The Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway | Page 6

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