builds engine Tom Thumb, 150.
Cotton, influence on river navigation, 180.
Cowpens, description of inhabitants, 22-24.
Crawford, agent for Washington, letter to, 5.
Crisman, Jesse, owner of Hit or Miss, 140.
Cumberland (Md.), eastern terminus of Cumberland Road, 119.
Cumberland Gap, "Warrior's Path" through, 19; railroad through, 20.
Cumberland Road, 136; Washington's vision realized in, 10; building
authorized, 114-115; importance, 116; plan, 118-119; route, 119-120;
building of, 120-121; cost, 121; stage lines, 122-123; freight traffic,
123-124; extension to Missouri, 132; Baltimore and, 143-144;
bibliography, 199.
D.
Day, Sherman, quoted, 140.
Deane, Silas, plan for payment of Revolutionary War debt, 2-3.
Delaware Water Gap, 17.
Delta (La.), changed by Mississippi River, 177.
Detroit, Washington marks out commercial lines to, 9; port of entry, 74;
demand for transportation facilities, 164; harbor, 169; growth, 172.
Detroit (lake steamer), 169.
Dickens, Charles, cited, 100; describes canal boat journey, 140-141;
describes aerial railway, 141-142.
Doddridge, Notes, quoted, 27-28.
Doolittle, Sylvester, builds Vandalia, 168.
Duane (ship), 76-77.
Duquesne, Fort, 26, 28, 50.
E.
Enterprise (steamboat), 79.
"Era of Good Feeling," 60.
Erie (Penn.), as place of embarkation, 35; port of entry, 74.
Erie Canal, 35, 37, 58, 116-117; Washington foresees, 9, 12; work begun
(1817), 38, 128; Hawley writes challenge to New York concerning, 115;
state enterprise, 118, 124-128, 136; Hawley's original plan, 119;
building of, 129-131; completion, 132; locks enlarged, 169.
Erie Railroad, 153; Washington forecasts, 9-10; follows Indian trade
route, 17.
"Erie" war, 194.
Evans, Oliver, and steam propelled wagon, 102-103.
Everett, Edward, quoted, 12-13.
F.
Fallen Timber, battle of, 67.
Ferries, 46-47.
Fink, Mike, "the Snag," 64; "Snapping Turtle," 64.
Fitch, John, steamboat experiments, 12, 101-102, 103-105; petition to
Congress, 106-107; obtains monopoly from States, 106; Fulton and, 108.
Forbes, General John, captures Fort Duquesne, 26; breaks army road, 50.
Forman, Joshua, bill for Erie Canal project, 124.
Franklin, Benjamin, on making rivers navigable, 30; and international
boundary line, 164.
Frederick (Md.), trail from, 18.
Free Democrat, St. Joseph, quoted, 192-193.
Freeland, H., account of the Clermont, 113-114.
French as commercial rivals, 20.
Fulton, Robert, steamboat experiments, 12, 107-114; and Livingston,
108-112; on Erie Canal committee, 125; bibliography, 199.
Fur trade, French and, 20; with Illinois country, 66; headquarters at
St. Louis, 186.
G.
Gallatin, Albert, scheme of internal improvements, 114.
Geddes, James, engineer, 125.
Gibbons, Thomas, steamboat competitor of Ogden, 132.
Great Britain, steamboat experiments in, 109; Fulton imports engine
from, 111, 113.
Great Kanawha River, Washington outlines route by way of, 10; as trade
route, 19.
Great Lakes, Washington's vision concerning, 8; French on, 20;
navigation of, 154 et seq.
Great Meadows, Washington on, 8; Nemacolin's Path by, 18.
"Great Trail," 28.
Great Western (lake steamer), 168.
Greensburg (Penn.), growth of, 26.
Greenville, Treaty of, 67.
H.
Hamilton County (O.) organized, 68.
Hard Times (Miss.), location changed by Mississippi River, 177.
Hawkins, John, Shreve compared with, 175.
Hawley, Jesse, and Erie Canal, 115, 119.
Hazard, of Pennsylvania, 31; and Lehigh coal, 40.
Hempstead, fur trader, 186.
