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Title: From trail to railway through the Appalachians
Author: Brigham, Albert Perry
Language: English
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[Illustration: (cover)]
[Illustration: EASTERN UNITED STATES]
FROM TRAIL TO RAILWAY
THROUGH
THE APPALACHIANS
BY
ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM, A.M.
PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY IN COLGATE UNIVERSITY
AUTHOR OF “GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES IN AMERICAN HISTORY”
GINN AND COMPANY
BOSTON · NEW YORK · CHICAGO · LONDON
ATLANTA · DALLAS · COLUMBUS · SAN FRANCISCO
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
621.1
The Athenæum Press
GINN AND COMPANY · PROPRIETORS
· BOSTON · U.S.A.
PREFACE
This book grows out of the conviction that geography in the schools
must return somewhat to human interests. In saying this the author will
scarcely need to defend himself against the charge of undervaluing
physiography. It is only a question of wise adaptation to youthful
students. Elementary history also needs to be placed in its setting of
physical conditions. It is here attempted to promote both these objects
in the study of the eastern United States. If geography and history
can be well correlated, both of these great themes may be taught with
economy of time and with stronger interest.
Much more might be said concerning the growth of centers, the
agriculture, and the commerce, but the limits of space are rigid.
Hence roads and westward movements have been made the main topic. The
geography is not taught formally, but is woven in with the story.
Care has been given to the maps of the several regions, that they
should clearly express the essentials and avoid the vagueness of many
small-scale representations of the Appalachian belt.
A. P. B.
COLGATE UNIVERSITY
October, 1906
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. BOSTON AND THE BERKSHIRES 1
II. PIONEERS OF THE MOHAWK AND THE HUDSON 14
III. ORISKANY, A BATTLE OF THE REVOLUTION 29
IV. THE ERIE CANAL 40
V. THE NEW YORK CENTRAL RAILWAY 53
VI. OLD JOURNEYS FROM PHILADELPHIA TO THE WEST 63
VII. THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD 74
VIII. THE NATIONAL ROAD 86
IX. THE BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD 98
X. CITIES OF THE OHIO VALLEY 111
XI. THE GREAT VALLEY 129
XII. TO KENTUCKY BY THE CUMBERLAND GAP 142
XIII. FRONTIER SOLDIERS AND STATESMEN 155
XIV. CITIES OF THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS 167
INDEX 183
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE PAGE
1. Cunard Steamship 3
2. Union Station, Springfield 6
3. Deerfield Valley, Charlemont, Mass. 8
4. Eastern Portal of Hoosac Tunnel 11
5. South Station, Boston 12
6. Henry Hudson 16
7. Sir William Johnson 20
8. Genesee Street, Utica 23
9. Old Fort Johnson, Amsterdam, New York 26
10. Oriskany Battle Monument 30
11. Herkimer directing the Battle of Oriskany 33
12. Herkimer’s Monument and Mansion 36
13. De Witt Clinton 43
14. Erie Canal, Utica 46
15. Erie Canal, Syracuse 48
16. Traveling by Packet on the Erie Canal 50
17. Erie Canal and Solvay Works, Syracuse 51
18. De Witt Clinton Train 54
19. Twentieth Century Limited 57
20. Rounding the Noses, Mohawk Valley 59
21. Penn Square, Lancaster, Pennsylvania 65
22. Bridge over Conestoga Creek, Lancaster, Pennsylvania 67
23. Tollhouse near Lancaster, Pennsylvania 68
24. Hambright’s Hotel, on the “Lancaster Pike” 70
25. Old Road House, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania 71
26. Freight Locomotive, Pennsylvania Railroad 75
27. Tunnel, Portage Railway 76
28. Broad Street Station, Philadelphia 77
29. Bridge, Pennsylvania Railroad, above Harrisburg 79
30. Pennsylvania Railroad Shops, Altoona 80
31. Horseshoe Curve, Pennsylvania Railroad 81
32. Rock Cut, Pennsylvania Railroad 84
33. Tollhouse near Brownsville, Pennsylvania 87
34. Milestone, Braddock’s Road, Frostburg, Maryland 90
35. Old Road House, Brownsville, Pennsylvania 92
36. Cumberland and Gap in Wills Mountain 95
37. Bridge and Monument, National Road, near Wheeling, West
Virginia 96
38. Mount Royal Station, Baltimore 99
39. Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, Cumberland 100
40. Highest Point on Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Sand Patch,
Pennsylvania 103
41. Down the Potomac from Harpers Ferry 106
42. Coke Ovens, Meyersdale, Pennsylvania 108
43. The Observation End, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad 110
44. Old Blockhouse, Pittsburg 112
45. Pittsburg 115
46. Coal Barges, Pittsburg 119
47. Pittsburg at Night 120
48. Furnaces near Pittsburg 121
49. River Front, Cincinnati 125
50. Luray, Shenandoah Valley 131
51. James River Gap in the Blue Ridge 134
52. Hilly Farm Lands, near Knoxville 136
53. Great Valley, from the Pinnacle, Cumberland Gap 139
54. Cumberland Gap from the East 143
55. Daniel Boone 145
56. Pineville Gap, Cumberland River 147
57. Cornfield near Cumberland Gap 150
58. Kentucky Blue Grass 152
59. Three States Monument, Cumberland Gap 153
60. George Rogers Clark 157
61. On the French Broad 159
62. John Sevier 162
63. James Robertson 164
64. Sevier Monument, Knoxville 165
65. Old Statehouse, Knoxville 166
66. Street in Knoxville 168
67. On the Campus, University of Tennessee 169
68. Marble Quarry near Knoxville 171
69. Statehouse, Nashville 173
70. Chattanooga from Cameron Hill 175
71. Broad Street, Atlanta 177
72. Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, Atlanta 178
73. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta 179
74. Iron Furnace, Birmingham 180
MAPS
Eastern United States _Frontispiece_
New England 4
New York 26
Pennsylvania 64
Southern Appalachian Region 132
FROM TRAIL TO RAILWAY
CHAPTER I
BOSTON AND THE BERKSHIRES
From the time of the settlement of Massachusetts Boston has had a large
share of the business of the country. Her natural advantages are great.
On the one hand there is her harbor, sheltered by many islands from
the storms of the Atlantic; on the other are tidal rivers and level
highways leading to the interior of the state. Emerson, who was born in
Boston, wrote:
Each street leads downward to the sea,
Or landward to the west.
For generations, as the city has grown, her people have been crowding
back the ocean by filling in the shallows, and now her busy streets
extend over acres of “made land,” while from the south, the west, and
the north, lines of railway connect her with all parts of America.
Not many years after the War of the Revolution a Boston merchant ship
went around the world. She took on board a native at Hawaii, sold her
load of furs in Canton, rounded Cape Horn, and anchored at length in
Boston harbor. So great an achievement did this seem that Governor
Hancock and the people said fine things and made merry.
This little ship was eighty-three feet long, and you could measure off
seven or eight times her length on one of the big liners of to-day.
Later the same ship set sail again, and on the west coast of America,
in one of the roughest seas, her master, Captain Gray, saw the mouth
of a great river. He was determined to enter it. Having crossed the
breakers, he sailed up the river more than twenty miles, and to-day it
bears the name of his ship, the _Columbia_. Boston was reaching out
into the wide world. Many years later this discovery had much to do
with securing the rights of the United States in the Oregon country
against the claims of Great Britain.
Young lads often went out on these voyages, and the training made them
strong men. There were dangers on the ocean then which to-day we do not
fear, for pirates still lay in wait for merchantmen and foreign powers
took liberties with American ships. One vessel seen in Boston harbor
was named _Catch-me-if-you-can_.
Many years later, when Mr. Samuel Cunard of Halifax took a contract
to carry the royal mail between Liverpool and America, there was an
immediate protest from the Boston merchants against ending the voyage
at Halifax. They urged the great commercial advantage of having the
ships run westward to Boston after stopping at Halifax, and so powerful
were these arguments that the first Cunard liners came steaming into
Massachusetts bay.
[Illustration: FIG. 1. ONE OF THE CUNARD STEAMSHIPS WHICH SAIL FROM
BOSTON TO-DAY]
This was not pleasant for New York people, who tried to show that
theirs was the better port. As if to help in the fight against Boston,
the harbor froze over in the winter of 1844, and the Cunard ship, the
_Britannia_, could not sail. Determined to hold their own, the Boston
people engaged Frederick Tudor, a great exporter of ice, to bring his
machinery from the fresh-water ponds and cut a way. He soon made a lane
of open water, and the _Britannia_ sailed out for Liverpool.
While ocean trade was growing much had been done on the land.
Settlements were first made at Plymouth, Salem, and Boston, and as soon
as possible the rough forest trails joining these towns were changed
into roads. Many ferries and bridges were needed to cross the streams,
and roads were carried back into the country as the people settled
farther from the sea.
After Providence was begun, in the Narragansett country, and the rich
lands along the Connecticut were settled, there was need of roads
across the hills of Massachusetts, so that the colonists could visit
each other, exchange letters, and thus be less exposed to danger from
savages in the great American wilderness.
The highway leading along the east coast was called Bay Road. A post
rider went between Boston and New York in 1704, and a rough path he had
to travel. It was thought remarkable, four years later, that a woman,
Madam Sarah Knights, made that journey. She afterwards taught school in
Boston, and Benjamin Franklin was one of her pupils. Somebody scratched
these lines on a window pane in her schoolroom:
Through many toils and many frights
I have returned, poor Sarah Knights;
Over great rocks and many stones,
God has preserved from fractured bones.
[Illustration: NEW ENGLAND
BOSTON AND MAINE RAILROAD (FITCHBURG DIVISION) -+-+-+-+-+-
BOSTON AND ALBANY RAILROAD ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯]
There is no doubt about the “great rocks and many stones” of New
England, but around Boston, at any rate, one usually sees them now at a
safe distance.
In western Massachusetts is the great Berkshire country. Through most
of its length the Housatonic river runs to the southward. At the north
the Hoosick river flows from it, across a corner of Vermont, to the
Hudson. On the first is beautiful Pittsfield, and on the second is busy
North Adams with its mills. In sight everywhere are the mountains,
not very high and usually covered with forest, but sometimes bold and
rocky. Farther north we should call them the Green mountains, but here
we name them the Berkshires. The eastern range, which separates the
Housatonic valley on the west from the Connecticut valley on the east,
is Hoosac mountain, of which we shall hear again.
These long ranges of mountains run from north to south, and while it
was easy to follow the valleys between them, it was hard to go across
them from east to west or from west to east. Boston and all the chief
towns of New England lay eastward, and the rest of the country was
west of the mountains. If a Massachusetts family wished to settle
in the fertile lands of western New York or Ohio, they had to cross
the mountains. In our day the mountain region is full of towns and
beautiful summer homes, but then it was a wilderness which in places
was almost impassable. If it was difficult to make a single journey
between the Connecticut river and the Hudson, it was quite out of the
question to carry grain and fruit from the West to Boston, and to bring
back in exchange the goods made in her factories.
Near Pittsfield, in the heart of the Berkshires, rises the Westfield
river, which has cut a deep valley eastward through the mountains.
Opposite the place where this stream enters the Connecticut the
beautiful city of Springfield has now grown up, partly on the low
grounds and partly on a terrace. It is readily seen that the Westfield
valley forms a natural roadway from here westward to Pittsfield, and on
toward Albany and the Mohawk in New York. We cannot say that the valley
was made for the cities, but the cities were made, in part at least,
because the valley was there.
[Illustration: FIG. 2. UNION RAILWAY STATION, SPRINGFIELD,
MASSACHUSETTS]
The first roads that improved on the Indian trails were, of course,
made for wagons. The gorge of the Westfield was so rugged that a
hundred years ago it seemed almost impossible to make a good wagon
road through it. There were some people, however, who thought that
it could be done and who determined to do it. Their courage won, and
before long there was a good highway all along the roaring river. The
bowlders were rolled out of the way, the trees were cut, the roadbed
was made, and people could go east and west in the stages without
risk of losing their lives or even of breaking their bones. This was
accomplished soon after 1825, but it did not solve all the problems of
the Massachusetts people, for, as we shall soon learn fully, the Erie
canal was finished in that year, and a long string of canal boats began
to carry produce from the West to New York.
The good people of Boston watched all this going on. Every load
of grain was headed straight eastward as if it were coming to
Massachusetts bay, thence to go by vessel to Europe. But when it
reached the Hudson it was sure to turn off down that river to help load
ships at the piers of New York. And New England had only a wagon road
across the mountains! A wagon road will never draw trade away from a
tidal river, and thus we can understand why a prominent Massachusetts
man, Charles Francis Adams, spoke of the Hudson as “a river so fatal to
Boston.” Boston might have all the ships she wanted, but if she could
not get cargoes for them they would be of no use. Shipowners, seeing
that there was plenty of western freight in New York, sent their boats
there. It was indeed time that Boston people began to ask themselves
what they could do.
They still had ships, but these were usually “down East” coasters,
and the noble vessels from far eastern ports, laden with spices and
teas, silks, and all the spoils of Europe and Asia, rarely came to
Boston, but brought more and greater loads to New York and Baltimore,
where they could lay in corn and wheat for the return voyage. Even the
Cunards transferred most of their boats and finally all their mail
steamers to New York.
[Illustration: FIG. 3. THE VALLEY OF DEERFIELD RIVER AT CHARLEMONT,
MASSACHUSETTS, ON THE LINE OF THE BOSTON AND MAINE RAILROAD]
The people of Boston first said, “We will build another canal, up the
Hoosick and down the Deerfield valley, and then the canal boats will
keep on to the east.” As states often do, they appointed a commission
to see if the canal could be built, and what it would cost. But what
were they to do about Hoosac mountain, which stood a thousand feet
high, of solid rock, between the Hoosick valley on the west and the
Deerfield valley on the east?
They decided that they would tunnel it for the water way. Rather
strangely they thought it could be done for a little less than a
million dollars. A wise engineer made the survey for the canal, and
when he remarked, “It seems as if the finger of Providence had pointed
out this route from the east to the west,” some one who stood near
replied, “It’s a great pity that the same finger wasn’t thrust through
the mountain.” The plans for the canal were finally given up, and
though many years later such a tunnel was made, it was not for a canal,
nor was the work done for a million dollars.
Every one was talking now of railways, but few thought that rails could
be laid across the Berkshires. It was even said in a Boston paper that
such a road could never be built to Albany; that it would cost as much
to do it as all Massachusetts would sell for; and that if it should be
finished, everybody with common sense knew it would be as useless as
a railroad from Boston to the moon. We need not be too hard on this
writer, for it was five years later when the De Witt Clinton train
climbed the hill from Albany and carried its handful of passengers to
Schenectady.
One of the friends of the railway scheme was Abner Phelps. When he was
a senior at Williams College, in 1806, he had thought of it, for he
had heard about the tram cars in the English coal regions. In 1826 he
became a member of the legislature of Massachusetts, and the second day
he was there he proposed that the road should be built.
In time the project went through, but at first it was planned to pull
the cars with horses, and on the down grades to take the horses on the
cars and let them ride. We do not know how it was intended that the
cars should be held back, for it was long before the invention of air
brakes. The line was built to its western end on the Hudson in 1842,
and thus Boston, Worcester, Springfield, and Albany were bound together
by iron rails.
There was only a single track and the grades were heavy. The road
brought little trade to Boston, and most of the goods from the West
still went by way of the Hudson to New York. It was, however, a
beginning, and it showed that the mountain wall could be crossed.
