The Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway | Page 5

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