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The Paths of Inland Commerce; a chronicle of trail, road, and waterway By: Archer Butler Hulbert (1873-1933) |
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A CHRONICLE OF TRAIL, ROAD, AND WATERWAY
By Archer B. Hulbert
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.
CONTENTS I. THE MAN WHO CAUGHT THE VISION
II. THE RED MAN'S TRAIL
III. THE MASTERY OF THE RIVERS
IV. A NATION ON WHEELS
V. THE FLATBOAT AGE
VI. THE PASSING SHOW OF 1800
VII. THE BIRTH OF THE STEAMBOAT
VIII. THE CONQUEST OF THE ALLEGHANIES
IX. THE DAWN OF THE IRON AGE
X. THE PATHWAY OF THE LAKES
XI. THE STEAMBOAT AND THE WEST BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
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.
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
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