The subject of a Hoosac tunnel now came up again. It would take a long
time to tell how the tunnel was made; indeed, it was a long time in
making. It was begun in 1850 or soon afterwards, and the work went
slowly, with many stops and misfortunes, so that the hole through the
mountain was not finished until November 27, 1873. On that day the
last blast was set off, which made the opening from the east to the
west side; and the first regular passenger train ran through July 8,
1875, fifty years after it had been planned to make a canal under the
mountain.
In order to help on the work the engineers sunk a shaft a thousand
feet deep from the top of the mountain to the level of the tunnel,
and from the bottom worked east and west. This gave them four faces,
or “headings,” on which to work, instead of two, and hastened the
finishing. The whole cost was about fourteen million dollars.
[Illustration: FIG. 4. EASTERN PORTAL OF THE HOOSAC TUNNEL, BOSTON AND
MAINE RAILROAD]
It took great skill to sink the shaft on just the right line, and to
make the parts of the tunnel exactly meet, as the men worked in from
opposite directions. They brought the ends together under the mountain
with a difference of only five sixteenths of an inch! You can measure
this on a finger nail and see how much it is. The tremendous task was
successfully accomplished, and Boston was no longer shut off from the
rest of the country by the mountains.
[Illustration: FIG. 5. THE SOUTH STATION, BOSTON]
The end of it all is not that Boston has won all the ships away from
New York, but that gradually she has been getting her share. Now she
has great Cunarders, White Star Liners, and the Leyland boats,--all
giant ships sailing for Liverpool,--and many other stately vessels
bound for southern ports or foreign lands. Now you may see in Boston
harbor not a forest of masts but great funnels painted to show the
lines to which the boats belong, and marking a grander commerce than
that which put out for the Indies long years ago; for to-day Boston is
the second American port. The great freight yards of the railways are
close upon the docks, and travelers from the West may come into either
of two great stations, one of which is the largest railway terminal in
the world. In and about Boston are more than a million people, reaching
out with one hand for the riches of the great land to the west, and
with the other passing them over the seas to the nations on the farther
side.
Man has taken a land of dense forests, stony hills, and wild valleys,
and subdued it. It is dotted with cities, crossed by roads, and is one
of the great gateways of North America.
CHAPTER II
PIONEERS OF THE MOHAWK AND THE HUDSON
If a stranger from a distant land should come to New York, he might
take an elevated train at the Battery and ride to the upper end of
Harlem. He would then have seen Manhattan island, so named by the
Indians, who but three hundred years ago built their wigwams there and
paddled their canoes in the waters where great ships now wait for their
cargoes. If the visitor should stay for a time, he might find that
Harlem used to be spelled Haarlem, from a famous old town in Holland.
He might walk through Bleecker street, or Cortlandt street, or see
Stuyvesant square, and learn that these hard names belonged to old
Dutch families; and if he studied history, he would find that the town
was once called New Amsterdam and was settled by Dutchmen from Holland.
They named the river on the west of the island the Great North river,
to distinguish it from the Delaware, or Great South river, and they
planned to keep all the land about these two streams and to call it New
Netherland.
Rocks and trees covered most of Manhattan island at that time, but the
Dutch had a small village at its south end, where they built a fort
and set up windmills, which ground the corn and made the place look
like a town in Holland. The Indians did not like the windmills with
their “big teeth biting the corn in pieces,” but they were usually
friendly with the settlers, sometimes sitting before the fireplaces
in the houses and eating supawn, or mush and milk, with their white
friends. Little did the Indian dream what a bargain he offered to the
white man when he consented to sell the whole island for a sum equal to
twenty-four dollars; and the Dutchman, to do him justice, was equally
ignorant.
All this came about because Henry Hudson with a Dutch vessel, the _Half
Moon_, had sailed into the harbor in 1609, and had explored the river
for a long distance from its mouth. Hudson was an Englishman, but with
most people he has had to pass for a Dutchman. He has come down in
stories as Hendrick instead of Henry, no doubt because he commanded a
ship belonging to a Dutch company, and because a Dutch colony was soon
planted at the mouth of the river which he discovered.
Hudson spent a month of early autumn about Manhattan and on the river
which afterwards took his name. Sailing was easy, for the channel is
cut so deep into the land that the tides, which rise and fall on the
ocean border by day and night, push far up the Hudson and make it like
an inland sea. In what we call the Highlands Hudson found the river
narrow, with rocky cliffs rising far above him. Beyond he saw lowlands
covered with trees, and stretching west to the foot of the Catskill
mountains. He went at least as far as the place where Albany now
stands, but there he found the water shallow and turned his ship about,
giving up the idea of reaching the Indies by going that way. He did
not know that a few miles to the west a deep valley lies open through
the mountains, a valley which is now full of busy people and is more
important for travel and trade than a dozen northwest passages to China
would be.
[Illustration: FIG. 6. HENRY HUDSON]
It was not long before this valley which leads to the west was found,
and by a real Dutchman. Only five years after Hudson’s voyage Dutch
traders built a fort near the spot where Albany now stands. Shortly
afterwards, in 1624, the first settlers came and founded Fort Orange,
which is now Albany. Arent Van Curler came over from Holland in 1630
and made his home near Fort Orange. He was an able man and became
friendly with the Indians. They called him “Brother Corlear” and spoke
of him as their “good friend.” A few years ago a diary kept by Van
Curler was found in an old Dutch garret, where it had lain for two
hundred and sixty years. It told the story of a journey that he made
in 1634, only four years after he came to America. Setting out on
December 11, he traveled up the valley of the Mohawk until he reached
the home of the Oneida Indians in central New York. He stayed with them
nearly two weeks, and then returned to Fort Orange, where he arrived
on January 19. This is the earliest record of a white man’s journey
through a region which now contains large towns and is traversed by
many railway trains every day in the year.
No one knows how long there had been Indians and Indian trails in the
Mohawk valley. These trails Van Curler followed, often coming upon some
of the red men themselves, and visiting them in a friendly way. They,
as well as the white settlers who followed them, chose the flat, rich
lands along the river, for here it was easy to beat a path, and with
their bark canoes they could travel and fish. The Indians entertained
Van Curler with baked pumpkins, turkey, bear meat, and venison. As the
turkey is an American bird, we may be sure that it was new to the Dutch
explorer.
These Indians, with whom Van Curler and all the New York colonists had
much to do, were of several tribes,--the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas,
Cayugas, and Senecas. All together they were known as the Iroquois
(ĭr-ṓ-kwoi´), or Iroquois Nation, a kind of confederation which met in
council and went forth together to war. They called their five-fold
league The Long House, from the style of dwelling which was common
among them,--a long house in which as many as twenty families sometimes
lived. The Iroquois built villages, cultivated plots of land, and
sometimes planted apple orchards. They were often eloquent orators and
always fierce fighters. Among the surrounding tribes they were greatly
feared. They sailed on lake Ontario and lake Erie in their birch-bark
canoes, and they followed the trails far eastward down the Mohawk
valley. Before the white men came these fierce warriors occasionally
invaded New England, to the terror of the weaker tribes. Sometimes they
followed up their conquests by exacting a tribute of wampum. After Fort
Orange was founded they went there with their packs of beaver skins and
other furs to trade for clothes and trinkets.
In fact the white man’s principal interest for many years was to barter
for furs. The Dutch, and soon afterwards the English, bid for the trade
from their settlements on the Hudson, and the French did the same from
their forts on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Thus there was
much letter writing and much fighting among the colonists, while each
side tried to make friends of the Indians and get the whole of the fur
trade. The result was that either in war or in trade the white men and
the savages were always going up and down the Mohawk valley, which
thus was a well-traveled path long before there were turnpike roads,
canals, or steam cars.
When Van Curler made his journey into the Indian country, he did not
reach the Mohawk river at once on leaving Fort Orange, but traveled for
about sixteen miles across a sandy and half-barren stretch of scrubby
pine woods. He came down to the river where its rich bottom lands
spread out widely and where several large islands are inclosed by parts
of the stream. South and east of these flats are the sand barrens, and
on the west are high hills through which, by a deep, narrow gap, the
Mohawk flows. The Indians called this place “Schonowe,” or “gateway.”
It was well named, for entering by this gate one can go to the foot of
the Rocky mountains without climbing any heights.
A few years before his death Van Curler led a small band of colonists
from Fort Orange, bought the “great flats” from the Mohawk Indians,
and founded a town, calling it Schenectady, which is the old Indian
name changed in its spelling. No easy time did these settlers have,
for theirs was for many years the frontier town and they never knew
when hostile savages might come down upon them to burn their houses
and take their scalps. In 1690, twenty-eight years after the town
was founded, a company of French and Indians from Montreal surprised
Schenectady in the night, burned most of the houses, and killed about
sixty of the people, taking others captive. But Dutchmen rarely give up
an undertaking, and they soon rebuilt their town. It was an important
place, for here was the end of the “carry” over the pine barrens from
the Hudson, and here began the navigation of the river, which for a
hundred years was the best means of carrying supplies up the valley and
into central New York.
The traveler of to-day on the New York Central Railway sees on Van
Curler’s “great flats” the flourishing city of Schenectady, with
its shops and houses, its college, and its vast factories for the
manufacture of locomotives and electrical supplies.
[Illustration: FIG. 7. SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON
See Fort Johnson, Fig. 9]
It is true that the Dutch pioneers played an important part in the
early history of the state and are still widely represented by their
descendants in the Mohawk valley, but the leading spirit of colonial
days on the river was a native of Ireland who came when a young man to
manage his uncle’s estates in America. This was in 1738, nearly fifty
years after the Schenectady massacre. The young man, who was in the
confidence of the governor of New York and of the king as well, is
known to all readers of American history as Sir William Johnson.
He built a fine stone mansion a short distance west of the present city
of Amsterdam and lived there many years. He also founded Johnstown, a
few miles to the north, now a thriving little city. He dealt honestly
with the Indians, when many tried to get their lands by fraud, and he
served as a high officer in the French and Indian wars.
As the Dutch settled the lower Mohawk valley, so the upper parts were
taken up and the forests cleared by Yankees from New England. One of
these was Hugh White, a sturdy man with several grown children. He left
Middletown, Connecticut, in 1784, and came by water to Albany, sending
one of his sons overland to drive two pair of oxen. Father and son met
in Albany and went together across the sands to Schenectady, where they
bought a boat to take some of the goods up the river. Four miles west
of where Utica now stands they stopped, cut a few trees, and built a
hut to shelter them until they could raise crops and have a better
home. Thus the ancient village of Whitesboro was founded. White was one
of many hardy and brave men who settled in central New York at that
time, and they doubtless thought that they had gone a long way “out
West.” Certainly their journey took more time than the emigrant would
now need to reach California or Oregon.
To cut the trees, build cabins, guard against the savages, and get
enough to eat and wear gave the settlers plenty to do. Only the
simplest ways of living were possible. Until a grist mill was built
they often used samp mortars, such as the Indians made. They took a
section of white ash log three feet long, and putting coals of fire
on one end, kept them burning with a hand bellows until the hole was
deep enough to hold the corn, which was then pounded for their meals
of hominy. By and by a mill was built, and here settlers often came
from a distance of many miles, sometimes carrying their grists on their
backs. A dozen years after White came, General William Floyd set up
another mill in the northern part of what is now Oneida county. He was
one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
One settler cleared several acres and planted corn with pumpkin seeds
sprinkled in. The pigeons pulled up all the corn, but hundreds of great
pumpkins grew and ripened. Since the crop was hardly enough, however,
for either men or beasts, the latter had to be fed the next winter on
the small top boughs of the elm, maple, and basswood.
Much use was made of the river, for the only roads were Indian paths
through the woods on the river flats. People and freight were carried
in long, light boats suited to river traffic and known as bateaux
(bȧ-tō̟s´). These could be propelled with oars, but poles were
necessary going upstream against a stiff current. It was impossible
to go up the Mohawk from the Hudson above Albany, on account of the
great falls at Cohoes; hence the long carry to Schenectady. From that
place, by hard work, the boatmen could make their way up to Little
Falls, where the water descends forty feet in roaring rapids. Here the
loads and the bateaux had to be carried along the banks to the still
water above, where, with many windings and doublings on their course,
the voyagers could reach the Oneida Carrying Place, or Fort Stanwix.
There they unloaded again, and for a mile or more tramped across low
ground to Wood creek, a little stream flowing into Oneida lake, and
thence into Oswego river and lake Ontario. The city of Rome stands
exactly on the road followed by the “carry.” This was an important
place, and was called by the Dutch Trow Plat, while to the Indians it
was De-o-wain-sta, “the place where canoes are carried across.” Several
forts were built there, of which the most famous was Fort Stanwix. We
should think Wood creek a difficult bit of navigation. It was a small
stream, very crooked, and often interrupted by fallen trees. In times
of low water the boats were dragged up and even down the creek by
horses walking in the water.
[Illustration: FIG. 8. GENESEE STREET, UTICA
Part of the old Genesee road]
The first merchant of old Fort Schuyler (Utica) was John Post, who
had served his country well through the Revolution. In 1790 he
brought hither his wife, three little children, and a carpenter from
Schenectady, after a voyage of about nine days up the river. Near the
long-used fording place he built a store, at the foot of what is now
Genesee street. Here he supplied the simple needs of the few families
in the new hamlet, and bought furs and ginseng of the Indians, giving
in exchange paint, powder, shot, cloth, beads, mirrors, and, it must be
added, rum also. Thus the fact that the river was shallow at this point
and could be passed without a bridge or a boat led to the founding of
the city of Utica.
The first regular mail reached the settlement in 1793, the post
rider being allowed twenty-eight hours to come up from Canajoharie,
a distance of about forty miles, now traversed by many trains in
much less than an hour. On one occasion the Fort Schuyler settlement
received six letters in one mail. The people would hardly believe this
astonishing fact until John Post, who had been made postmaster, assured
them that it was true. Post established stages and lines of boats to
Schenectady, and soon had a large business, for people were pouring
into western New York to settle upon its fertile lands.
All the boats did not go down to Oswego and lake Ontario. Some turned
and entered the Seneca river, following its slow and winding waters to
the country now lying between Syracuse and Rochester. But these boats
were not equal to the traffic, for the new farms were producing grain
to be transported, and the people needed many articles from the older
towns on the Atlantic coast. Hence about a dozen years after Hugh White
built his first cabin by the river, the state legislature took up the
question of transportation and built a great road, a hundred miles
long, from Fort Schuyler, or the future Utica, to Geneva, at the foot
of Seneca lake.
The road as laid out was six rods wide. It was improved for a width
of four rods by the use of gravel and logs where the ground was soft
and swampy, as much of it was in those days, being flat and shaded by
trees. Over the famous Genesee road, as it was called, thousands of
people went not only to the rich valley of the Genesee in western New
York but also on to Ohio, and even to the prairies of the Mississippi
river. Genesee street in Utica and Genesee street in Syracuse are parts
of this road. The historian tells of it as a triumph, for it was an
Indian path in June, and before September was over a stage had started
at Fort Schuyler, and on the afternoon of the third day had deposited
its four passengers at the hotel in Geneva. After this wagons and
stages began to run frequently between Albany and Geneva. A wagon could
carry fourteen barrels of flour eastward, and in about a month could
return to Geneva from Albany with a load of needed supplies. In five
weeks, one winter, five hundred and seventy sleighs carrying families
passed through Geneva to lands farther west.
