The Paths of Inland Commerce
By Archer B. Hulbert
A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway
Volume 21 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys
Abraham Lincoln Edition
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1920
Copyright, 1920
by Yale University Press
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.
The Paths of Inland Commerce
Chapter Chapter Title Page
Preface vii
I. The Man Who Caught The Vision 1
II. The Red Man's Trail 14
III. The Mastery Of The Rivers 30
IV. A Nation On Wheels 44
V. The Flatboat Age 62
VI. The Passing Show Of 1800 81
VII. The Birth Of The Steamboat 100
VIII. The Conquest Of The Alleghanies 116
IX. The Dawn Of The Iron Age 134
X. The Pathway of the Lakes 154
XI. The Steamboat And The West 174
Bibliographical Note 197
Index 203
THE PATHS OF INLAND COMMERCE
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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. ¹
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. ² 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.
¹ 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.
² 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 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 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 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 ocean-going 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.