Henry Clay (steamboat), 156.
Hercules (lake freighter), 169.
Heydt, Jost, leads immigrants south, 49.
"Highland Trail," 17, 20.
Hit or Miss (canal boat), 140.
Hockaday and Liggett establish stage line to Great Salt Lake, 189.
Holliday, Ben, and Overland Route, 190.
Horses, pack, 21; in "Bonnyclabber Country," 86.
Hough, Emerson, The Passing of the Frontier, cited, 189 (note).
Houghton, Douglass, discovers copper in Michigan, 165.
Hudson River, Washington foresees joining to Great Lakes, 8; pathway
along, 15; see also Erie Canal.
I.
Illinois, trade with, 66; growth of population, 116, 156; canal fever,
157, 161; railway projects, 171; influence of river trade on, 180.
Illinois (lake steamer), 168.
Illinois Central Railroad, 170.
Illinois-Michigan Canal, 157-158, 161, 167, 168.
Illinois River, French on, 20.
Independence (Mo.), Overland Trail from, 189.
Indiana, migration to, 67; growth of population, 116, 156; canal
enthusiasm, 161; railway projects, 171; influence of river trade on,
180.
Indians, trails, 14, 18; pack-horse trade with, 21, 27.
Ingles ferry, 47.
Iowa, influence of river trade on, 180.
J.
J. M. White (river boat), 184, 185, 186.
James-Kanawha Turnpike, 10.
James River, 17; Washington's vision regarding, 8, 10; as trade route,
19.
Jefferson, Thomas, plan for settlement of West, 4.
June Bug, stagecoach line, 122.
Juniata River, Kittanning Trail along, 17, 152.
K.
Keever, Captain, builds steamboat on Ohio, 78.
Kent, Chancellor, and Erie Canal, 127, 128.
Kentucky, wagon road constructed to, 49-50; migration to, 67.
King, Billy, builder of the J. M. White, 184.
Kittanning Trail, 17, 25.
Knoxville (Tenn.), Baily reaches, 98.
L.
Labadie, fur trader, 186.
Lake Shore Railroad, 170, 171.
Lancaster (O.) grant to Zane at, 47.
Lancaster Turnpike, 35, 53-58.
Laramie, Fort, Overland Trail to, 189.
Lee, Arthur, on cost of transportation (1784), 66.
Lee, Henry, Washington writes to, 9.
Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, 39, 43.
Lehigh Coal Company, 42-43.
Lehigh Navigation Company, 42-43.
Lewis and Clark expedition, 12.
Liggett and Holliday run stage to Salt Lake, 189.
Ligonier (Penn.), growth of, 26.
Ligonier, Fort, 50.
Lisa, Manuel, fur trader, 186.
Livingston, R. R., and Fulton, 108-112; on Erie Canal committee, 125.
Long, Major, expedition up Missouri River, 186.
Louisiana cotton exports, 180.
Louisiana of Marietta (ship), 77.
Louisiana Purchase, 75, 77.
Louisville, importance and growth, 68-69; as river port, 73-74, 77;
shipbuilding, 180.
Ludlow, actor, sings The Hunters of Kentucky, 62-63.
M.
Mackinaw Island, port of entry, 74.
Marietta (O.), founded, 67-68; shipbuilding, 76; as port of entry, 77.
Maryland, Washington outlines trade routes for, 10; roads, 49, 53,
58-59; cotton grown in, 85; Cumberland Road, 119; canals, 136, 144;
Canal Company formed, 145; see also Baltimore.
Massac, Fort (Ill.), port of entry, 74; 75, 77; Baily at, 93.
Massachusetts, Old Bay Path, 16; roads, 44, 54-55.
Mauch Chunk (Penn.), coal from, 40.
Maynard and Morrison, trade with Illinois, 66.
Menard, fur trader, 186.
Mercer quoted, 148.
Miami Canal, 159.
Michigan, growth of population, 116, 156; plan for Erie Canal funds from
sale of land in, 117, 125; development, 164; "Toledo War," 164-165;
minerals, 165.
Michigan (lake steamer), 168.
Milwaukee, demand for transportation facilities, 164; harbor
improvement, 169.
