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The first American cow pony was not without his cowboy. Though
the drivers were not all of the same type and though the
proprietors, so to speak, of the trans-Alleghany pack-horse trade
came generally from the older settlements, the bulk of the hard
work was done by a lusty army of men not reproduced again in
America until the picturesque figure of the cow-puncher appeared
above the western horizon. This breed of men was nurtured on the
outer confines of civilization, along the headwaters of the
Susquehanna, the Potomac, the James, and the Broad–the country
of the ‘Cowpens.’ Rough as the wilderness they occupied, made
strong by their diet of meat and curds, these Tatars of the
highlands played a part in the commercial history of America that
has never had its historian. In their knowledge of Indian
character, of horse and packsaddle lore, of the forest and its
trails in every season, these men of the Cowpens were the kings
of the old frontier.

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Valley of Virginia, by way of Wadkins on the Potomac, was used by
German and Irish traders probably as early as 1700
The long Philadelphia Road from the Lancaster region into the
Valley of Virginia, by way of Wadkins on the Potomac, was used by
German and Irish traders probably as early as 1700. In 1728 the
people of Maryland were petitioning for a road from the ford of
the Monocacy to the home of Nathan Wickham. Four years later Jost
Heydt, leading an immigrant party southward, broke open a road
from the York Barrens toward the Potomac two miles above Harper”s
Ferry. This avenue by way of the Berkeley, Staunton, Watauga, and
Greenbrier regions to Tennessee and Kentucky–was the longest and
most important in America during the Revolutionary period. The
Virginia Assembly in 1779 appointed commissioners to view this
route and to report on the advisability of making it a wagon road
all the way to Kentucky. In 1795, efforts were made in Kentucky
to turn the Wilderness Trail into a wagon road, and in this same
year the Kentucky Legislature passed an act making the route from
Crab Orchard to Cumberland Gap a wagon road thirty feet in width.

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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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bureaus under the title ‘Return loads’ in the local directories
In many cities the telephone companies have listed the return-load
bureaus under the title ‘Return loads’ in the local directories. By
calling ‘Return loads’ or the telephone number of the bureau, shippers
can learn where trucks may be obtained to carry loads to points which
the shipper wishes to reach quickly. In many cities there are motor
express lines operating on daily schedule over regular routes, but
there are also many companies, firms, and individuals that own trucks
which stand idle part of the time. The return-load bureaus list these
trucks and can place them at the service of the shippers on short
notice.

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songs of the day was ‘The Hunters of Kentucky
In the early twenties of the last century one of the popular
songs of the day was ‘The Hunters of Kentucky.’ Written by Samuel
Woodworth, the author of ‘The Old Oaken Bucket,’ it had
originally been printed in the New York Mirror but had come into
the hands of an actor named Ludlow, who was playing in the old
French theater in New Orleans. The poem chants the praises of the
Kentucky riflemen who fought with Jackson at New Orleans and
indubitably proved

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desired merely to obtain official encouragement and intended to
allow his invention to be used by all comers
Fitch, on the other hand, when he applied to Congress in 1785,
desired merely to obtain official encouragement and intended to
allow his invention to be used by all comers. Meeting only with
rebuff, he realized that his only hope of organizing a company
that could provide working capital lay in securing monopolistic
privileges. In 1786 he accordingly applied to the individual
States and secured the sole right to operate steamboats on the
waterways of New Jersey, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and
Virginia. How different would have been the story of the
steamboat if Congress had accepted Fitch at his word and created
a precedent against monopolistic rights on American rivers!

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Latka transforms himself into the slick talking pop culture amalgamation of Vic Ferrari.

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granted a hospitality not to be found on more frequented
thoroughfares
On such inland pathways as this, early travelers came to take for
granted a hospitality not to be found on more frequented
thoroughfares. In this hospitality, roughness and good will,
cleanliness and filth, attempts to ape the style of Eastern towns
and habits of the most primitive kind, were singularly blended.
In one instance, the traveler might be cordially assigned by the
landlord to a good position in ‘the first rush for a chance at
the head of the table’; at the next stopping place he might be
coldly turned away because the proprietor ‘had the gout’ and his
wife the ‘delicate blue-devils’; farther on, where ’soap was
unknown, nothing clean but birds, nothing industrious but pigs,
and nothing happy but squirrels,’ Daniel Boone”s daughter might
be seen in high-heeled shoes, attended by white servants whose
wages were a dollar a week, skirting muddy roads under a
ten-dollar bonnet and a six-dollar parasol. Or, he might emerge
from a lonely forest in Ohio or Indiana and come suddenly upon a
party of neighbors at a dreary tavern, enjoying a corn shucking
or a harvest home. Immediately dubbed ‘Doctor,’ ‘Squire,’ or
‘Colonel’ by the hospitable merrymakers, the passer-by would be
informed that he ’should drink and lack no good thing.’ After he
had retired, as likely as not his quarters would be invaded at
one or two o”clock in the morning by the uproarious company, and
the best refreshment of the house would be forced upon him with a
hilarity ‘created by omnipotent whiskey.’ Sometimes, however, the
traveler would encounter pitiful instances of loneliness in the
widespreading forests. One man in passing a certain isolated
cabin was implored by the woman who inhabited it to rest awhile
and talk, since she was, she confessed, completely overwhelmed by
‘the lone!’

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did not prevail with Fulton, for the American Minister was
distinctly prejudiced against paddle wheels
It is fortunate that, in one particular, Livingston”s influence
did not prevail with Fulton, for the American Minister was
distinctly prejudiced against paddle wheels. Although Livingston
had previously ridden as a passenger on Morey”s sternwheeler at
the rate of five miles an hour, yet he had turned a deaf ear when
his partner in experimentation, Nicholas J. Roosevelt, had
insisted strongly on ‘throwing wheels over the sides.’ At the
beginning, Fulton himself was inclined to agree with Livingston
in this respect; but, probably late in 1803, he began to
investigate more carefully the possibilities of the paddle wheel
as used twice in America by Morey and by four or five
experimenters in Europe. In 1804 an eight-mile trip which Fulton
made on the Charlotte Dundas in an hour and twenty minutes
established his faith in the undeniable superiority of two
fundamental factors of early navigation–paddle wheels and
British
engines. Fulton”s splendid fame rests, and rightly so, on his
perception of the fact that no mere ingenuity of design could
counterbalance weakness, uncertainty, and inefficiency in the
mechanism which was intended to make a steamboat run and keep
running. As early as November, 1803, Fulton had written to
Boulton and Watt of Birmingham that he had ‘not confidence in any
other engines’ than theirs and that he was seeking a means of
getting one of those engines to America. ‘I cannot establish the
boat without the engine,’ he now emphatically wrote to James
Monroe, then Ambassador to the Court of St. James. ‘The question
then is shall we or shall we not have such boats.’

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to Statlers, Baily found here a prosperous millstone quarry,
which sold its stones at from fifteen to thirty dollars a pair
Pushing on westward by way of historic Sideling Hill and Bedford
to Statlers, Baily found here a prosperous millstone quarry,
which sold its stones at from fifteen to thirty dollars a pair.
Twelve years earlier Washington had prophesied that the
Alleghanies would soon be furnishing millstones equal to the best
English burr. As he crossed the mountains Baily found that
taverns charged the following schedule: breakfast, eighteen
pence; dinner and supper from two shillings to two shillings and
sixpence each. Traversing Laurel Hill, he reached Pittsburgh just
at the time when it was awakening to activity as the trading
center of the West.

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