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renamed after its capture, a new day dawned for the great region
to the West
Thus, with the English flag afloat at Fort Pitt, as Duquesne was
renamed after its capture, a new day dawned for the great region
to the West. Beyond the Alleghanies and as far as the Rockies, a
new science of transportation was now to be learned–the art of
finding the dividing ridge. Here the first routes, like the
‘Great Trail’ from Pittsburgh to Detroit, struck out with an
assurance that is in marvelous agreement with the findings of the
surveyors of a later day. The railways, when they came, found the
valleys and penetrated with their tunnels the watersheds from the
heads of the streams of one drainage area to the streams of
another. Thus on the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, the
Southern, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and other railroads, important
tunnels are to be found lying immediately under the Red Man”s
trail which clung to the long ascending slope and held
persistently to the dividing ridges.

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Electric car vs Ferrari

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first the break in the wall at the Delaware Water Gap, and then
that long arm of the Susquehanna, the Juniata, reaching out
through dark Kittanning Gorge to its silver playmate, the dancing
Conemaugh
Traversing the line of the Alleghanies southward, the eye notes
first the break in the wall at the Delaware Water Gap, and then
that long arm of the Susquehanna, the Juniata, reaching out
through dark Kittanning Gorge to its silver playmate, the dancing
Conemaugh. Here amid its leafy aisles ran the brown and red
Kittanning Trail, the main route of the Pennsylvania traders from
the rich region of York, Lancaster, and Chambersburg. On this
general alignment the Broadway Limited flies today toward
Pittsburgh and Chicago. A little to the south another important
pathway from the same region led, by way of Carlisle, Bedford,
and Ligonier, to the Ohio. The ‘Highland Trail’ the Indian
traders called it, for it kept well on the watershed dividing the
Allegheny tributaries on the north from those of the Monongahela
on the south.

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the golden age of monopoly
The early years of the national life of the United States were
the golden age of monopoly. Every colony, as a matter of course,
had granted to certain men special privileges, and, as has
already been pointed out, the questions of monopolies and
combinations in restraint of trade had arisen even so early as
the beginning of the eighteenth century. Interwoven inextricably
with these problems was the whole problem of colonial rivalry,
which in its later form developed into an insistence on state
rights. Every improvement in the means of transportation, every
development of natural resources, every new invention was
inevitably considered from the standpoint of sectional interests
and with a view to its monopolistic possibilities. This was
particularly true in the case of the steamboat, because of its
limitation to rivers and bays which could be specifically
enumerated and defined. For instance, Washington in 1784 attests
the fact that Rumsey operated his mechanical boat at Bath in
secret ‘until he saw the effect of an application he was about to
make to the Assembly of this State, for a reward.’ The
application was successful, and Rumsey was awarded a monopoly in
Virginia waters for ten years.

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the Blue Grass region
Louisville, the ‘Little Falls’ of the West, was the entrepot of
the Blue Grass region. It had been a place of some importance
since Revolutionary days, for in seasons of low water the rapids
in the Ohio at this point gave employment to scores of laborers
who assisted the flatboatmen in hauling their cargoes around the
obstruction which prevented the passage of the heavily loaded
barges. The town, which was incorporated in 1780, soon showed
signs of commercial activity. It was the proud possessor of a
drygoods house in 1783. The growth of its tobacco industry was
rapid from the first. The warehouses were under government
supervision and inspection as early as 1795, and innumerable
flatboats were already bearing cargoes of bright leaf southward
in the last decade of the century. The first brick house in
Louisville was erected in 1789 with materials brought from
Pittsburgh. Yankees soon established the ‘Hope Distillery’; and
the manufacture of whiskey, which had long been a staple industry
conducted by individuals, became an incorporated business of
great promise in spite of objections raised against the ‘creation
of gigantic reservoirs of this damning drink.’

