The Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway | Page 4

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 war.** 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.
* 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.
** 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