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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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Forbes in 1758 and the final conquest of New France two years
later removed the French barrier and opened the way to expansion
beyond the Alleghanies
The capture of Fort Duquesne by the English army under General
Forbes in 1758 and the final conquest of New France two years
later removed the French barrier and opened the way to expansion
beyond the Alleghanies. Thereafter settlements in the Monongahela
country grew apace. Pittsburgh, Uniontown, Morgantown,
Brownsville, Ligonier, Greensburg, Connellsville–we give the
modern names–became centers of a great migration which was
halted only for a season by Pontiac”s Rebellion, the aftermath of
the French War, and was resumed immediately on the suppression of
that Indian rising. The pack-horse trade now entered its final
and most important era. The earlier period was one in which the
trade was confined chiefly to the Indians; the later phase was
concerned with supplying the needs of the white man in his
rapidly developing frontier settlements. Formerly the principal
articles of merchandise for the western trade were guns,
ammunition, knives, kettles, and tools for their repair,
blankets, tobacco, hatchets, and liquor. In the new era every
known product of the East found a market in the thriving
communities of the upper Ohio. As time went on the West began to
send to the East, in addition to skins and pelts, whiskey that
brought a dollar a gallon. Each pony could carry sixteen gallons
and every drop could be sold for real money. On the return trip
the pack-horses carried back chiefly salt and iron.

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put a nation on wheels
But neither roads nor ferries were of themselves sufficient to
put a nation on wheels. The early polite society of the settled
neighborhoods traveled in horse litters, in sedan chairs, or on
horseback, the women seated on pillions or cushions behind the
saddle riders, while oxcarts and horse barrows brought to town
the produce of the outlying farms. Although carts and rude wagons
could be built entirely of wood, there could be no marked advance
in transportation until the development of mining in certain
localities reduced the price of iron. With the increase of travel
and trade, the old world coach and chaise and wain came into use,
and iron for tire and brace became an imperative necessity. The
connection between the production of iron and the care of
highways was recognized by legislation as early as 1732, when
Maryland excused men and slaves in the ironworks from labor on
the public roads, though by the middle of the century owners of
ironworks were obliged to detail one man out of every ten in
their employ for such work.

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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
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.

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rivers, but it was on the Mississippi and its branches,
especially the Ohio, that they played their most important part
in the history of American inland commerce
Such men and the craft they handled were known on the Atlantic
rivers, but it was on the Mississippi and its branches,
especially the Ohio, that they played their most important part
in the history of American inland commerce. Before the beginning
of the nineteenth century wagons and Conestogas were bringing
great loads of merchandise to such points on the headwaters as
Brownsville, Pittsburgh, and Wheeling. As early as 1782, we are
told, Jacob Yoder, a Pennsylvania German, set sail from the
Monongahela country with the first flatboat to descend the Ohio
and Mississippi. As the years passed, the number of such craft
grew constantly larger. The custom of fixing the widespreading
horns of cattle on the prow gave these boats the alternative name
of ‘broadhorns,’ but no accurate classification can be made of
the various kinds of craft engaged in this vast traffic.
Everything that would float, from rough rafts to finished barges,
was commandeered into service, and what was found unsuitable for
the strenuous purposes of commercial transportation was palmed
off whenever possible on unsuspecting emigrants en route to the
lands of promise beyond.

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River, until below Grave Creek floating ice wrecked his boat and
drove him ashore
Severe winter weather overtook Baily as he descended the Ohio
River, until below Grave Creek floating ice wrecked his boat and
drove him ashore. Here in the primeval forest, far from ‘Merrie
England,’ Baily spent the Christmas of 1796 in building a new
flatboat. This task completed, he resumed his journey. Passing
Marietta, where the bad condition of the winter roads prevented a
visit to a famous Indian mound, he reached Limestone. In due time
he sighted Columbia, the metropolis of the Miami country.
According to Baily, the sale of European goods in this part of
the Ohio Valley netted the importers a hundred per cent. Prices
varied with the ease of navigation. When ice blocked the Ohio the
price of flour went up until it was eight dollars a barrel;
whiskey was a dollar a gallon; potatoes, a dollar a bushel; and
bacon, twelve cents a pound. At these prices, the total produce
which went by Fort Massac in the early months of 1800 would have
been worth on the Ohio River upwards of two hundred thousand
dollars! In the preceding summer Baily quoted flour at Norfolk as
selling at sixty-three shillings a barrel of 196 pounds, or
double the price it was bringing on the ice-gorged Ohio. It is by
such comparisons that we get some inkling of the value of western
produce and of the rates in western trade.

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2006 Ferrari F430 F1 vs. 2004 Lamborghini Gallardo E-Gear. Virginia City hill climb.

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valley beyond began to show evidences of life
One by one the other important centers of trade in the great
valley beyond began to show evidences of life. Marietta, Ohio,
founded in 1788 by Revolutionary officers from New England,
became the metropolis of the rich Muskingum River district, which
was presently sending many flatboats southward. Cincinnati was
founded in the same year as Marietta, with the building of Fort
Washington and the formal organization of Hamilton County. The
soil of the Miami country was as ‘mellow as an ash heap’ and in
the first four months of 1802 over four thousand barrels of flour
were shipped southward to challenge the prestige of the
Monongahela product. Potters, brickmakers, gunsmiths, cotton and
wool weavers, coopers, turners, wheelwrights, dyers, printers,
and ropemakers were at work here within the next decade. A
brewery turned out five thousand barrels of beer and porter in
1811, and by the next year the pork-packing business was
thoroughly established.

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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
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.’

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but it is evident that the measure of success achieved was not
equaled elsewhere on similar improvements on a large scale
The total actual work done is not clearly shown by the documents,
but it is evident that the measure of success achieved was not
equaled elsewhere on similar improvements on a large scale. From
1796 to 1804 the tolls received at Rome amounted to over fifteen
thousand dollars, and at Little Falls to over fifty-eight
thousand dollars–a sum which exceeded the original cost of
construction. Dividends had crept up from three per cent in 1798
to five and a half per cent in 1817, the year in which work was
begun on the Erie Canal.

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