The Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway | Page 7

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 oceangoing 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