Minnesota, development, 164.
Mirror, New York, prints The Hunters of Kentucky, 62.
Mississippi cotton exports, 180.
Mississippi River, Washington's vision of navigation on, 12; French on,
20; importance to commerce, 160; canal to connect with Lake Michigan,
161, 163; navigation, 176 et seq.; eccentricities, 177, 183.
Missouri, influence of river trade on, 180; admitted as State, 187.
Missouri River, navigation on, 186, 187, 188.
Mohawk River, route through Appalachians, 16.
Mohawk Trail, 16.
Mohawk Turnpike, 16.
Mohawk Valley, Washington and, 7.
Monongahela Farmer (ship), 76.
Monroe, James, Fulton writes to, 107, 110, 112; recommends congressional
aid for canals, 145.
Montreal, furs brought to, 20; rival of New York City, 125, 126.
Moody, John, The Railroad Builders, cited, 157 (note).
Morey, Samuel, inventor of stern-wheeler, 104, 109, 110.
Morgantown (Penn.), growth of, 26.
Morris, Gouverneur, of New York, 31, 36.
N.
Nashville (Tenn.), trails to, 19.
Natchez (Miss.), Baily at, 93, 97.
Natchez Trace, 96.
National, stagecoach line, 122.
Nemacolin Path, 18, 25.
Newberry, Oliver, of Detroit, builds Michigan, 168.
New Madrid, Baily at, 93.
New Orleans, made open port, 75; Baily at, 95; steamboat tonnage of
(1843), 181.
New Orleans (steamboat), 180, 181, 187.
New York (State), Washington foresees communication lines of, 9; canal
project, 35-38; roads, 44, 59; Livingston obtains steamboat monopoly,
109; steamboat grant to Livingston, Roosevelt and Fulton, 111;
railroads, 151, 153; see also Erie Canal.
New York Central Railroad, 153; Washington and, 9; follows Mohawk Trail,
16, 17.
New York City, Baily at, 84; Erie Canal and, 125, 126; tonnage compared
to that of river ports, 181.
Niagara, French at, 25.
Niagara (steamboat), 156.
Nickel Plate Railroad, 17.
Northwest, Deane's plan for, 2-3; navigation of Great Lakes, 154 et
seq.; immigration to, 167-168.
O.
Ogden, Aaron, vs. Gibbon, 132.
Ohio, migration to, 67; growth of population, 116, 156; and Cumberland
Road, 117; canals, 157-160; admitted as State (1802), 158; railroads,
171; influence of river trade on, 180.
Ohio and Lake Erie Company, 145.
Ohio Canal, 157, 159, 168, 169.
Ohio River, Washington and, 8, 12; access of French and English to, 25;
value of cargoes on (1800), 74; Baltimore and Ohio Railroad reaches
(1853), 151, 183; navigation, 180.
Old Bay Path, 15, 16.
Ontario (steamboat), 156.
Orange, Fort (Albany), 16; see also Albany.
Ordinance of 1787, 170.
Oregon, western trail to, 188; effect of acquisition on transportation,
191.
Orleans (steamboat), 78.
Ormsbee, of Connecticut, makes steamboat model, 104.
Ottawa (Ill.) canal terminal, 162.
Overland Stage Company, 189.
Overland Trail, 189, 191.
P.
Palmyra (Tenn.), as river port, 74.
Pedee River, 17.
"Pennamite" war, 194.
Pennsylvania, Washington and transportation in, 9, 10-11; canals, 33-35,
136; roads, 35, 44, 45, 48-49, 50, 53-54, 119-120; "Bonnyclabber
Country," 86, 87; and Great Lakes, 138; railways, 151.
Pennsylvania Canal, 132; Washington forecasts, 9; route, 139;
engineering achievement, 139-140.
Pennsylvania Railroad, 142, 153; Washington and, 9-10; follows Indian
trail, 29; incorporated (1846), 151; reaches Ohio River, 171.
Perkins, fur trader, 186.
Philadelphia, roads to, 48-49; meeting to protest against monopoly of
Lancaster Turnpike, 55; Baily at, 84; rival of New York City, 137.
Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Road Company, 53-54.
Philadelphia Road, 49.
Pickering plan of occupying West, 4.
Pike, Captain Z. M., 93.
Pioneer, stagecoach line, 122.
Pioneer (steamboat), 156.
Pitt, Fort, 28.
Pittsburgh, growth, 26, 67; trade with, 65-66, 66-67, 75; shipbuilding,
76; port of entry, 77; Baily reaches, 88.
Platt, Judge, and Erie Canal, 126, 127.
Pontiac's Rebellion, 26-27, 34.
"Pony Express," 192.
Potomac Canal Company, 143.
Potomac Company, 31-33, 138.
Potomac River, Washington's vision regarding, 8, 10; commerce on, 17-18.
Prairie (steamboat), 182.
Presq'Isle (Erie) recommended as place of embarkation, 35.
Prices in 1800, 92.
Putnam, General Rufus, advocates Pickering plan, 3-4.
Q.
Quebec, furs brought to, 20.
Queen of the West (British steamer), 182.
R.
Railroads, 134 et seq.; see also names of railroads.
Revolutionary War, plans for payment of debt of, 2-3.
Rhodes, Mayor of Philadelphia, 30.
Rideau canal system, 160.
Rivers and harbors, government policy of improvement, 12; Chicago
convention (1846), 169.
Roads, 44 et seq., 83; tolls, 59-60; see also Cumberland Road.
Robinson, Moncure, 139-140.
Roosevelt, Theodore, quoted, 176.
Rumsey, James, 12; general manager of Potomac Company, 32; steamboat
experiments, 101, 102, 103, 106; Virginia grants monopoly to, 106;
Fulton and, 108.
Russell, Majors, and Waddell found Overland Stage Company, 189.
Rutherfordton Trail, 19.
S.
Sacramento, stage line to, 189.
St. Clair (brig), 76.
St. Joseph (Mo.), stage line from, 189.
St. Lawrence canal system, 160.
St. Louis, shipbuilding, 180; headquarters for fur trade, 186; trade
with Santa Fé, 187.
St. Mary's River Ship Canal, 164, 167, 168.
Salt Lake City, stage line to, 189.
Samson (lake freighter), 169.
Sandusky, port of entry, 74.
San Francisco, Overland Trail to, 189.
San Lorenzo, Treaty of, 75.
Santa Fé, trade with, 187.
Santa Fé Trail, 191.
"Sapphire Country," 19, 152.
Saturday Advertiser, Liverpool, on the Duane, 76-77.
Schoph, J. D., crosses mountains in chaise, 66.
Schuylkill-Susquehanna Canal, 35.
Searight describes freight wagons on Cumberland Road, 123-124.
Sellers, Captain Isaiah, 182.
Shreve, Henry, builds double-decked steamboat, 79; invents flat-bottomed
steamboat, 175.
Society for Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation,
31, 34-35, 39, 54.
South, trade with, 65; demands for commerce, 174.
Southern Belle (steamboat), 181.
Southern Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, 29.
Southern Railway, 19.
Stanton, E. M., has model of J. M. White, 186.
Stephenson, Robert, on Pennsylvania Canal, 140.
Stevens, E. A., invents twin-screw propeller, 104.
Sublette, fur trader, 186.
Sultana (steamboat), 181.
Superior (steamboat), 156, 167.
Superior, Lake, copper and iron deposits near, 164; commerce from,
166-167.
Susquehanna River, Washington foresees joining to West, 8.
T.
Taverns, 56-57, 82-83.
Taylor, Acting-Governor of New York, and Erie Canal, 127, 128.
Tennessee, trails to, 19; cotton exports, 180.
Tennessee Path, Baily on, 96.
Thackeray, W. M., quoted, 135.
Thomas, P. E., and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 149.
Thompson, Chief Justice of New York, and Erie Canal, 127.
Toledo (O.), demand for transportation facilities, 164.
"Toledo War," 164-165, 194.
Tom Thumb, Peter Cooper's engine, 150.
Transportation, Conestoga wagons, 57-58, 86; steamboats, 100 et seq.;
stagecoaches, 122; "J. Murphy wagons," 190; see also Canals, Ferries,
Horses, Railroads, Roads.