Geneva was quite a metropolis in those days, when there was nothing
but woods where Syracuse and Rochester now are. Regular markets were
held there, for there were fine farms and orchards about the beautiful
shores of Seneca lake. It is recorded as remarkable that one settler
had “dressed up” an old Indian orchard and made “one hundred barrels of
cyder.”
We might think that the founders of the city of Rochester would have
come in by the Genesee road, but they did not. Far to the south,
at Hagerstown in Maryland, a country already old, lived Colonel
Rochester. He heard of the Genesee lands and at last bought, with his
partners, a hundred acres by the falls, where the city now stands.
When the little family procession passed down the street and entered
upon the long journey up the Susquehanna valley to western New York,
Rochester’s friends in Hagerstown wept to see him go. They thought
that he had thrown his money away in buying swamp lands where only
mosquitoes, rattlesnakes, and bears could live, but he saw farther than
they did. If he had been unwilling to take any risk, he would never
have laid out the first streets of the prosperous city which now bears
his name.
[Illustration: FIG. 9. OLD FORT JOHNSON, AMSTERDAM, NEW YORK
Built by Sir William Johnson, 1742]
Syracuse, like Utica and Rochester, had its own way of beginning. We
can truly say that at first salt made the city. The beds of salt are
not directly under Syracuse, but are in the hills not far away. The
water from the rains and springs dissolves some of this salt, and as it
flows down it fills the gravels in and around the town. While all was
yet forest the Indian women had made salt from the brine which oozed up
in the springs. So long ago as 1770, five years before the Revolution,
the Delaware Indians went after Onondaga salt, and a little of it was
now and then brought down to Albany. Sometimes it was sold far down the
St. Lawrence in Quebec.
[Illustration: NEW YORK
NEW YORK, LAKE ERIE AND WESTERN RAILROAD ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
DELAWARE, LACKAWANNA AND WESTERN RAILROAD ...........
NEW YORK CENTRAL AND HUDSON RIVER RAILROAD -----------
NEW YORK, ONTARIO AND WESTERN RAILROAD -·-·-·-·-·-
DELAWARE AND HUDSON RAILROAD -+-+-+-+-+-
ERIE CANAL (old location) ===========
]
The pioneers first made salt there in 1788. This was several years
before the Genesee road was cut through the woods. One of these men, a
Mr. Danforth, whose name a suburb of Syracuse now bears, used to put
his coat on his head for a cushion and on that carry out a large kettle
to the springs. He would put a pole across crotched sticks, hang up the
kettle, and go to work to make salt. When he had made enough for the
time he would hide his kettle in the bushes and bring home his salt.
By and by so many hundreds of bushels were made by the settlers that
the government of the state framed laws to regulate the making and
selling of the salt, and as time went on a town arose and grew into a
city. Many years later rock salt was found deep down under the surface
farther west, and since that discovery the business of Syracuse has
become more and more varied in character.
The history of the state of New York shows well how the New World was
settled along the whole Atlantic coast. The white men from Europe found
first Manhattan island and the harbor. Then they followed the lead of
a river and made a settlement that was to be Albany. Still they let a
river guide them, this time the Mohawk, and it led them westward. They
pushed their boats up the stream, and on land they widened the trails
of the red men. Near its head the Mohawk valley led out into the wide,
rich plains south and east of lake Ontario. Soon there were so many
people that a good road became necessary. When the good road was made
it brought more people, and thus the foundations of the Empire State
were laid.
CHAPTER III
ORISKANY, A BATTLE OF THE REVOLUTION
About halfway between old Fort Schuyler, or Utica, and Fort Stanwix,
which is now Rome, is the village of Oriskany. A mile or two west
of this small town, in a field south of the Mohawk river, stands a
monument raised in memory of a fierce battle fought on that slope in
the year following the Declaration of Independence. On the pedestal are
four tablets in bronze, one of which shows a wounded general sitting
on the ground in the woods, with his hand raised, giving orders to his
men. The time was 1777, the strife was the battle of Oriskany, and the
brave and suffering general was Nicholas Herkimer.
On another of the tablets is this inscription:
HERE WAS FOUGHT
THE BATTLE OF ORISKANY
ON THE 6TH DAY OF AUGUST, 1777.
HERE BRITISH INVASION WAS CHECKED AND THWARTED.
HERE GENERAL NICHOLAS HERKIMER,
INTREPID LEADER OF THE AMERICAN FORCES,
THOUGH MORTALLY WOUNDED KEPT HIS COMMAND OF THE FIGHT
TILL THE ENEMY HAD FLED.
THE LIFE BLOOD OF MORE THAN
TWO HUNDRED PATRIOT HEROES
MADE THIS BATTLE GROUND
SACRED FOREVER.
After the battle Herkimer was carried down the valley to his home,
where a few days later he died. On the field he had calmly lighted his
pipe and smoked it as he gave his orders, refusing to be carried to a
safe place and saying, “I will face the enemy.” If the battle has its
monument, so the hero that won it has his, and the traveler on the New
York Central Railway can see both, but thirty miles apart, the one at
Oriskany, the other a short distance down the valley from Little Falls.
[Illustration: FIG. 10. ORISKANY BATTLE MONUMENT, A FEW MILES WEST OF
UTICA]
Herkimer was not a trained soldier, but a plain farmer of the valley.
His letters and military orders show us that he could spell as poorly
as any of his neighbors, and that is saying a good deal. His army was
made up of these same simple neighbors, who, though they did not
know much about soldierly marching, were good shots and hard hitters,
fighting not for pay but to save their liberty and to protect their
homes from the cruel savages.
The names of many of these men are on the battle monument,--names
such as Groot, Petrie, Dunckel, Klock, Kraus, Sammons, Schnell, Van
Horn, and Zimmerman. We do not need to be told that these were not men
of English blood; indeed, many of them belonged to those same Dutch
families which we saw settling in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. And
some, like the last one, were not Dutch but German, and their ancestors
came not from Holland but from a land farther up the Rhine. They had
been driven out by the persecutions of one of the French kings and
had come to America. They had had a hard time, suffering much from
taskmasters, from poverty, and from the savages, until finally they
had gone farther west in the Mohawk valley and had received good
lands lying eastward from Utica. There they became comfortable and
prosperous. They answered promptly the brave Herkimer’s call to arms,
and many of them gave their lives for home and country at Oriskany.
We must now tell the other side of the story and see who the invaders
were and where they came from. In Revolutionary days nearly all the
people of New York were in its two great valleys. One could go up the
Hudson from New York, pass Albany and Fort Edward, and, without finding
high ground, enter the valley of lake Champlain and go down to Montreal
on the St. Lawrence. Here, then, was an easy valley road from the sea
at New York into Canada. Coming either way, one could turn off to the
west at Fort Orange or Albany and go up the Mohawk and down to Oswego
on lake Ontario. In these two valleys were all the farms, the towns,
and of course the forts. There were forts at Oswego and where Rome,
Utica, and Albany are; at Fort Edward, Fort Ann, Ticonderoga, and many
other places, making a chain of defenses in these valleys. West of
the Hudson and south of the Mohawk were the high, rough woods of the
Catskills; while west of lake Champlain and north of the Mohawk were
the rugged Adirondacks, without roads or clearings. And because the
roads, the homes, and the forts were in the valleys, we shall almost
always find the armies and the fighting there.
This will help us to understand the plan which the British made in
1777, by which they felt sure of crushing the rebellion. The year
before they had to leave Boston and had come around to New York. New
York was not so large as Philadelphia then, but it was an important
place, for it was the key to the Hudson valley. The British generals
decided to send one army up the Hudson to destroy the forts and beat
back the colonists. This army was under General Howe. Another army,
commanded by General Burgoyne, was to come from the St. Lawrence up
lake Champlain and through the woods by Fort Edward to Albany. Burgoyne
was a brave officer, but he was conceited, and he felt too sure that he
could do his part easily. He was confident that when he marched through
the country many colonists would run to place themselves under the
English flag. In a few weeks he learned that these backwoods Americans
were quite ready to meet and give battle to the combined forces of the
British regulars, the hired German soldiers, and the Indians with whom
they were in league.
[Illustration: FIG. 11. GENERAL NICHOLAS HERKIMER DIRECTING THE BATTLE
OF ORISKANY]
There was yet a third division in this campaign. A British force
under General St. Leger had come up the St. Lawrence and lake Ontario
to Oswego. St. Leger also had with him many Indians, and these were
commanded by Joseph Brant, a famous chief, who had had much to do with
white men and who was well educated. This third army was to go east,
over the Oneida Carrying Place and down the Mohawk to Albany. By this
pretty plan three armies, one from the south under Howe, one from the
north under Burgoyne, and one from the west under St. Leger, were
to meet in Albany. They would put British soldiers in every fort on
the way, capture and disarm the rebels, and have all New York under
their feet. More than this, they would thus shut off New England from
Pennsylvania and Virginia, cutting the unruly colonies into two parts
so that they could not help each other.
But the scheme, brilliant as it was, would not work. None of the
British armies reached Albany. Howe did not, perhaps because he did not
try. Burgoyne and St. Leger did not, because they could not: there was
altogether too much in the way. We shall now see how this happened.
St. Leger brought into the Mohawk valley from Oswego an army of
seventeen hundred men. Some were British, some were Hessians or hired
German soldiers, and the rest were Indians under Joseph Brant. They
thought that it would not be much trouble to take Fort Stanwix and
then go down the valley, burning and killing as they went, until they
should meet the other armies of the king at Albany. But the colonists
sent more soldiers to defend the fort, and Colonel Peter Gansevoort,
who was in command, had under him nearly a thousand men. Just before
the British came in sight a stock of provisions, brought on several
boats up the river, had been safely delivered within the defenses. This
was early in August, and only about seven weeks before Congress had
adopted the style of American flag which we know so well. There was no
flag at Fort Stanwix, so the garrison set about making one. They cut up
shirts to make the white. The blue came from a cloak captured not long
before in a battle, on the Hudson, by Colonel Marinus Willett, one of
the bravest commanders within the fort. The red is said to have been
taken from a petticoat. Certain it is that a patriot flag was made,
and some think that it was the first American flag ever raised over a
fortification.
While the British were besieging Fort Stanwix, General Herkimer had
called out the men of the valley, bidding all between the ages of
sixteen and sixty make ready for battle. The boys and old men were to
do their best to care for the families and to defend their homes. Eight
hundred men gathered under Herkimer and marched to help the garrison
of the fort. Hearing of this, part of the British army, including
the Indians, came down the valley to head off Herkimer. They met at
Oriskany. The farmer soldiers were hurrying up the valley without due
watching for sudden attack, while the enemy placed themselves in ambush
around a low field which was wooded and swampy. Through this field the
road ran, and when Herkimer’s men were well down into it the Indians
opened a hot fire, which threw the patriots into disorder. They soon
rallied and fought fiercely for five hours, until two hundred of them
had lost their lives. Early in the battle Herkimer was shot, but he
forgot his pain when he saw his men victorious. Much of the fighting
was of the Indian sort, from behind trees, for the Dutchmen well knew
the ways of the savages. They saw that when one man fired from behind
a tree an Indian would rush forward to tomahawk him before he could
load his gun for another shot. So they were ordered to stand by twos
and take turns in firing. Thus when the Indian ran forward with his
tomahawk he would receive a bullet from the other man’s gun.
[Illustration: FIG. 12. NICHOLAS HERKIMER’S MONUMENT
To the right is the old mansion in which he lived. Near Little Falls,
New York]
Under John Johnson, the son of Sir William Johnson, were many Tories
from the valley. They and the patriots often recognized each other as
former neighbors, and then the fight was more stubborn than ever, for
the soldiers of freedom were bitterly angry to find old friends in arms
against them. During the battle a terrific thunder-shower came up, and
both sides stopped fighting, having enough to do to keep their powder
and guns dry. The dark storm passed and the strife went on again. At
length the Indians grew tired and ran, leaving the field to Herkimer
and his little army. The importance of a conflict is not always in
proportion to the size of the armies engaged, and in what it did for
freedom Oriskany takes high place among the battles of modern times.
The enemy went back to the siege of Fort Stanwix, and soon a new force
of patriots under Benedict Arnold was sent up the valley to relieve
the fort. It was during this march that an ignorant but cunning fellow
named Han Yost Schuyler was caught, tried, and condemned to die as
a spy. Because his friends pleaded for his life Arnold finally told
him that he might live if he would go up to Fort Stanwix and make the
Indians and British believe that a great army was marching against
them. Meanwhile the man’s brother was held as a hostage, to be punished
if the promise was not fulfilled. Han Yost did his part so well
that St. Leger, taking fright, left the fort in great haste and his
expedition was entirely broken up. Why he did not have a gay march down
to Albany is now quite plain.
A few days after the battle of Oriskany a number of men drove some
cattle to Fort Stanwix as food for the soldiers. Several women went
with them on horseback to visit their husbands, who belonged to the
garrison. At the ford of the river, now the Genesee street crossing in
Utica, a big Dutchman, who did not wish to get wet, leaped uninvited
upon a horse behind one of the women. The horse did not like the double
load, and made great sport by throwing the Dutchman into the middle of
the stream, while he carried his mistress over in safety.
General Burgoyne came nearer Albany than did St. Leger. Indeed he
went to Albany, but not until he had lost his army. He had promptly
captured Ticonderoga on lake Champlain, and this success gave him high
hopes and sent rejoicing throughout Great Britain; but the patriots,
by felling trees and cutting away bridges, hindered his southward
march in every way. He sent a thousand of his German soldiers across
to Bennington, among the Green mountains, to capture stores which
he knew were there. But General Stark was there also, with a little
army from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and the thousand Hessians
did not go back to help Burgoyne. He had left another thousand to
guard Ticonderoga, and so he was two thousand short. All this time
the patriot army was growing, for the men of the Hudson valley were
maddened when they saw the bloodthirsty Indians marching with the
English, and, to Burgoyne’s surprise, they had no mind to fight for the
king. Howe did not come, St. Leger did not come, and the provisions
were getting short. These could only come along the road from the
north, and the colonists were already marching in behind Burgoyne’s
army to cut his line of communications. He knew that he must fight or
starve. He chose to fight. The battle was fought on Bemis Heights, a
range of hills west of the Hudson, a short distance north of the little
village of Stillwater. The British general, after his defeat, withdrew
a few miles northward and surrendered his army near the present town
of Schuylerville. A tall monument marks the place. This was the battle
of Saratoga, fought in old Saratoga, which is several miles from the
famous resort of that name.
So it was that up and down these beautiful valleys went armies and
scouting bands, as well as peaceful emigrants with their oxen, their
stages, and their small freight boats. One cannot go far along the
Hudson or the Mohawk without finding the site of an Indian village, the
foundations of an old fort, the homestead of a Revolutionary hero, or
an ancient place of worship. When we see the great railways and swift
trains, the bundles of telegraph wires, the noisy cities and great
mills of to-day, we can remember Philip Schuyler, Sir William Johnson,
Marinus Willett, Peter Gansevoort, and Nicholas Herkimer. There were no
nobler patriots, even in Virginia and Massachusetts, than these men of
the Mohawk valley.
CHAPTER IV
THE ERIE CANAL
If we think that the men of a hundred years ago were people with few
wants, who were willing to let others do the trading and make the
fortunes, we are quite in the wrong. They were as eager in business
as are the driving Americans of to-day. So long ago as 1683 Thomas
Dongan, a well-born Irishman, came to New York to be its governor. In
his letters to the government in London he said a great deal about the
fur trade and the danger of its going to other cities. Once he reported
that two hundred packs of beaver skins had gone down the Susquehanna
river and across to Philadelphia instead of being brought by the Mohawk
to New York, and he thought that if this traffic continued New York
would be ruined.
