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veritable Slough of Despond
Everywhere, north and south, the early American road was a
veritable Slough of Despond. Watery pits were to be encountered
wherein horses were drowned and loads sank from sight. Frequently
traffic was stopped for hours by wagons which had broken down and
blocked the way. Thirteen wagons at one time were stalled on
Logan”s Hill on the York Road. Frightful accidents occurred in
attempting to draw out loads. Jonathan Tyson, for instance, in
1792, near Philadelphia saw a horse”s lower jaw torn off by the
slipping of a chain.

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Electric car vs Ferrari

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mystery to the average dweller on the Atlantic seaboard as the
elephant was to the blind men of Hindustan
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.

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vision
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.’

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certain respects the effort of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company to bridle the Lehigh and make it play its part in the
commercial development of Pennsylvania
No struggle for the mastery of an American river matches in
certain respects the effort of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company to bridle the Lehigh and make it play its part in the
commercial development of Pennsylvania. The failures and trials
of the promoters of this company were no less remarkable than
was the great success that eventually crowned the effort. In 1793
the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was organized and purchased some ten
thousand acres in the Mauch Chunk anthracite region, nine miles
from the Lehigh River. It then appropriated a sum of money to
build a road from the mines to the river in the expectation that
the State would improve the navigation of the waterway, for
which, it has already been noted, an appropriation had been made
in 1791, in accordance with the programme of the Society for
Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation. Nothing
was done, however, to improve the river, and the company, after
various attempts at shipping coal to Philadelphia, gave up the
effort and allowed the property, which was worth millions, to lie
idle. In 1807 the Lehigh Coal Mine Company, in another effort to
get its wares before the public, granted to Rowland and Butland,
a private firm, free right to operate one of its veins of coal;
but this operation also resulted in failure. In 1813 the company
made a third attempt and granted to a private concern a lease of
the entire property on the condition that ten thousand bushels of
coal should be taken to market annually. Difficulties immediately
made themselves apparent. No contractor could be found who would
haul the output to the Lehigh River for less than four dollars a
ton, and the man who accepted those terms lost money. Of five
barges filled at Mauch Chunk three went to pieces on the way to
Philadelphia. Although the contents of the other two sold for
twenty dollars a ton, the proceeds failed to meet expenses, and
the operating company threw up the lease.

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Washington
>From New York Baily returned to Baltimore and went on to
Washington. The records of all travelers to the site of the new
national capital give much the same picture of the countryside.
It was a land worn out by tobacco culture and variously described
as ‘dried up,’ ‘run down,’ and ‘hung out to dry.’ Even George
Washington, at Mount Vernon, was giving up tobacco culture and
was attempting new crops by a system of rotation. Cotton was
being grown in Maryland, but little care was given to its culture
and manufacture. Tobacco was graded in Virginia in accordance
with the rigidity of its inspection at Hanover Court House,
Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Cabin-Point: leaf worth sixteen
shillings at Richmond was worth twenty-one at Hanover Court
House; if it was refused at all places, it was smuggled to the
West Indies or consumed in the country. Meadows were rapidly
taking the place of tobacco-fields, for the planters preferred to
clear new land rather than to enrich the old.

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mystery to the average dweller on the Atlantic seaboard as the
elephant was to the blind men of Hindustan
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.

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of the fur trade of our North
Upon Fort Orange converged the score of land and water pathways
of the fur trade of our North. These Indian trade routes were
slowly widened into colonial roads, notably the Mohawk and
Catskill turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into the
Erie, Lehigh, Nickel Plate, and New York Central railways. But
from the day when the canoe and the keel boat floated their bulky
cargoes of pelts or the heavy laden Indian pony trudged the
trail, the routes of trade have been little or nothing altered.

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chain, paddle wheel, and screw propeller and of his puzzling
earth-and-water creature that gives luster to his name
It is not alone Fitch”s development of the devices of the endless
chain, paddle wheel, and screw propeller and of his puzzling
earth-and-water creature that gives luster to his name. His
prophetic insight into the future national importance of the
steamboat and his conception, as an inventor, of his moral
obligations to the people at large were as original and striking
in the science of that age as were his models.

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short-haul service of rail carriers may be relieved and partially
supplanted; the relief of congested terminals, and an effective
store-door delivery plan
Substitution of adequate truck service that the intracity and
short-haul service of rail carriers may be relieved and partially
supplanted; the relief of congested terminals, and an effective
store-door delivery plan.

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