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The streams proved serious obstacles to early traffic. It has
been shown already that the earliest routes of animal or man
sought the watersheds; the trails therefore usually encountered
one stream near its junction with another. At first, of course,
fording was the common method of crossing water, and the most
advantageous fording places were generally found near the mouths
of tributary streams, where bars and islands are frequently
formed and where the water is consequently shallow. When ferries
began to be used, they were usually situated just above or below
the fords; but when the bridge succeeded the ferry, the primitive
bridge builder went back to the old fording place in order to
take advantage of the shallower water, bars, and islands. With
the advent of improved engineering, the character of river banks
and currents was more frequently taken into consideration in
choosing a site for a bridge than was the case in the olden
times, but despite this fact the bridges of today, generally
speaking, span the rivers where the deer or the buffalo splashed
his way across centuries ago.

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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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end of his Journal, which was reproduced in his classic letter to
Harrison, written in 1784
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.’

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commerce, local war boards, and other organizations the Council of
National Defense, through its Highways Transport Committee and its
State Councils Section, is building up a system for the efficient
utilization of the highways of the country as a means of strengthening
the Nation”s transportation resources and affording merchants and
manufacturers relief from necessary railroad embargoes and delays due
to freight congestion
With the cooperation of State councils of defense, chambers of
commerce, local war boards, and other organizations the Council of
National Defense, through its Highways Transport Committee and its
State Councils Section, is building up a system for the efficient
utilization of the highways of the country as a means of strengthening
the Nation”s transportation resources and affording merchants and
manufacturers relief from necessary railroad embargoes and delays due
to freight congestion.

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