As time went on the rivalry grew stronger and stronger. All the cities
on the coast were bidding for the western trade. The “West” was then
the Genesee country, the plains along the Lakes, and the rich lands of
the Ohio valley. Some of the trade from the Lakes and the Genesee went
down the St. Lawrence. Heavy articles especially were sent to Quebec,
while lighter freight was taken overland down the Mohawk. When De Witt
Clinton was stirring up the legislature and the people of New York,
he told them he was very sorry to learn that merchandise from Montreal
was sold in the state for less than New York prices. This was because
there was transportation by water from Montreal, and the St. Lawrence
merchants could afford to undersell those of New York.
Many people thought that the wheat and flour and other products of
western New York would all go down the Susquehanna to Baltimore and
Philadelphia. Rough boats known as “arks” were built and floated down
the river in the high water caused by the melting of the snows in
the Allegheny highlands. From two to five hundred barrels of flour
were carried in one of these craft. As the boats could not be sailed
up the river, they were taken to pieces at the end of the voyage and
sold for lumber. We have already seen that Colonel Rochester followed
this valley in migrating to the Genesee river, and one writer calls
attention to the fact that in seven days several elderly people had
come quite comfortably by this route from Baltimore to Bath in the
southwestern part of New York. One could now travel from San Francisco
to New York and almost halfway across the Atlantic ocean in that time.
Other cities also hoped to secure some of the profits of dealing with
the rapidly growing West. The tourist on his way down the Potomac to
Mount Vernon, the home of Washington, will pass by Alexandria, a quiet
old town of about fifteen thousand people. Washington himself thought
it possible that Alexandria might get a good share of the trade from
Detroit and other places on the Lakes and on the Ohio river. All this
seems strange to us, because since the days of our great-grandfathers
the traffic has been going largely to New York. The cause of the
change was the Erie canal. Yet in 1818, a few months after the canal
was begun, an Albany newspaper discussed very earnestly, as one of the
chief questions of the day, the danger that Philadelphia would take
away the western trade.
Flour, salt, and potash had been taken to New York in large quantities,
but all these products were carried as far as Schenectady in little
ten-ton boats, by way of Wood creek and the Mohawk. As the business
grew it was seen to be impossible always to drag the boats up Wood
creek with horses, and that the small canal, ten feet wide, which
had been cut around the rapids at Little Falls, could not serve the
purposes of another generation.
Hence for many years there had been talk of a canal to join the Lakes
and the Hudson, thus making navigation without a break from the
interior of the country to the Atlantic ocean at New York. The credit
for first thinking of such a canal has been claimed for several men,
but probably it was “in the air,” and many thought of it at about the
same time.
Gouverneur Morris, one of the famous New York statesmen of the day,
proposed that lake Erie should be “tapped” and its waters led to the
Hudson. The surface of this lake is five hundred and seventy-three feet
above tide water at Albany. It was Morris’s idea to dig a channel, with
a gently sloping bottom, which should send the water east in a stream
deep enough to float a boat. The water thus turned from its course
would go to Albany instead of flowing through the Niagara and the St.
Lawrence. There were, however, difficulties about the plan which Morris
did not understand, and it was never carried out.
[Illustration: FIG. 13. DE WITT CLINTON]
The great water way is often known as “Clinton’s Ditch.” This name
was doubtless given in ridicule by those who did not think it could
be built. There were many who laughed at the surveyors when they saw
them looking about, using their levels, and driving their stakes in
the woods and swamps. It was even said that to dig such a canal was
impossible, that it would cost too much money, that it would take too
much time, and that the canal itself could never be made to hold water.
But Clinton and his supporters believed in it, and worked hard to make
it a success. They said that the cost of carrying a ton of produce in
wagons a distance of one hundred miles was about thirty-two dollars.
The experience of others had proved that in canals a ton could be
carried one mile for one cent, or a hundred miles for one dollar.
There is a great difference between one dollar and thirty-two dollars,
especially if the difference is added to the cost of the wheat from
which our bread is made, or of the lumber used in building our houses.
Clinton himself thought that it might take ten or fifteen years to make
the canal, but, as we shall see, it was finished in less time than he
supposed.
Clinton declared very truly that New York was especially fortunate, for
the surface made it an easy task to dig the ditch. There was no high or
rough ground to be crossed, there was plenty of water to keep the canal
full, and it would run through a fertile and rich country. As Clinton
was governor of New York during much of the period in which the canal
was made, his name is imperishably connected with the great enterprise.
He was once candidate for the office of President of the United States,
but perhaps even that office, if he had been elected, would not have
given him so much honor as did the building of this great public work.
Canals were not new in Clinton’s time. Long before the Christian era
began men had dug them to carry water for various uses, such as
irrigation and turning machinery. Often, as for hundreds of years in
the fen country of England, canals have been used to drain wet or
flooded lands and for moving boats. Even beavers have been known to dig
ditches, which fill with water, that they may float the wood which they
cut to the place where they build their dams and their homes.
If a region is perfectly level, only a ditch and water are needed. But
lands are not often level for more than short distances; hence a canal
consists commonly of a series of levels at different heights. Of course
the boats must be passed from one level to another by some means. If
they are small, they can be dragged up or down between two levels; but
this method will not serve for large boats carrying many tons of coal,
lumber, salt, or bricks, hence locks are generally used. A lock is a
short section of a canal, long enough for the boats used, and having
walls rising from the bottom of the lower level to the top of the upper
one. There are big gates at each end. If a boat is to ascend, it runs
into the lock on the lower level and the lower gates are closed. A
small gate in the large upper gate is then opened and the water runs
in from above, slowly raising the water in the lock and with it the
boat. When the water in the lock is even with the water in the upper
level, the big upper gates are swung open and the boat goes on its way.
In a similar manner boats go down from higher to lower sections of the
canal. Locks have been used in Italy and in Holland for more than four
hundred years.
On April 15, 1817, the legislature passed the law for the construction
of the long ditch, and the first spade was set into the earth by Judge
John Richardson at Rome, New York, on July 4 of the same year. This was
forty-one years after the Declaration of Independence, and it is plain
that the country had grown much in wealth and numbers when a single
state could start out to build a water way three hundred miles long.
After the first spadeful of soil had been lifted, the citizens and the
laborers eagerly seized the shovels, and thus everybody had a small
share in beginning the great work. Guns were fired and there was much
rejoicing.
[Illustration: FIG. 14. ERIE CANAL, LOOKING EAST FROM GENESEE STREET
BRIDGE, UTICA]
The men who took the contracts for digging short sections of the canal
were mainly farmers who had gained good properties and who were living
along the line. In those days, if any one had visited the men at work,
he would not have seen crowds of foreign laborers living in huts, but
men born and reared in the country round about. It was little more than
twenty years since the Genesee road had been built through central New
York, and there was still much forest. The trees grew rank and strong,
and it was no light task to cut through the tangled network of roots
that lay below the surface. First the trees were cut down, making a
lane sixty feet wide, and in this the canal was dug to a width of forty
feet. Powerful machines that could draw out stumps and pull over the
largest trees were brought from Europe. The wheels of the stump machine
were sixteen feet across. A plow with a sharp blade was also made, to
cut down through the heavy carpet of fibers and small roots.
Swiftly one piece after another of the canal was finished and the water
let in. The trench was found to hold water, and boats were soon busy
hauling produce from town to town. In 1825 it was finished from Black
Rock, or Buffalo, to Waterford, above Troy. The work had taken eight
years and had cost a little less than eight million dollars. De Witt
Clinton was right and the croakers were wrong. Perhaps it was hard at
that time to find any one who did not think that he had always wanted a
canal.
There were, it is true, a few disappointed ones at Schenectady. There
the wagons from Albany had always stopped, and there the boating up the
Mohawk had begun. As all the loads had to be shifted between the river
and the land journeys, there had been work for many men. Thus the place
had grown up, and now that boats were to run through without change,
some people naturally thought that the town would die out, or would at
least lose much of its business. These few discontented folk, however,
were hardly to be counted, among the thousands who exulted over the
completed canal.
[Illustration: FIG. 15. ALONG THE CANAL IN SYRACUSE
Copyrighted, 1899, by A. P. Yates, Syracuse, N.Y.]
A great celebration was arranged, and the rejoicings of the beginning
were redoubled in the festivities at the end. Boats were made ready at
Buffalo to take Governor Clinton and the other guests to New York. When
the first boat entered the canal from lake Erie a cannon was fired.
Cannon had been set within hearing distance all the way to the sea
along the line of the canal. This way of sending news was the nearest
approach to the telegraph at that time. Soon the tidings of the great
event came booming down among the cliffs of the Hudson and reached New
York.[1]
[1] The time allowed for the signaling from Buffalo to Sandy
Hook was one hour and twenty minutes. This programme was
substantially carried out. From Albany to Sandy Hook only
twenty minutes were required.
Two kegs of lake Erie water were put on one of the boats at Buffalo,
and we shall see what was done with them. There were also two barrels
of fine apples which had been raised in an orchard at Niagara Falls.
These were not to be eaten on the way, one barrel being for the Town
Council of Troy, and the other for the city fathers of New York. Many
people on both sides of the ocean are still eating fine apples from the
trees of the Genesee country.
One boat in the little fleet was called _Noah’s Ark_, and on board
were two eagles, a bear, some fawns, fishes, and birds, besides two
Indian boys. These were sent to New York as “products of the West.”
At every town there was a celebration, and great was the excitement
in such cities as Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, and Albany. There were
salutes and feasts and speeches and prayers, and the gratitude and joy
of the people fairly ran over. The greatest celebration of all was in
New York, where everybody turned out to do honor to the occasion. The
fine ladies boarded a special boat, and the “aquatic procession” went
down through the bay to Sandy Hook. It was arranged that a messenger
of Neptune, the sea god, should meet the fleet, inquire their errand,
and lead them to his master’s realm. Here Governor Clinton turned out
the lake Erie water from the two kegs into the sea as a symbol of the
joining of the lakes and the ocean. Then all the people went back to
the city and had speeches and parades, feasts and fireworks, while the
city-hall bell was rung for several hours. The illumination was said to
be a fine one, but perhaps their lamps and candles would now look dim.
After the canal was finished the carrying business was quite made over.
Little was heard then about sending western New York fruit and grain to
Philadelphia or Montreal or Alexandria. Freighting was so cheap that
a man who had been selling his wheat for thirty cents a bushel now
received a dollar for it. In the war with England, only a few years
before, it had cost more to carry a cannon from Albany to Oswego than
it had cost to make it. The journey had now become an easy and simple
matter. Two farmers built a boat of their own, loaded it with the
produce of their farms, and took it down Seneca lake and all the way to
New York. They were let out of the woods into the wide world.
[Illustration: FIG. 16. TRAVELING BY PACKET ON THE ERIE CANAL]
The canal was not entirely given up to the carrying of freight. People
thought that it was a fine experience to travel in the passenger boats,
which were called “packets.” These were considered as remarkable as
are the limited express trains of to-day. The speed allowed by law
was five miles an hour. To go faster would drive the water against
the banks and injure them. The fare was five cents a mile including
berth and table. It was said that a man could travel from New York to
Buffalo with “the utmost comfort” and without fatigue. The journey cost
eighteen dollars, and only took six days! We, of course, cannot help
thinking of the Empire State Express, which leaves New York at 8.30
A.M. and arrives in Buffalo at 4.50 P.M.
[Illustration: FIG. 17. ERIE CANAL AND SOLVAY WORKS, SYRACUSE]
If the journey of those days seems long to us, we must remember that
to most of the travelers the scenery was fresh and interesting, for it
was a visit to a new land. The rocky highlands, the blue Catskills, the
winding Mohawk, and the towns and farms of the interior were perhaps
as full of interest as the morning paper is on the trains of to-day.
From Utica to Syracuse, more than fifty miles, is one great level; but
on nearing Rochester the canal follows an embankment across a valley,
and the passengers in those days looked wonderingly down on the tops
of trees. At Lockport they heard the clatter as they slowly rose by a
long row of locks to the top of the cliffs, and at Buffalo they looked
out on a sea of fresh water. At Utica, Rome, Rochester, and other
places, after a few years, side canals came in from north and south,
from Binghamton and from the upper valley of the Genesee; and up in
the hills great reservoirs were built, with shallow canals known as
“feeders” leading down to the main trench. These were built to make
sure that there should be water enough for dry seasons; for locks will
leak, and whenever a boat locks down a lockful of water goes on toward
the sea.
Now all was stir and growth. Buffalo had started on its way to become
a great city. Rochester ground more wheat and Syracuse made more salt.
There was no doubt that New York would soon be known as the metropolis
of the western world, and “Clinton’s Ditch” became the most famous of
American canals.
CHAPTER V
THE NEW YORK CENTRAL RAILWAY
The Erie canal had not long been finished when a new way of carrying
men and merchandise came into use in New York. In the next year after
the great celebration the legislature granted a charter to build a
railroad from Albany to Schenectady. It is sometimes said that this was
the first time in America that cars were drawn by means of steam. This
is not true, but New York was not far behind some other states, and the
De Witt Clinton train, of which a picture is shown in this chapter,
looks as if it must have been one of the very earliest ones. This train
made its trial trip in 1831, which was seventeen years after George
Stephenson had built his first locomotive in England.
A railroad had been opened from Baltimore, a few miles to the west,
the year before, and about the same time another was built in South
Carolina. Two years earlier, in 1829, the Delaware and Hudson Canal
Company brought from England three locomotives, one of them built by
Stephenson, to draw coal to their canal from their mines at Honesdale,
Pennsylvania. In 1826 a railroad four miles long was built at Quincy,
Massachusetts, to carry granite from the quarries to the sea. It was
called a tramway, and horses were used instead of steam. If we go to
England, we shall find that tramways have been used there for more than
a hundred years. Thus it is not easy to say when the first railroad was
built, and all writers do not tell the same story about it, but it is
certain that steam cars were first used and long roads with iron tracks
were first built a little less than a hundred years ago.
[Illustration: FIG. 18. THE DE WITT CLINTON TRAIN]
If we study the De Witt Clinton train, we shall learn several things.
Both the engine and the coaches were small and light compared with
those used now. With the great speed of to-day, all the parts of a
train must be very heavy in order to cling to the track. The engine of
those days had four light driving wheels, and the engineer, it would
seem, had to operate his engine while facing wind and storm. The cab
looks very much like a common express wagon made heavier than usual;
and if we look at the passenger wagons, we shall see why passenger cars
are called coaches. The first ones _were_ coaches, and every picture
of an old passenger train shows that the cars were modeled after the
coaches of the stage lines of that age, except that the wheels were
made with flat rims, with flanges to keep them on the track. The
passengers certainly could not move about, and the high perches on the
top look somewhat dangerous. One would think that the wind and the
smoke of the locomotive could not have been pleasant. The men could not
go into a smoking car, and if they had luncheon they must have brought
it in their pockets. Nor could they tuck themselves snugly into a berth
and sleep all night. These things, however, were not needed upon a
railroad that was only eighteen miles long. To this day dining cars and
“sleepers” are not so much used in England as in this country. Millions
of people travel there, but the land is small, they go swiftly, and can
usually eat and sleep at their journey’s end. They still speak of the
“wagons” of the “goods train,” and English freight cars look almost
like toys by the side of ours in America. This shows us how closely the
railways and cars are related to common roads and vehicles.