Tupper, General Benjamin, 104.
Twain, Mark, cited, 181.
Tyson, Jonathan, 52.
U.
Unaka Mountains, see Alleghanies.
Union Canal, 35, 139, 151; see also Pennsylvania Canal.
Union Pacific Railroad, 191, 193.
Uniontown (Penn.), growth of, 26.
V.
Vandalia (lake freighter), 168.
Vesuvius (steamboat), 78.
Virginia, Washington's vision of trade routes for, 10; Indian trails,
18; roads, 44-45, 49, 119; negroes, 85; tobacco, 85; canals, 136, 144.
Virginia Road (Braddock's Road), 51.
W.
Walk-in-the-Water (steamboat), 132, 156, 167, 172.
"Warrior's Path," 19, 20.
Washington (D. C.), Baily at, 84, 85-86.
Washington, first double-decked steamboat, 79, 175.
Washington, Fort, 68.
Washington, George, vision of inland navigation, 4 et seq., 193;
doctrine of expansion, 6; journey to West, 7-9; letter to Harrison, 10,
53, 117, 127; Journal, 10; and river improvement, 31; president of
Potomac Company, 32; and army roads, 50; and crop rotation, 85; prophecy
regarding millstones, 87-88; Rumsey and, 100-101, 105-106.
Watauga, Fort, 19.
Waters, Dr., of New Madrid, builds schooner, 95.
Watson, Elkanah, of New York, 31, 33, 36, 37, 54.
Wayne, Anthony, 67.
Webster, Pelatiah, and settlement of Northwest, 3.
Weiser, Conrad, 26.
Welch, Sylvester, 139.
Welland Canal, 12, 155, 160, 168, 169.
Western Engineer (steamboat), 186.
Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, 31, 36-37.
Western Maryland Railway, 18.
Westfield River, Old Bay Path along, 16.
Westover, stagecoach driver, 122-123.
Wheeling, western terminus of Cumberland Road, 119.
White, of Pennsylvania, 31, 40, 43.
Wickham, Nathan, 49.
Wilderness Road, 47, 50.
Winchester (Va.), trail from, 18.
Wisconsin, development of, 164.
Woodworth, Samuel, The Hunters of Kentucky, 62-63; The Old Oaken Bucket,
62.
Y.
Yadkin River, trail on, 19.
Yates, Judge, and Erie Canal, 127.
Yoder, Jacob, 64-65.
York Road, 52.
Yorktown (steamboat), 181, 182.
Z.
Zane, Ebenezer, 47, 88.
Zanesville (O.), grants to Zane near, 47.
The Chronicles of America Series
1. The Red Man's Continent
by Ellsworth Huntington
2. The Spanish Conquerors
by Irving Berdine Richman
3. Elizabethan Sea-Dogs
by William Charles Henry Wood
4. The Crusaders of New France
by William Bennett Munro
5. Pioneers of the Old South
by Mary Johnson
6. The Fathers of New England
by Charles McLean Andrews
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by Maud Wilder Goodwin
8. The Quaker Colonies
by Sydney George Fisher
9. Colonial Folkways
by Charles McLean Andrews
10. The Conquest of New France
by George McKinnon Wrong
11. The Eve of the Revolution
by Carl Lotus Becker
12. Washington and His Comrades in Arms
by George McKinnon Wrong
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by Max Farrand
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by Henry Jones Ford
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by Allen Johnson
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by Edward Samuel Corwin
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by Ralph Delahaye Paine
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by Constance Lindsay Skinner
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by Frederic Austin Ogg
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by Frederic Austin Ogg
21. The Paths of Inland Commerce
by Archer Butler Hulbert
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by Constance Lindsay Skinner
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by Herbert Eugene Bolton
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by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
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by Stewart Edward White
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by Emerson Hough
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by William E. Dodd
28. The Anti-Slavery Crusade
by Jesse Macy
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by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
30. The Day of the Confederacy
by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
31. Captains of the Civil War
by William Charles Henry Wood
32. The Sequel of Appomattox
by Walter Lynwood Fleming
33. The American Spirit in Education
by Edwin E. Slosson
34. The American Spirit in Literature
by Bliss Perry
35. Our Foreigners
by Samuel Peter Orth
36. The Old Merchant Marine
by Ralph Delahaye Paine
37. The Age of Invention
by Holland Thompson