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propulsion, natural and artificial, were used as models by the
inventors
In the development of the steamboat almost all earlier means of
propulsion, natural and artificial, were used as models by the
inventors. The fins of fishes, the webbed feet of amphibious
birds, the paddles of the Indian, and the poles and oars of the
riverman, were all imitated by the patient inventors struggling
with the problem. Rumsey”s first effort was a copy of the old
setting-pole idea. Fitch”s model of 1785 had side paddle wheels
operated by an endless chain. Fitch”s second and third models
were practically paddle-wheel models, one having the paddles at
the side and the other at the stern. Ormsbee of Connecticut made
a model, in 1792, on the plan of a duck”s foot. Morey made what
may be called the first real stern-wheeler in 1794. Two years
later Fitch ran a veritable screw propeller on Collect Pond near
New York City. Although General Benjamin Tupper of Massachusetts
had been fashioning devices of this character eight years
previously, Fitch was the first to apply the idea effectively. In
1798 he evolved the strange, amphibious creation known as his
‘model of 1798,’ which has never been adequately explained. It
was a steamboat on iron wheels provided with flanges, as though
it was intended to be run on submerged tracks. What may have been
the idea of its inventor, living out his last gloomy days in
Kentucky, may never be known; but it is possible to see in this
anomalous machine an anticipation of the locomotive not
approached by any other American of the time. Thus, prior to 1800
almost every type of mechanism for the propulsion of steamboats
had been suggested and tried; and in 1804, Stevens”s twin-screw
propeller completed the list.

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In this trade the riverman was the fundamental factor. Only by
means of his brawn and his genius for navigation could these
innumerable tons of flour, tobacco, and bacon have been kept from
rotting on the shores. Yet the man himself remains a legend
grotesque and mysterious, one of the shadowy figures of a time
when history was being made too rapidly to be written. If we ask
how he loaded his flatboat or barge, we are told that ‘one squint
of his eye would blister a bull”s heel.’ When we inquire how he
found the channel amid the shifting bars and floating islands of
that tortuous two-thousand-mile journey to New Orleans, we are
informed that he was ‘the very infant that turned from his
mother”s breast and called out for a bottle of old rye.’ When we
ask how he overcame the natural difficulties of trade–lack of
commission houses, varying standards of money, want of systems of
credit and low prices due to the glutting of the market when
hundreds of flatboats arrived in the South simultaneously on the
same freshet–we are informed that ‘Billy Earthquake is the
geniwine, double-acting engine, and can out-run, out-swim, chaw
more tobacco and spit less, drink more whiskey and keep soberer
than any other man in these localities.’

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In this trade the riverman was the fundamental factor. Only by
means of his brawn and his genius for navigation could these
innumerable tons of flour, tobacco, and bacon have been kept from
rotting on the shores. Yet the man himself remains a legend
grotesque and mysterious, one of the shadowy figures of a time
when history was being made too rapidly to be written. If we ask
how he loaded his flatboat or barge, we are told that ‘one squint
of his eye would blister a bull”s heel.’ When we inquire how he
found the channel amid the shifting bars and floating islands of
that tortuous two-thousand-mile journey to New Orleans, we are
informed that he was ‘the very infant that turned from his
mother”s breast and called out for a bottle of old rye.’ When we
ask how he overcame the natural difficulties of trade–lack of
commission houses, varying standards of money, want of systems of
credit and low prices due to the glutting of the market when
hundreds of flatboats arrived in the South simultaneously on the
same freshet–we are informed that ‘Billy Earthquake is the
geniwine, double-acting engine, and can out-run, out-swim, chaw
more tobacco and spit less, drink more whiskey and keep soberer
than any other man in these localities.’

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heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a
valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses, through the
tree-tops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors;
dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing;
terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in
their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid
indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their
unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow”s work; and we riding
onward, high abode them, like a whirl-wind
‘It was very pretty traveling thus, at a rapid pace along the
heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a
valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses, through the
tree-tops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors;
dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing;
terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in
their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid
indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their
unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow”s work; and we riding
onward, high abode them, like a whirl-wind. It was amusing, too,
when we had dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other
motive power than the weight of the carriages themselves, to see
the engine released, long after us, come buzzing down alone, like
a great insect, its back of green and gold so shining in the sun,
that if it had spread a pair of wings and soared away, no one
would have had occasion, as I fancied, for the least surprise.
But it stopped short of us in a very business-like manner when we
reached the canal; and, before we left the wharf, went panting up
this hill again, with the passengers who had waited our arrival
for the means of traversing the road by which we had come.’*

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passion which the first generation of pioneers had for the
wilderness
In direct contradiction to this longing for society was the
passion which the first generation of pioneers had for the
wilderness. When the population of one settlement became too
thick, they were seized by an irresistible impulse to ‘follow the
migration,’ as the expression went. The easy independence of the
first hunter-agriculturalist was upset by the advance of
immigration. His range was curtailed, his freedom limited. His
very breath seems to have become difficult. So he sold out at a
phenomenal profit, put out his fire, shouldered his gun, called
his dog, and set off again in search of the solitude he craved.

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