People laughed at railroads in these early days and had about as much
faith in them as we now have in flying machines. A few years ago men
would have had the same sport about wireless telegraphy, or about
talking between New York and Chicago with a telephone. Mrs. Alice Morse
Earle, who has written much about early life in New England, says that
the farmers did not like railroads, for they thought that horses would
soon be useless and would then be killed, and that there would be no
demand for oats or hay. They were afraid, too, that the noise would
frighten the hens so that they would not lay, that the sparks from the
engine would burn up everything, and that the people would go crazy.
There was some excuse for not enjoying railway travel, for the
roadbeds were often made of solid rock, and the cars did not always
have springs. The tracks were made of strap iron spiked down to wooden
stringers. These iron straps would sometimes become loose, and had an
unpleasant way of curling up and piercing the floor of the coach where
people were sitting.
In these days it is more comfortable and probably safer to ride in a
railway train than behind a horse. The Empire State Express runs from
New York to Buffalo in eight hours and twenty minutes. It makes but
four stops on the way and covers more than fifty-three miles an hour.
When we compare this with the packet-boat time-table of seventy-five
years ago we see how much time is now saved.
To-day a man can board the Twentieth Century Limited in New York City
at 2.45 in the afternoon and be set down in Chicago the next morning.
He can do business nearly all of one day by the sea, and nearly all
of the next day on the shore of lake Michigan. On the way he will
find easy chairs, books and papers, a good bed, a fine table, a place
to write, to be shaved, or to take a bath, and he may even read from
time to time the prices of stocks as they are sent over the wire from
New York and Chicago. But our comfortable traveler should not despise
the early days. Perhaps he misses some of the good times that the
great-grandfathers had in the Mohawk boats and along the Genesee road.
To go so fast and so far means that much has been done since the first
small train came across the sand fields to Schenectady. Five years
later the trains ran up to Utica. This was two hundred and two years
after Arent Van Curler’s journey along the same river. In two years
more a little road, twenty-five miles long, had been finished between
Syracuse and Auburn; but it was not until 1839, when another winter had
passed, that the link between Utica and Syracuse was completed. This
ran much of the way through woods and swamps, and in some cases timbers
or piles had to be driven deep to hold up the track.
[Illustration: FIG. 19. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LIMITED]
These roads were built by different companies, with no idea of joining
them all into a through line. When, in time, there was talk of this
the Utica people did not like it. They thought that it would ruin the
business of their town if passengers and freight need not be changed
there and if trains went rushing through. But after a while all the
links between New York and Buffalo were forged into one chain, or
became a “trunk line,” to put it in the modern way. Of course it would
cost less to haul Genesee flour or Niagara county apples to New York
if they could go through in the same car in which they were first
locked. This soon became so plain that there was no further question as
to uniting the various roads. We shall see how they all became one.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was of Dutch descent and was born on Staten
island in 1794. He grew up in the steamboat business, and by industry
and foresight became the owner of various lines plying on the Hudson,
along the coast, and even across the Atlantic. He had so much to do
with shipping that at length he was known as “Commodore” Vanderbilt,
although this was a nickname and not a real title. By and by he began
to buy railroads, and by 1869 he was able to unite those of the Hudson
and those west of Albany into the New York Central and Hudson River
Railroad. His descendants have bought or leased many other roads,
which, taken together, are often called the Vanderbilt system. This
reaches far westward into many states and joins other great cities to
the metropolis by lines of steel.
[Illustration: FIG. 20. ROUNDING THE NOSES, MOHAWK VALLEY]
Railways in Michigan and Ohio were tied to Vanderbilt’s road, and wheat
and many other products came to Buffalo not only on cars but by ships
on the Great Lakes, and were then sent to New York and across the
ocean. So the canal gradually did less business and the railroad did
more, for people could travel faster by rail, and some things, like
meat and fruit, must be carried swiftly or they will spoil on the way.
Now, instead of ten-ton boats on the Mohawk, or the slow-going craft of
“Clinton’s Ditch,” great freight trains rush down the Mohawk valley,
bearing nearly a hundred thousand bushels of grain behind one engine.
Such a load would have fed George Washington’s armies for a long time.
After a while one track was not sufficient for so many trains going
east and west. Too much time was lost in waiting on sidings and there
was danger of collision. For this reason a second track was put down,
then a third and a fourth, and now all the way from Albany to Buffalo
there are two tracks for passenger trains and two for freight. Down the
Hudson there are but two tracks, because the space between the river
and the uplands is so narrow. Many years ago a rival road, called the
West Shore Railway, was built along the west bank of the Hudson, and
then westward to Buffalo. This with its two tracks was bought by the
owners of the Central road, so that now they have six tracks across
the state. Even these are hardly enough, for every year the great West
has more people, raises more grain to ship to eastern cities and to
Europe, and requires more goods from mills and factories along the
Atlantic coast.
There are many local trains that run between New York and Albany, or
Albany and Syracuse, or Syracuse and Buffalo. These are convenient
for the smaller towns and cities. Then there are many through trains
whose destination is Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, or St.
Louis. Quickly changing cars at lake Michigan or the Mississippi river,
the traveler is hurried on to the Rocky mountains, the Pacific ocean,
Alaska, or the lands of Asia or Australia across the sea.
The New York Central is not the only great road that runs westward
through the state. The Erie road was built through the southern
counties from New York to lake Erie, partly because the townships
through which it runs were jealous of the privileges which the great
canal gave to the people farther north. The Delaware, Lackawanna
and Western also comes from New York through the coal region of
Pennsylvania, and runs near the Erie road to Buffalo.
The larger cities and the greater number of towns are, however, along
the Central Railway. Going up the Hudson and the Mohawk, the traveler
will hardly pass one busy town before he is in sight of another. When
he looks across the river and sees Newburg he will remember that in a
plain old house in that city General Washington had his headquarters.
When he comes in sight of Albany he will see the great Capitol
building standing high over all others. At Schenectady he will think
of Arent Van Curler and the old boatmen and the dreadful French and
Indian massacre. At Utica he will pass the ford where thousands waded
the river as they went to the wilderness. At Rome he will be reminded
of the famous carry of Fort Stanwix, of St. Leger, and of the heroes
who drove him back to the north. At Syracuse he will ride through miles
of closely built streets, and as he leaves the city on the west he
will see ancient vats with low sliding roofs. In these vats countless
bushels of salt have been made, as the sun has slowly drawn off the
water of the brine in vapor. There were buildings, too, with chimneys
and great boilers for making salt; but in the main the city has other
interests now. It has mills and large stores, and is a railway center.
At Rochester our traveler crosses the Genesee, and remembers the hardy
pioneer who left comfortable old Hagerstown to build a city in the
swamp and forest. Colonel Rochester could have had no idea of the fine
city he was starting, or of the orchards, nurseries, and wheat fields
that would be around it, but he lived long enough to see the flour
mills at the falls doing a thriving business. Thus wheat and flour made
Rochester as salt made Syracuse, and first the canal and then the great
railway took these useful things to market.
An hour or two more and the train pulls into Buffalo, the second city
of New York, looking on the lake and stretching out its hands to the
great world of inland sea and prairie. To Buffalo come coal and iron
and meat and wheat and corn. Here great elevators receive grain from
the ships and load canal boats and railway cars for the east. Here some
of the New York Central trains turn north and go by Niagara through
Canada to the west, while others pass off to the south and west and go
to Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago. Since the day when the two kegs were
filled with water from lake Erie, Buffalo has become a large city, a
gateway of the East and West. And since the De Witt Clinton train crept
from Albany to Schenectady, the New York Central Railway has become
great also, for every day hundreds of trains of goods and men are
coming and going between the Lakes and the city by the sea.
CHAPTER VI
OLD JOURNEYS FROM PHILADELPHIA TO THE WEST
The people of New York City like to say that Philadelphia is slow, and
would almost make one think that all the men there wear Quaker hats
and act like William Penn. The citizens of Philadelphia, however, are
not much troubled by this, for they have a great and busy city, and
they like to remind the men of New York that Philadelphia is a “city of
homes,” and that the people do not live in great tenement houses nor do
all their business in “sky scrapers.” The Liberty Bell hangs there, the
Continental Congress sat there, and the home of the federal government
was there before it was in Washington. For a long time the Quaker City
was the metropolis of America, but as New York and Baltimore grew they
took away some of the trade that otherwise would have gone to the city
on the Delaware. It also ceased to be the capital of the nation and
thus had to depend more on its shipping and inland business. Now to
do much inland business it was necessary not only to reach the rich
lowlands at hand but also to send out across the mountains. This could
not be done without roads.
When men went from New York City across the mountains they found the
Great Lakes and the rich plains on their shores. So Philadelphia,
looking over her mountain wall, saw the noble valley of the Ohio river
and the young Pittsburg at its gateway. As New York found a route to
the West, so Philadelphia sought out its highways to the country beyond
the Appalachian mountains. In this chapter and the next we shall see
where these highways ran.
The first roads were little like those of to-day, and the stage drivers
had to be steady, cool-headed men. There were many stumps and logs in
what was called a road, and the teams were guided less by reins than by
shouts in a kind of language which the horses understood. A traveler
between Philadelphia and Washington said that often the driver would
call to the passengers to lean out of the carriage on one side or the
other, so that their weight might keep the balance even. He would say,
“Now, gentlemen, to the right!” and the men would lean out as far as
they could; or, “Now, gentlemen, to the left!” and over they would
swing to the other side.
[Illustration: PENNSYLVANIA
PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD -+-+-+-+-+-
NATIONAL ROAD - - - - - -
TURNPIKE FROM PHILADELPHIA TO PITTSBURG -·-·-·-·-·-
]
It took strong wagons to travel such roads, and sometimes the wheels
were cut solid by sawing off short sections of the butt of a great
tree, much as the wheels of a toy cart have been made by many boys.
When a driver was stuck in the mud he had to wait for other teams to
come up, when they would hook on with him and drag him out upon hard
ground again. They were a rough but sociable company, the teamsters
of those days, feeding their horses and cracking their jokes at the
taverns which lined the turnpikes. They would stand by one another
loyally, but when they met some fine gentleman on the road they did
not object to taking off a wheel or crushing the frame of his light
carriage.
[Illustration: FIG. 21. PENN SQUARE, LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA, LOOKING
EAST ALONG THE “LANCASTER PIKE”]
Out of West Philadelphia to-day leads a street known as Lancaster
avenue. It is the eastern end of the old “Lancaster pike,” the town
which gave name to the road being sixty-six miles to the west. This
is the oldest turnpike road in the United States. When the pioneers
were clearing up the forests and building the Genesee road in New York
this region was already well settled. If you ride from Philadelphia to
Lancaster to-day, you will see that it is an old country, and you will
not think it strange when you learn that so long ago as 1730, two years
before the birth of Washington, some of the inhabitants were moving out
beyond Lancaster. This means that they went west of the Susquehanna,
for Lancaster is only about twelve miles east of that great river.
Many of the earlier settlers of this lowland region west of
Philadelphia were Germans. William Penn had invited some of these
people to come, and they had settled near by in the place now known
as Germantown. In time many others settled both around Lancaster and
farther west. Hence we hear of “Pennsylvania Dutch,” although they
were not really Dutch, which is a term belonging rather to Hollanders
and their descendants. There were also some Scotch-Irish, as they were
called,--descendants of Scotch people who had migrated to the north
of Ireland, whence their children had come to America. These were
Presbyterians, and some of them had settled in New Jersey, where they
founded Princeton College.
The country between Philadelphia and the Susquehanna is one of the
richest and most fertile regions in the world. Most of it is low, with
gently rolling fields and a few higher hills. One fine farm joins
another, and the great stone houses look as strong and as solid as if
they had grown up out of the ground. Huge chimneys rise from the roofs
and make one think of the warm fire-places and well-spread tables of
the thrifty German farmers who built these houses and lived in them.
The barns, like the houses, are large; they are often built of stone
and whitewashed, and they still hold great harvests. One side of the
barn usually reaches several feet beyond the high foundation, and is
called an “overshoot.” As the doors to the stables are under this, it
seems to have been planned as a protection against storms.
An English traveler went over the Lancaster pike in 1796 and found it
worthy of praise. He said that it was paved with stone, covered with
gravel, and could be traversed in any season of the year. About one
mile east of the public square in Lancaster a fine old arched bridge
of stone carries the turnpike across Conestoga creek, a stream flowing
southward into the Susquehanna. It takes its name, which has become
famous in American history, from a small tribe of Indians who lived on
its borders. The early inhabitants made the water deeper by building
dams with locks, and sailed their boats with loads of produce down to
the Susquehanna. In the common phrase of that time, they spoke of it as
the “Conestoga navigation.”
[Illustration: FIG. 22. BRIDGE ON THE “PIKE” CROSSING CONESTOGA CREEK
ONE MILE EAST OF PENN SQUARE, LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA]
But the most interesting thing to which the name Conestoga was given
was a wagon that was invented in this region. It was made very large
and strong, to carry freight, and was drawn by four, seven, or even a
dozen horses. Hundreds of these wagons were to be seen on the Lancaster
pike and on the other great roads of that time. They were built, as
freight cars are now, to carry heavy loads long distances in safety.
[Illustration: FIG. 23. TOLLHOUSE EIGHT MILES EAST OF LANCASTER,
PENNSYLVANIA]
These wagons were unusually long, and the boxes curved upward at the
ends, so that inside and out they were shaped somewhat like a canoe.
The advantage of this was that the loads did not slide, but rode
steadily when the wagons went up and down steep hills. The wheels were
big and had wide tires, so that the heavy loads would not cut the
roads. The story is told that one of these wagons with its load of
tobacco weighed more than thirteen thousand pounds, or almost seven
tons.
They were painted red and blue, and were covered with a canopy of
cloth, so that they looked like the “prairie schooners” which in later
days were the emigrant wagons of the western plains. Each wagon had a
tool box fastened at the side, and a tar bucket and a water pail hung
beneath. The horses were well fed, well matched, and strong, with good
harnesses and many jingling bells. The drivers were rough-and-ready
men, who snapped their whips in the daytime, told stories in the
evening, and slept at night on little mattresses of their own in front
of the barroom fire.
Hundreds of these wagons were going and coming on the roads in the
days when people were not dreaming of freight trains, and no doubt
the Conestoga seemed as important then as the chief freight lines now
appear to us. In the French and Indian War, when there was great need
of wagons to carry Braddock’s stores, Benjamin Franklin was asked to
get some of these famous conveyances. He succeeded, for many were to
be found in this part of Pennsylvania, and he sent on more than one
hundred and fifty of them. He nearly lost his fortune in consequence,
for he told the farmers he would see that they were paid if the wagons
and horses were not returned. It cost the old patriot twenty thousand
pounds, but fortunately the government afterwards paid the money
back to him. Not long ago the writer saw one of these wagons, with a
boat-shaped box, but without a canopy, in use on a farm near Lancaster.
Following the pike westward for twelve miles from Lancaster, the
traveler crosses the Susquehanna river at Columbia. The old bridge was
destroyed long ago, but the present one, although it looks new, is
hardly used in a modern way. It is narrow, with a plank floor, and it
serves for railway trains and wagons, as well as for foot passengers.
There is no separate place for any of these, so when a train or wagon
goes on at either end a telegram is sent to the other end to keep cars
and carriages from entering the bridge there.