38. The Railroad Builders
by John Moody
39. The Age of Big Business
by Burton Jesse Hendrick
40. The Armies of Labor
by Samuel Peter Orth
41. The Masters of Capital
by John Moody
42. The New South
by Holland Thompson
43. The Boss and the Machine
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44. The Cleveland Era
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47. Theodore Roosevelt and His Times
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48. Woodrow Wilson and the World War
by Charles Seymour
49. The Canadian Dominion
by Oscar D. Skelton
50. The Hispanic Nations of the New World
by William R. Shepherd
Historic Highways of America
1. Paths of the Mound-Building Indians and Great Game Animals
2. Indian Thoroughfares
3. Washington's Road (Nemacolin's Path):
The First Chapter of the Old French War
4. Braddock's Road and Three Relative Papers
5. The Old Glade (Forbes) Road:
Pennsylvania State Road
6. Boone's Wilderness Road
7. Portage Paths: The Keys of the Continent
8. Military Roads of the Mississippi Basin:
The Conquest of the Old Northwest
9. Waterways of Westward Expansion:
The Ohio River and Its Tributaries
10. The Cumberland Road
11. Pioneer Roads and Experiences of Travelers: Volume I
12. Pioneer Roads and Experiences of Travelers: Volume II
13. The Great American Canals:
Volume I The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and Pennsylvania Canal
14. The Great American Canals:
Volume II The Erie Canal
15. The Future of Road-Making in America: A Symposium
16. Index
Archer Hulbert completed a fifteen-part series from 1902-1905 on the
historic highways of America, which he distilled into this one volume
for the Chronicles of America Series. Project Gutenberg offers thirteen
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fifteen volumes.
Transcriber's Notes
Introduction:
The Chronicles of America Series has two similar editions of each volume
in the series. One version is the Abraham Lincoln edition of the series,
a premium version which includes full-page pictures. A textbook edition
was also produced, which does not contain the pictures and captions
associated with the pictures, but is otherwise the same book. This book
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We have retained the original punctuation and spelling in the book, but
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whether the hyphen should be retained in transcription. The reasons
behind some of these decisions are itemized.
Detailed Notes Section:
Chapter 2
On Page 28, pack-saddles was hyphenated between two lines for spacing.
The word was used inside a quote, so prior references may not give us
the right transcription. However, it is the best information that we
have available. On page 22, packsaddle was not hyphenated and appeared
in the middle of a line. A word with the same prefix, pack-horse, was
consistently spelled with a hyphen. We transcribed the word without the
hyphen, because the evidence suggests that the author intended
packsaddles without the hyphen, but pack-horse and pack-horsemen with
the hyphen.
Chapter 3
On Page 32, stock-holders was hyphenated between two lines for spacing.
On page 41, stockholders was spelled without a hyphen. Also, on page 56,
stockholders was spelled without a hyphen. We transcribed the word
without the hyphen.
Chapter 4
On Page 57, stage-coach was hyphenated between two lines for spacing. In
several other instances, stagecoach was spelled without the hyphen. You
will find one instance of stage-coach with a hyphen, on page 135: it is
from quoted text. We transcribed the word without the hyphen.
Chapter 6
On Page 86, pack-horse was hyphenated between two lines for spacing. In
many other instances, pack-horse was spelled with the hyphen. We
transcribed the word with the hyphen.
Chapter 7
On Page 101, iron-shod was hyphenated between two lines for spacing.
There was no other use of the word in this book. We transcribed the word
without the hyphen.
On Page 109, stern-wheeler was hyphenated between two lines for spacing.
On the same page, stern-wheeler was used again, hyphenated, in the
middle of a line. We transcribed the word with the hyphen.
Index
On Page 210, stage-coach was hyphenated between two lines for spacing.
We transcribed the word without the hyphen. See the note in this section
under Chapter 4 for a further explanation.
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