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to days as distant as those of which Homer sang
The riverman, his art, his language, his traffic, seem to belong
to days as distant as those of which Homer sang.

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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
‘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.

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who had entered the portals of inland America
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.* 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.** 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.

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