[Illustration: FIG. 24. HAMBRIGHT’S HOTEL, ON THE “PIKE,” THREE MILES
WEST OF LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA]
Along the “Pike” is an electric road, which carries people more swiftly
and doubtless with less dust and jolting than did the old stages.
Hambright’s Hotel, shown in the picture above, is on this road, and,
with its big chimneys and high, long-handled pump, shows how many of
the ancient hotels looked. They seem lonely enough now, but they were
gay and busy places then. It is very appropriate that the company
which runs all the street cars in and about Lancaster calls itself The
Conestoga Traction Company.
Westward from the Susquehanna, in what we shall know in a later chapter
as the Great Valley, are some comfortable old towns bearing the names
of Carlisle, Shippensburg, and Chambersburg. The pike passes through
these and on to the old town of Bedford. Then it enters a high, rough
strip of land that was covered with forest long after Philadelphia had
become a city and the farmers about Lancaster had built their great
houses and barns. At the other end of this wilderness was Pittsburg.
The road from Bedford to Pittsburg was cut through the woods in 1758,
in the time of the French and Indian wars, and is sometimes called
Forbes’s road, from the general who directed the making of it. It was
used in the time of the Revolution, and many forts were built to guard
it.
[Illustration: FIG. 25. OLD ROAD HOUSE, ONE MILE WEST OF CHAMBERSBURG,
PENNSYLVANIA]
This roadway was so important that the Pennsylvania government, a few
years after the Revolutionary War, took it in hand and improved it.
Thus there was a line of travel over the older highway to Lancaster
and Bedford, and thence over the newer road to Pittsburg. The whole
road led from the seaboard to the Ohio river and was often called the
Pittsburg pike.
We have now learned of two great, well-trodden routes from east to
west,--the route of the Hudson and the Mohawk through New York, and the
route through the southern parts of Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to
Pittsburg.
In laying out such roads the pioneers almost always followed trails
that the Indians had made. For long generations the red men had
followed the same paths, beating them smooth and deep in the forest
earth. The white men widened the trail by using pack horses, loading
the beasts well with all sorts of things. The next step was to cut away
trees, take out the stones, and make roads for wagons. Carrying by pack
horses, however, had become a great business, and the horse owners were
very angry when the wagons began to take away their trade.
In 1830 a Pennsylvania citizen, then nearly a hundred years old, told
of seeing the first wagon reach Carlisle, and he remembered how furious
the “packers” were because they feared that they would lose their
business. It did not occur to them that they could harness their horses
into teams, buy strong wagons, and be ready to make money in the new
way instead of the old. The horse owners were quite as angry about
stagecoaches, and they sometimes destroyed the coaches and injured
the passengers to vent their spite. Moreover, as people often like
an excuse for doing wrong, and for harboring mean feelings, these men
said that the stage business was bad for the cloth makers and tailors,
because people could ride in coaches without spoiling their fine
clothes, whereas when they rode on horseback they soon ruined them and
had to buy new ones. Almost any excuse will serve those to whom no way
seems good except their own.
Philadelphia now had its connection with Pittsburg and the Ohio river
and the rich lands bordering it, as New York had its way leading to
Buffalo and the Great Lakes and the prairies. But the southern road
crossed a rougher country than did the northern one, and so it was less
easily kept in order and was harder to travel. Hence Philadelphia, like
New York, sought better means of communication with the country on the
other side of the mountains.
CHAPTER VII
THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD
A horse railroad had been built from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna
river, and the big Conestoga wagons were running along the pike to
Pittsburg; but this was not enough. New York had stirred the whole
country by its great canal, and the people along the Potomac were
thinking of similar schemes. Pennsylvania could not rest idle, and
decided to have a canal of its own.
In 1826 the ditch was begun at Columbia, where the railroad ended, and,
following the custom of the times, those in charge started the work
on Independence Day. In four years they had dug the canal, let in the
water, and were running boats as far as Harrisburg.
A few miles above Harrisburg the canal turned away from the main river
and followed its great western branch, the Juniata. This river cuts
through the high ridges, or flows between them as best it can, taking
a very winding course. The valley is often narrow and its sides are
steep and rugged. Still it has no heavy grades along the bottom, and
it led the canal diggers far into the mountains, to a village called
Hollidaysburg.
Here the highlands are so steep that the canal had to stop. The
Allegheny Front is almost fourteen hundred feet above Hollidaysburg,
and on the other side the Conemaugh river rushes swiftly down past the
city of Johnstown, which is seven hundred and seventy-one feet below
the summit. Hollidaysburg and Johnstown are thirty-eight miles apart,
and the uplands lying between are so steep and high that to cut through
them was out of the question. But those who were interested in the
canal were not to be beaten, and they kept on digging both to the east
and to the west. Beyond Johnstown they carried the canal to the Ohio
river at Pittsburg.
[Illustration: FIG. 26. FREIGHT LOCOMOTIVE, PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD]
Meantime the high grounds on the divide were not neglected. A famous
road, the Allegheny Portage Railway, was built with several inclined
planes. Stationary engines pulled the cars up each slope, but on the
level parts of the road they were drawn by horses.
The road was not carried to the top, but nearly two hundred feet below
a tunnel was cut about a mile long. The entrance to one end of this
tunnel is shown in Fig. 27.
[Illustration: FIG. 27. ENTRANCE TO TUNNEL, OLD PORTAGE RAILWAY]
The two great sections of the canal and the Portage Railway were
finished in 1835. Goods then went by rail from Philadelphia to Columbia
on the Susquehanna river. There the boats took them to the east end of
the Portage road. The next haul was over the Allegheny Front, with its
lofty forests, to Johnstown. Then the boats received the merchandise
and landed it in Pittsburg, whence other boats could carry it to any
town on the Ohio river.
The _Hit or Miss_ was one of the boats that came up to Hollidaysburg.
It was desirable to take this particular boat over the heights, so a
car was built which would fit its keel. The car was dragged up the east
side of the mountain and down to Johnstown, where the boat was put into
the water again and sent off to the Mississippi river. We can now look
across a gorge from the coaches of the Pennsylvania Railroad, beyond
Altoona, and see the grade of the old Portage Railway.
[Illustration: FIG. 28. BROAD STREET STATION, PHILADELPHIA:
PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD]
The canal almost put out of business the Conestoga wagons on the dusty
pike which had seen so much travel by way of Carlisle and Bedford.
But the people did not stop with a canal. Like the men of New York,
they wanted something even better than that. They wished to have a
railroad all the way, and in 1846 the Pennsylvania Railroad Company was
incorporated. By this time it was very well known that railroads were
successful both in America and in England, and that steam was better
than horses.
Over the Allegheny Front a route was found where the grades were not
too steep for locomotives. The grade, of course, had been the one
great hindrance to the whole project, and when this difficulty was
overcome there was no reason why passengers should not be carried
from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, or a load of iron from Pittsburg to
Philadelphia, without changing cars. In the year 1854 the Pennsylvania
people triumphed, for they had conquered the mountains and could run
trains from the banks of the Delaware to the Ohio river.
If we leave Philadelphia by the great Broad street station of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, we shall pass out among the pleasant homes
of West Philadelphia and through the fine farms of the Pennsylvania
lowlands, until we come, in about an hour and a half, to the staid old
city of Lancaster. We have been here before, to learn of turnpikes and
Conestoga freighters.
The next stop, if we are on an express train, will be at Harrisburg, a
little more than a hundred miles from Philadelphia. We have now come
from the Delaware to the Susquehanna, and are close to the mountains.
Before we go in among them let us see Harrisburg. It is a city of fifty
thousand people, and lies along the east bank of the Susquehanna, which
here is a great river a mile wide, having gathered its tribute of
waters from hundreds of branching streams in Pennsylvania and New York.
[Illustration: FIG. 29. BRIDGE, PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD, ABOVE HARRISBURG]
Not far to the east a small stream runs parallel to the main river, and
the larger part of Harrisburg is on higher ground between the two. On
the highest part of this ridge is the state capitol, a great building
but recently finished. Harrisburg is at the right point for the state
government. It is not in the center of the state, to be sure, but it is
at the rear of the lowlands which reach in from the sea, and is just
outside the great gateway where roads from all the northern, western,
and central uplands come out on the plain. It is a convenient center
for coal and iron, and hence one sees along the river below the city
many blast furnaces, rolling mills, and factories. To the northeast
rich, open lands stretch along the base of Blue mountain, and railroads
join Harrisburg to Reading, Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton. To the
southwest bridges cross the Susquehanna, and roads run to Carlisle,
Hagerstown, and other cities of the Great Valley (Chapter XI).
Thus the Pennsylvania Railroad, running northwest from Philadelphia,
crosses at Harrisburg other roads that run to the southwest. As hamlets
often gather about “four corners” in the country, so cities grow up
where the great roads of the world cross each other.
[Illustration: FIG. 30. PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD SHOPS, ALTOONA]
Leaving Harrisburg behind, we pass the splendid new bridge of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, across the Susquehanna (Fig. 29), and go through
the gap in Blue mountain. Soon we turn away from the main river and
enter the winding valley of the Juniata. The grades are easy, the
roadbed is smooth, and by deep cuts through the rocks the curves have
been made less abrupt. It is only when one looks out of the car window
that the land is found to be rugged and mountainous.
All the greater valleys and ridges of the mountain belt of Pennsylvania
run northeast and southwest. The last of these to be crossed on our
journey is Bald Eagle valley, from which the Allegheny Front rises to
the northwest.
In this valley, near the place where the Portage Railway began to scale
the heights, and a little more than a hundred miles from Pittsburg,
the Pennsylvania Railroad Company in 1850 founded a town and called
it Altoona. Here they started shops, which have now grown to notable
importance. The town became a city eighteen years after it was begun,
and has to-day about forty thousand inhabitants. In the railway
shops alone may be found nine thousand men repairing and building
locomotives, passenger coaches, and freight cars. The Pennsylvania
Railroad Company is now founding a great school in Altoona, where young
men may be taught to become skillful and efficient in railway service.
[Illustration: FIG. 31. HORSESHOE CURVE, PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD]
Altoona looks new, and with its endless freight yards, its noisy
shops, and its sooty cover of smoke from burning soft coal, it is very
different from quiet Lancaster, which was old when forests covered the
site of Altoona.
On our way to Pittsburg we are soon pulling up the Allegheny Front by a
great loop, or bend, which enables the tracks to reach the summit more
than a thousand feet above Altoona. Nestling within the great bend is
a reservoir of water to supply the houses and shops of the city lying
below. Passing the highest point, we find ourselves descending the
valley of the Conemaugh river to Johnstown, and surrounded by the high
lands of the Allegheny plateau.
Johnstown is much older than Altoona, for it was settled in 1791, but
it has not grown so fast, and has only about as many inhabitants as the
city of railroad shops. Most people know of Johnstown because of the
flood which ruined the place in 1889. Several miles above the town was
a reservoir more than two miles long and in several places one hundred
feet deep. After the heavy rains of that spring the dam broke on the
last day of May, and the wild rush of waters destroyed the town. Homes,
stores, shops, and mills were torn away and carried down the river.
Clara Barton of the Red Cross, who went to Johnstown as soon as she
could get there, says that the few houses that were not crushed and
strewn along the valley were turned upside down.
More than two thousand men, women, and children lost their lives, and
those that were left were in mourning and poverty. The whole land sent
in its gifts of money, clothing, and food, and the town was built up
again into a prosperous city. Near the city are found coal, iron,
limestone, and fire clay, and these things make it easy to establish
iron works. The Cambria Steel Company gives work to ten thousand men in
its shops, mines, and furnaces.
The main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad runs down the rugged
Conemaugh valley through Johnstown, and is its chief means of traffic.
As we go on to the west we near Pittsburg, but first we pass through
a number of stirring towns. At one place fire bricks are made, and
the clay for molding them and the coal for burning them are found in
the same hill. In another town there are coal mines and glass works.
Farther west the Pennsylvania road has more repair shops, and Braddock
is the great Carnegie town. We shall see why many thriving young cities
have grown up in this region when we take up Pittsburg, about which
they are all clustered.
At Pittsburg we pull into one of the finest railway stations in the
United States. We may stop in the city of coal and iron, or we may go
on to the west, over one of the main arms of the Pennsylvania Railroad
system. If we take the northern branch, it will carry us across Ohio
to Fort Wayne in Indiana and to Chicago. If we board a train on the
southern arm, we shall go through Columbus and Indianapolis, and be set
down on the farther side of the Mississippi river at St. Louis.
North and south from the great east and west trunk lines run many
shorter roads, or “spurs.” On the east there is a network of short
roads in New Jersey, and one of the busiest parts of the whole system
is that which joins Washington to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New
York.
[Illustration: FIG. 32. ROCK CUT, ALONG THE LINE OF THE PENNSYLVANIA
RAILROAD]
West from Philadelphia for a long distance there are four tracks,
and on either side may be seen neat hedges, such as one finds along
the railways of England. In the mountains it is often hard to make a
roadbed wide enough for four tracks, and hence there may be only three
or even two in some places. No doubt four will in time be built through
to Pittsburg, for many millions of dollars are spent in improving the
road. Instead of having a long circuit around the hills, tunnels and
vast cuts in the bed rock are made so as to straighten the line. Thus
both passenger and freight trains are able to make better time, and
the road can carry the stores of iron and coal which are found in the
lands on either side.
Some of the freight yards are always crowded with cars, and at
Harrisburg the company is building separate tracks around the city, so
that through freight trains need not be delayed.
At New York the Pennsylvania Railroad now has its station on the New
Jersey side of the Hudson river, but it is building a tunnel under the
river. The company has already bought several city blocks and has torn
away the buildings. Here it will build one of the greatest passenger
stations in the world. The tunnel will run on to the east, under the
streets and shops of Manhattan, and under the East river. Thus under
New York and its surrounding waters trains can go to the east end of
Long Island.
Pennsylvania has told us the same story that we learned from New York.
We read it again: first, how the Indian’s path was beaten deeper and
wider by the hoofs of the pack horse, bearing goods to sell and barter
in the wilderness; then how strips of forest were cut down to make room
for the Conestoga wagons and the gay stages that swept through from
Philadelphia to Pittsburg. These in their turn became old-fashioned
when the canal and Portage Railway were done, and now we sit in a car
that is like a palace, and think canals and Conestogas very old stories
indeed. In future generations swift air ships may take the wonder away
from the Empire State Express, and make us listen unmoved when a man,
standing in the station at Philadelphia, calls the limited train for
Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATIONAL ROAD
The sea reaches inland almost to the northeast corner of the state of
Maryland. This long, wide arm of the ocean receives many rivers and
is known as Chesapeake bay. Near its north end is Baltimore, one of
the four great cities of our Atlantic coast. It is one hundred and
fifty miles from the open sea. If, instead of sailing up the bay, we
should turn toward the west, we could go up the Potomac river, which
is deep and wide. On our way we should pass Washington’s estates at
Mount Vernon, the old city of Alexandria, and the national capital,
Washington. We could not sail much farther because there are falls
in the Potomac which ships cannot pass. The Potomac runs so close to
Chesapeake bay that it is only forty miles from Washington across to
Baltimore.
Chesapeake bay is much like Delaware bay and the tidal Hudson river,
only it is larger than either. Baltimore is at a greater distance from
the open sea than Philadelphia is, and Philadelphia is farther inland
than New York, but each of these cities tried to get as much of the
western trade as it could.
The natural way for the men of Baltimore and Alexandria to go across
to the west was up the Potomac river and through its passes in the
mountains. But before they tried this they had settled much of the low,
flat land along the Potomac and about the Chesapeake in Virginia and
Maryland. This was often called “tide-water country,” because the beds
of the rivers are below sea level, and the streams are deep enough for
boats of some size.
[Illustration: FIG. 33. TOLLHOUSE WEST OF BROWNSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA]
When the land was first settled and the colonists found that they
could go almost everywhere by boat, they paid small heed to making
roads. They could visit their neighbors on other plantations and they
could load their tobacco and take it to market by the rivers. Many
plantations were beside rivers of such great depth that sailing vessels
bound for London could come up to the farmer’s wharf and get his crop
of tobacco.
In early days the members of the legislature were not always given
so much per mile to pay the stage fares between their homes and the
capital, but they were allowed the cost of hiring boats instead. Many
ferries were needed, and laws about them were made before rules were
laid down for bridges and roads. Several lawmakers at one time would
have been fined for their absence from the legislature of the colony
had they not been excused because there was no ferry to carry them over
the river which they would have had to cross.
Around Annapolis “rolling roads” were made. These were wide paths made
as smooth as possible, in order that large hogsheads of tobacco might
be rolled, each by two men, to the market in that old town.
After a time the lowlands of the coast region began to fill up and the
people were pushing westward, just as they did in Pennsylvania and New
York. No man had so great a part in this westward movement as the young
surveyor, George Washington. In 1748 he was sixteen years old, a tall,
strong lad, full of courage and energy. Lord William Fairfax, a rich
English gentleman who had settled in Virginia, had bought great tracts
of forest land up the Potomac behind the Blue Ridge mountains, and he
was eager to have them surveyed. Knowing that Washington had studied
surveying, Fairfax asked him to undertake the task. The boy consented;
he went beyond the Blue Ridge into the country along the Shenandoah,
camped in the woods, swam the rivers, toughened his muscles, learned
the ways of the red men, and three years later came back, a grown man,
ready for great things.
While Washington was getting his practice as a surveyor the Ohio
Company was formed to take up lands along the Ohio river, and to keep
the French from settling there. Lawrence, Washington’s elder brother,
was one of the chief men of this company. In 1753 Washington himself
went west to the Ohio river. Day by day the French were taking a firmer
hold of that country, and Dinwiddie, the old Scottish governor of
Virginia, looked about for some one to carry a warning letter to the
commander of one of their new forts. The messenger was also to keep his
eyes open and report what the French were doing on the upper waters of
the Ohio. He chose Washington, saying, “Faith, you’re a brave lad, and,
if you play your cards well, you shall have no cause to repent your
bargain.” Washington did not wait, but left on the day he received his
commission, late in October, 1753.
Christopher Gist, a famous frontiersman, was secured as guide, and we
can have no doubt that he and Washington formed a team, ready to meet
Frenchmen, red men, and the dangers of river and forest. They made up
their little party where the city of Cumberland, Maryland, now stands.
It is far up the Potomac, in the heart of the mountains,--a long way
beyond the Blue Ridge and the lands where Washington had been surveying.
At this place a large stream called Wills creek cuts through one of
the mountain ridges by a deep gorge and enters the Potomac. On a hill,
where these streams come together, was Fort Cumberland, the great
outpost of Virginia and Maryland. A fine church now stands on the
ground of the old fort, in the heart of the busy city of Cumberland.
This was the starting point for Washington’s expedition and for many
later ones into the western wilderness.
Washington made his dangerous journey with success. He brought back a
letter from the French commander, but of much greater value was the
story of all that he had seen. The colonists now knew just what they
would have to do to keep possession of the Ohio lands.
It was not long before Washington went again as commanding officer
of a small army, and in 1755 he served under General Braddock in the
famous battle which resulted in the defeat of the English and the
death of their general. Washington, as we know, brought off the troops
with honor to himself. In each of these expeditions something was done
toward cutting away the trees and grading a road from Fort Cumberland
to the head of the Ohio river at Pittsburg.
[Illustration: FIG. 34. MILESTONE ON THE LINE OF BRADDOCK’S ROAD, NEAR
FROSTBURG, MARYLAND]
On the line of Braddock’s road, a dozen miles west of Cumberland, is
a milestone, set up about a hundred and fifty years ago. A photograph
of it is shown above. It is a rough brown stone, standing in a pasture
half a mile outside the city of Frostburg, in western Maryland. The
stone was once taken away and broken, but it has since been set up
again and cemented into a base of concrete. The view shows how it has
been split up and down. On one side are directions, and on the other
are the words, “Our Country’s Rights We Will Defend.”
Braddock’s journey from Alexandria to Fort Duquesne was an
uncomfortable one, to say nothing of its disastrous end. He bought a
carriage to ride in, but the road was not suited to a coach, as were
the roads he knew in old England. Beyond Cumberland, especially, in
spite of all the work his men could do upon it, it was so bad that he
was forced to take Washington’s advice and change the baggage from
wagons to pack horses.
Gradually, as time went on, these rough paths were beaten down into
smoother thoroughfares. The same causes that led to the development of
the North were working also at the South. Along the Potomac, as in New
York and in Pennsylvania, the stream of colonial life flowed westward.
First the pioneers settled the lowlands around Chesapeake bay and along
the deep rivers; then as their strength and courage reached beyond
the mountains they found the forests and fertile soil behind the Blue
Ridge. Farther within the rugged highlands they built Fort Cumberland
and sent out discoverers and armies to the Ohio river. When the woods
were cleared and towns and states grew up on the Ohio, there was
frequent occasion to cross the mountains for trade, for travel, and to
reach the seat of government, which in 1801 was moved to Washington on
the Potomac.
[Illustration: FIG. 35. OLD ROAD HOUSE, BROWNSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA]
These glimpses of colonial journeys will help us to understand why
the National Road came to be built. About one hundred years ago the
government began to take a great interest in opening roads, especially
across the Appalachian mountains, to Ohio, Kentucky, and other parts
of the Mississippi valley. Washington, who died in 1799, had said
much about this work, for he not only wanted western trade to come to
Virginia instead of going to New Orleans, but he also felt that so long
as the mountains kept the East and the West apart we should never have
one common country, held together by friendly feelings.
The people of Baltimore, like those of New York and Philadelphia, were
eager to have the best road to the West, that their business might be
benefited. Not far from Baltimore is an old place called Joppa, and
several roads are still known as “Joppa roads.” The town is older than
Baltimore and was once the chief trading town in the northern part of
Maryland; but Baltimore was well situated on an arm of the great bay,
and by this time had gone far ahead of its old rival.
A number of good roads had been built in Maryland, among them a famous
one leading out westward to Frederick. This was in the direction
of Hagerstown, and still farther west was Cumberland. The United
States government decided to build a great road to Ohio, beginning
at Cumberland. To get the benefit of this, the men of Baltimore went
to work to push the Frederick pike westward to the beginning of the
National Road.
So it came about in 1811 that the first contracts were let for building
parts of the National Road. We remember that the Erie canal was not
started until six years later. The act of Congress which ordered
the making of the road provided that a strip four rods wide should
be cleared of trees, that it should be built up in the middle with
broken stone, gravel, or other material good for roads, and that all
steep slopes should be avoided. The road was opened to the public in
1818, one year after the Erie canal was begun. The original plan was
to make it seven hundred miles long, reaching from Cumberland to the
Mississippi river, but it was never carried out.
The Maryland roads, as we have seen, ran west from Baltimore and
Washington to Frederick, east of the Blue Ridge; to Hagerstown, in
the Great Valley; and to Cumberland, in the mountains. Cumberland is
a stirring town of about twenty thousand people, and with its great
business in coal, iron, and railroads it seems like a larger city.
Thence the National Road runs through the gap in Wills mountain
(Fig. 36) to Frostburg, a dozen miles west and fifteen hundred feet
higher. The road soon bears northward into Pennsylvania and crosses
the Monongahela river at Brownsville, about forty miles south of
Pittsburg. Coal is mined here, and boats were running in those early
days, as coal barges and steamboats run to-day, down to the great iron
city.
From Brownsville the pike leads over the hills and comes down to the
Ohio river at Wheeling, West Virginia. It then passes on through
Ohio, touching Columbus, the capital, on the way to Indiana and the
Mississippi.
We sometimes admire the cars marked with the sign of the United
States post office, which we see drawn by a swift locomotive at a
speed of sixty miles an hour; but when the government put its mail
coaches on the National Road from Washington to Wheeling, no doubt
they seemed quite as wonderful to the people of that time. And it
was only twenty-five years since the people of Utica had thought
it so remarkable that six letters had come to them in one mail!
Soon passenger coaches were rushing along at ten miles an hour, and
sometimes even faster. There were canvas-covered freight wagons, each
of which carried ten tons, had rear wheels ten feet high, and was drawn
by twelve horses. In those days life was full of stirring interest on
the National Road.
[Illustration: FIG. 36. CUMBERLAND AND THE GAP IN WILLS MOUNTAIN]
There were rates of toll for all sorts of animals and wagons. The toll
was higher for hogs than for sheep, and more was charged for cattle
than for hogs. If the wagons had very wide tires, no toll was demanded.
Drivers sometimes lied about the number of people in their stages,
so as to pay less toll. The stages were not owned by the drivers
but by companies, which bid for travelers and freight, as railways
do now. There were penalties for injuring milestones or defacing
bridges, showing that some people then were like some people now.
The companies had interesting names. There were the “Good Intent,”
“Ohio National Stage Lines,” the “Pilot,” “Pioneer,” “June Bug,” and
“Defiance.” Not one of them cared for mud or dust, for horses or men,
if only it could be the first to reach its destination. There must have
been dust enough, for twenty coaches with their many horses sometimes
followed one another in a close line.
[Illustration: FIG. 37. BRIDGE AND MONUMENT, NATIONAL ROAD, NEAR
WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA]
Henry Clay was one of the chief advocates of this road, and a monument
built in his honor may be seen near the bridge, shown in Fig. 37. It
is a few miles east of Wheeling. At Brownsville a small stream called
Dunlap’s creek flows into the Monongahela from the east. Over it is an
iron bridge on the line of the National Road. According to a story told
in Brownsville, Henry Clay was once overturned as he was riding through
the creek before the bridge was built. As he gathered himself up he
was heard to say, “Clay and mud shall not be mixed here again.” The
story goes that he went on immediately to Washington and got an order
for the building of the bridge.
Whether this be true or not, it is certain that he and many other
statesmen traveled over the National Road. They could not have private
cars, nor did they go in drawing-room coaches, as we can if we choose.
Anybody might chance to sit beside these men of national fame, as
day after day they rode through the valleys and over the mountains,
stopping at the wayside hotels for food and rest.
Some of the old hotels, tollhouses, and bridges, as they look to-day,
are shown in the illustrations in this chapter. The road itself was
long ago given up to the different states and counties through which it
runs, but it still tells to the traveler who goes over it many a story
of the life of a hundred years ago.
CHAPTER IX
THE BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD
Even after the Erie canal was built and long lines of boats were
carrying the grain and other products of the West to New York, the men
of Virginia and Maryland did not give up the notion of still making
the trade of the western country come their way. They planned the
Chesapeake and Ohio canal, to reach the Ohio river, and thought that
other canals across the state of Ohio would let them into lake Erie.
By the Ohio river they would connect with New Orleans and the upper
Mississippi river, and through lake Erie they could reach the towns and
farms that border lake Huron, lake Michigan, and lake Superior.
A canal along the Potomac valley had been talked of several years
before the Revolution, when Richard Henry Lee laid a plan for it before
the Assembly of Virginia. Doubtless others thought of it too, as of
the Erie canal, long before it was made. At the end of the War of the
Revolution Washington made a long journey into the wild woods of New
York. He went to the source of the Susquehanna at Otsego lake, visited
the portage between the Mohawk and Wood creek, and saw for himself
that New York had a great chance for navigation and trade. But he had
a natural love for his own Virginia, and he did not intend to let New
York go ahead of his native state. His journeys across the mountains as
a surveyor and as a soldier gave him a knowledge of the Ohio country,
and as he had himself taken up much good land there, he wished to have
an easy way, by land or water, from the sea to the rich Ohio valley. So
he thought much about a canal to run by the side of the Potomac, and he
joined with others who felt as he did to form the Potomac Company. They
started a canal, but they found so much in the way that they were not
able to go far with it.
[Illustration: FIG. 38. MOUNT ROYAL STATION, BALTIMORE AND OHIO
RAILROAD, BALTIMORE]
The plan for a canal came up again twenty years after Washington died,
and in 1823 a charter was given for building the Chesapeake and Ohio
canal. New York had then been six years at work on the Erie canal and
would finish it in two years more. If the Virginia and Maryland people
had known that most of them would be dead before their canal was half
done, and that it would never be really finished, they would not have
undertaken it.
[Illustration: FIG. 39. CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO CANAL, CUMBERLAND]
They did not begin the work until five years later, in 1828. Then a
great crowd came together at Georgetown, now a part of Washington, on
the Potomac, to see the first earth thrown out. President John Quincy
Adams made the principal speech and then took a spade to begin the
digging. The spade hit a root and would not go into the soil. The
President set down his foot more firmly, but still the spade would
not move. At last, determined to succeed, he pulled off his coat for
the job. The crowd liked this and cheered loudly, while Mr. Adams
accomplished what he had set out to do.
On this very day something else was going on at Baltimore, forty
miles away. Baltimore was not on the Potomac, but her people did not
propose to be left out of the western trade on that account. After much
disputing a charter had been granted for building what became one of
the most famous, as it is one of the oldest, American railways,--the
Baltimore and Ohio. Hence Baltimore had a celebration of her own on
this same Fourth of July, 1828.
They did not have the President of the United States to help them, but
they fared very well. They had great faith in what they were doing, and
doubtless would have shouted even louder had they known what a great
railroad they were starting and what a hard time the canal people would
have.
There was only one man remaining of all the patriots who had signed the
Declaration of Independence almost fifty years before. This was Charles
Carroll of Carrollton, and he was the guest of Baltimore on that day. A
prayer was offered, the Declaration was read, and after an officer of
the railway company had spoken Mr. Carroll removed the first earth. As
if nature would be kind to an old man, no root made his work hard; and
the superstitious may say that the President’s toilsome digging over
in Georgetown was a bad omen for that enterprise. It is easier to look
back than to see into the future.
Both canal and railway went on building, but as they needed nearly
the same route in some places, they did not get on well together. The
canal was located in the state of Maryland, along the north bank of the
Potomac. This was done in some measure because a large part of the
water which would be needed for the canal came down from the uplands
on the north side. It took twenty-three years to dig the trench as
far as Cumberland, so that it was 1851 before boats could run between
Cumberland and tide water. The original plan of carrying the canal
beyond Cumberland and across the mountains was never carried out.
Just below the point where Wills creek enters the Potomac there is a
dam, and from the pond so made the water is taken into the upper end
of the canal. Much traffic has passed up and down the canal, but, on
the whole, it has not paid for the cost of building and repairing.
Sometimes it has been out of use, and a few months ago the state of
Maryland sold it for a small sum to the Wabash Railway Company.
The _North American Review_ has been published for a long time. At
least seventy-five years ago this magazine printed two articles on
the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. By reading them we can see how the
intelligent people of that time felt about building it.
In favor of the proposed railroad they said, first, that it would not
be closed by ice for several months each year, as the Erie canal and
the rivers were. Secondly, they reminded the public that Baltimore is
two hundred miles nearer the Ohio navigation than New York is, and
one hundred miles nearer than Philadelphia. Thirdly, they argued that
New Orleans was a long way off, and its climate hot and unhealthful.
Provisions sent by that route would be likely to spoil, and the traders
taking the goods down the river might fall sick. Further, the rivers in
a dry summer would be too low for navigation.
[Illustration: FIG. 40. HIGHEST POINT ON BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD,
AT SAND PATCH, PENNSYLVANIA]
Nor did Baltimore people think that the Erie canal could get much trade
except from regions close to lake Erie, and they had noticed that lands
not far from the canal still sent a good deal of produce down the
Susquehanna river to Baltimore. There was no port south of them that
was so good as theirs; in short, they showed a very proper pride in
their own home and a conviction that Baltimore was as good as any other
American city, if not, perhaps, a little better.
They said also that the lime used for building in the city of
Washington was brought all the way from Rhode Island, while there was
a great abundance of good limestone in their own mountains, although
it could not be carried by wagons. There was coal also, in seams so
thick and wide that it could never be used up, but there was no way
of getting it down to the sea where it would run factories, smelt
iron, and propel the new steamships that so soon would make the ocean
a well-traveled highway. Slate also was to be had, and marble, and
gypsum, and timber, but these could not be brought to the towns where
they might be used. There was, moreover, much iron ore all along the
proposed route, and we all know that iron is the most important of the
metals.
It had long before been learned that there were many fish in Chesapeake
bay, and that New England was not to have the fishing business all
to herself. Better even than this, there were then, as there are
now, places under the shallow waters where countless oysters lived
and multiplied. It was said, even in 1827, that if there could be a
railroad to carry things quickly, oysters might be sent to people
living far from the sea.
Baltimore’s notion of swift carrying was much like that of the Erie
canal packet owners. Trains could go four miles an hour, and thus
goods might be sent from Baltimore to the Ohio river in sixty-two and
one-half hours. Some hopeful people thought that the speed might even
be raised to eight miles an hour. When cars run at that rate in these
days we begin to talk about getting out and pushing the engine.
The builders of the railroad had what seem to us curious ideas of
laying a foundation for the track. They dug a trench in some places,
putting into it broken stone, and on this they laid long slabs of
stone, or “stone rails.” On these, in their turn, the iron rails were
riveted down. Until car springs were invented the jolting must have
been like that of a farm wagon.
Even when the track was finished no decision had been made as to how
the cars were to be moved. Mr. Hulbert, in one of his stories of
historic highways, tells of several experiments which were made. Some
one invented a locomotive in which a horse was to tread an endless belt
and thus make the machine go, carrying with it the horse and dragging
the cars. On one trip, when several newspaper men were present to
report the trial, the train ran into a cow and they were all tipped
out and tumbled down a bank. The method did not have much praise in
the papers. Sails were also tried, and one car which was thus moved by
wind was called _Æolus_. This car, with its mast and other ship-like
rigging, made much talk, but that was all. And no one could quite see
how it would ever be possible to draw a car on a curved track. This
meant much, for it was out of the question to build a railway through
the mountains without many curves, and some of them rather short ones.
But there were those who thought that if a curved road were possible,
it would be a good thing because the engineer could occasionally look
back along the line and see how his train was coming on.
[Illustration: FIG. 41. LOOKING DOWN THE POTOMAC FROM HARPERS FERRY
Maryland on the left; West Virginia on right and in foreground;
Virginia in the distance; Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and
Chesapeake and Ohio canal at the left; Shenandoah river enters
under bridge on the right
]
But steam was to win the day. Mr. Peter Cooper had a locomotive, called
_Tom Thumb_, built in 1829, and an old picture shows an exciting race
between this little engine and a horse car. The steam car won the race,
and it is now to be seen whether or not electricity will drive steam
out of business on the railways.
By 1833 the road was laid as far as Harpers Ferry, a place made lively
by armies and guns in the Civil War. It is a rugged old town, built
near the spot where the Shenandoah joins the Potomac, and both together
have cut a fine gorge through the Blue Ridge. To-day as one stands in
the upper part of the village and looks down through the great gorge,
he sees the bridge and tracks and trains of the Baltimore and Ohio, and
the channel of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal (Fig. 41). The railway
outstripped the canal, for the road was finished to Cumberland in 1842,
nine years before canal boats floated into that place; and in 1853 the
first train rolled into Wheeling, on the Ohio river.
Another part of the road now runs farther north to Pittsburg and leads
on to Chicago, while yet another passes south to Cincinnati and St.
Louis. Eastward the main line runs to Philadelphia and stops at the
Whitehall terminal in New York City. These long lines, with many spurs
and side lines, make up the Baltimore and Ohio Railway system, which,
like the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, joins the seaports
of the Atlantic coast with the fields and cities of the Mississippi,
and carries in either direction the rich mineral products of the
intervening mountains.
Like her neighbors on the Atlantic, Baltimore stretches out her
hands to sea and land. The city was begun in 1730, at which time a
Mr. Carroll sold the land for it at forty shillings an acre. When
Washington first went to the Ohio there were only twenty-five houses
in Baltimore, but in 1770 there were twenty thousand people, and the
new city was drawing trade from Philadelphia. In 1826, when the Erie
canal was building, Baltimore had become a city of sixty thousand
inhabitants. Now it has more than half a million people, and is the
sixth American city. In foreign trade, however, it stands third, and
its docks are busy places. The Hamburg-American, the North-German
Lloyd, and the Red Star lines all send regular steamers between
Baltimore and Europe, and hundreds of others sail to ports on our own
coast, to the West Indies, and to South America. Baltimore builds
ships as well as sails them, to carry the corn, flour, and meat of the
prairies and the great plains to foreign lands, and to bring back their
products in exchange. Where there are railways and ships there are
always merchants and factories. Out of the gains of trade a Baltimore
merchant built one of the most famous of our schools, the Johns Hopkins
University.
[Illustration: FIG. 42. COKE OVENS AT MEYERSDALE, PENNSYLVANIA]
There has been no more important factor in the development of the
United States than is found in the great railway systems, which, by
linking all sections together, give unity and strength to the whole
fabric of our government. Washington’s dreams of his country’s future
are already overtopped by her actual achievements, and the most hopeful
among those who first saw the advantages of steam engines could hardly
have looked forward to the swift transportation of to-day.
In the year 1901 an American ship and American railway trains ran a
great race to London over land and sea. The start was from Australia
and the distance was more than thirteen thousand miles. The race was
not against other ships and other trains, but against time. The mail
from Sydney in New South Wales usually went by the Red sea and the Suez
canal, a route which is a thousand miles shorter than is the Pacific
route, and which took thirty-five days and a few hours. It happened on
August 13, in the morning, that three hundred and sixty-seven sacks of
important mail for London were piled on the dock, beside which lay a
new American ship, the _Ventura_. Because no good British ship was at
hand that morning, the post-office authorities thought that they would
let the vessel with the Stars and Stripes carry the mail. She did carry
it, and on the evening of September 2 she laid down the bags on the
pier at San Francisco.
The American railroads tried their hand at carrying the British mail.
The Southern Pacific took it swiftly across to Ogden, in Utah. The
Union Pacific seized it, two hours late, and said that the time should
be made up. The train raced a thousand miles to Omaha and made up some
of the time but not all. Then it was off for Chicago, where the Lake
Shore road had a “special” ready to overtake the Fast Mail. It ran two
hundred and forty-four miles in two hundred and sixty-five and a half
minutes, and did overtake it. Then came Buffalo, New York, Queenstown,
and London. The carriers in that great city started out with the mail
early in the morning of September 14. If the bags had come by the
shorter route under the British flag, they would not have reached
London until September 16. This is what great railways and great ships
do in our time,--they make neighbors of all men.
[Illustration: FIG. 43. THE OBSERVATION END, BALTIMORE AND OHIO
RAILROAD]
CHAPTER X
CITIES OF THE OHIO VALLEY
If we look at a map, we shall see that the Allegheny river flows
southward from New York into western Pennsylvania. The Monongahela
river, rising among the rough highlands of West Virginia, sends its
waters toward the north, and the two great streams join to form the
Ohio, which flows on far to the southwest. All together they are like
wide-spreading branches of an apple tree uniting with the gnarled old
trunk.
In the great crotch of the tree Pittsburg is snugly placed. A narrow
point of flat land lies between the rivers just before they come
together to make the Ohio, and back of this point, to the east, rise
steep hills. Across the Allegheny and across the Monongahela the banks
rise sharply for several hundred feet, and there too, wherever the
slope is not too steep for houses to stand, tens of thousands of busy
people have their homes.
[Illustration: FIG. 44. OLD BLOCKHOUSE, PITTSBURG]
The rivers are crossed by many bridges and are full of boats. Up and
down for miles their banks are smoky and noisy with furnaces, and at
night the iron mills light up the valley with wonderful torches of
flame leaping into the black sky. If the great towns clustered within
an hour’s ride were counted in, Pittsburg would now have a million
people. Only a hundred years ago she was, like many other cities in
the New World, a humble village between two rivers. As early as 1730
white men journeyed here to trade with the Indians, who could come from
any part of the western country in their canoes. Washington stood here
November 24, 1753, and in his description of the place wrote, “I think
it extremely well situated for a fort, as it has absolute command of
both rivers.” Men were to need forts for a long time in that country,
and the one which was soon built on this site had a stirring history.
In 1758 it was recaptured from the French and named for England’s
prime minister, Pitt. Hence we have Pittsburgh, which is the old
spelling, but it is now common to drop the _h_, and write it Pittsburg.
The old blockhouse of brick, which is still standing, was built
in 1764. Washington came back to the spot in 1770, and found here
about twenty houses, used by men who were trading with the Indians.
Arthur Lee, in 1784, thought that the place would “never be very
considerable,” but he was not a good prophet. In 1816 it had become a
city and has been steadily gaining in importance since that time. Not
much more than fifty years later an historian of Pittsburg said that if
Mr. Lee could then come back, he would find a city bigger than the six
largest cities and towns in the Old Dominion.
The secret of Pittsburg’s success is in its location. Many years ago
it was called “the gate of the West,” and through it has gone much of
the trade between the East and the lands beyond the mountains. Even
from New York the pioneers came by land and water to the head of the
Ohio, an undertaking by no means easy in those days. A prominent man
in Pittsburg once contracted with the government to send provisions
to Oswego, and as he wished to make the long journey as profitable as
he could, he packed the provisions in strong barrels that would hold
salt. When these were emptied they were filled for the return trip
with Onondaga salt and carried by lake Ontario to the Niagara river
below the falls. They were then taken around the falls and across the
lake to Erie, up French creek, over the portage, and at length by boat
to Pittsburg. It was a roundabout way, but the enterprising dealer
sold salt in Pittsburg for half the price charged by the packers who
brought it by rough mountain roads from the East.
Improvements in methods of transportation caused an increase in
business activity. By the Pittsburg pike, by the canal with its Portage
Railway, and finally by the Pennsylvania Railroad, trade was coming
from Philadelphia. Not less promptly did the men of Baltimore and the
Virginians reach Pittsburg by the trail, the National Road, and the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Because Pittsburg stood at the head of the
Ohio it was a door to the whole Mississippi valley, and men and goods
quickly found their way to it. Once there a boat would take them over
thousands of miles of river, or to New Orleans and the open sea.
Henry Clay used to tell in Congress a good story about Pittsburg. He
said that a ship built at Pittsburg sailed down the river, through
the gulf, across the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, and anchored
at Leghorn. The captain handed his papers to the officer of the
customhouse, who did not credit them. “Sir,” said he, “your papers are
forged; there is no such port as Pittsburg in the world; your vessel
must be confiscated.” Though the captain was frightened, he pulled out
a map and taught the Italian official a lesson in geography, making
him understand at last that one could sail a thousand miles up the
Mississippi and another thousand up the Ohio, and that there was such a
port as Pittsburg.
[Illustration: FIG. 45. PITTSBURG]
The first boats on the Ohio river were the light bark canoes of the red
men. These could sail in almost any water, but they were easily broken
and could carry only light loads. When white men began to throng the
river and wanted to carry their families, household furniture, tools,
grain, and all the produce of the land, they needed something larger
and stronger. At first they built barges, which were little more than
great boxes made water-tight. These they loaded and steered down the
stream as best they could. They did not expect to bring them back, for
such boats could not be pushed against the current. Hence the barge
builders at Pittsburg always had work, for a new one had to be provided
for each fresh cargo.
Later men began to make keel boats, in which they could not only go
downstream but could also, by poling, make a return voyage. These boats
were about fifty feet long and could carry twenty tons or more. Along
the sides were “running boards,” where the men went up and down with
their setting poles to drive the boat against the current. The space
between the running boards was covered over to form a kind of cabin.
It was not an easy task to pole one of these boats up a rapid, and the
life on the river was a life of toil.
During the last twenty years before 1800, or while Washington was
President, a wealthy merchant of Philadelphia took up traffic on the
Ohio. He sent dry goods and other merchandise overland to Pittsburg,
thence down the Ohio in a barge, and up the Mississippi to Kaskaskia in
Illinois, which was at that time an important town. Here the cargo was
exchanged for skins of bear, deer, buffalo, and other animals, to be
taken up the Ohio and sent from Pittsburg to Philadelphia.
It took time to trade in this way. A summer was needed to go down to
New Orleans and back again with a keel boat or a barge. When a boat
came up “with furs from St. Louis; cotton from Natchez; hemp, tobacco,
and saltpeter from Maysville; or sugar and cotton from New Orleans and
Natchez, it was a wonder to the many, and drew vast crowds to see and
rejoice over it.”
One of the river men. Captain Shreve, once took his boat from New
Orleans up to Louisville in twenty-five days. The people celebrated
this remarkable achievement and gave the captain a public dinner. No
doubt they made as much ado as we should now make if a ship should go
from New York to Liverpool in three days. They were quite right to make
a feast in honor of the occasion, for the time commonly allowed for the
journey had been three months.
The flatboat, which for years was used in river traffic, was about
forty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight feet deep. It had a flat
bottom and was handled by means of three oars on each side. Two of
these were called sweeps, and were almost as long as the boat itself.
At the stern was a still longer steering oar. When the water rose in
the autumn these boats carried loads of produce and bore thousands of
families who were seeking homes farther west.
Old and young with their household treasures, which often included
the cow, sailed down in these rude house boats to some chosen spot in
the distant wilderness. It was in a boat like these that the tall and
awkward young man, Abraham Lincoln, made a voyage to New Orleans and
first saw something of the outside world.
Redstone was an old name for Brownsville, where the National Road
crossed the Monongahela, and many boats started from here in early
days. It is said that an old boatman was once hailed by a seeker after
information. “Where are you from?” was the first question. “Redstone,”
was the answer. “What is your lading?” “Millstones.” “What is your
captain’s name?” “Whetstone.” “Where are you bound?” “For Limestone.”
The interesting part of the story is that these answers were all true.
Large as the traffic was by the flatboats, it was greatly increased
when steamboats began to run on the rivers. No other craft could hope
to compete with these.
The boatmen owed a grudge to the steamboat, just as the pack-horse
men had hated the Conestoga wagon, for they saw that their trade was
lost, and it was hard to try to make a living in some other way. For
many years the great passenger boats reigned supreme on the rivers
of the West, but at last they in turn were forced to give way to the
railroads. Such boats still run on the Ohio and the Mississippi, but
men do not travel on them when they wish to go quickly.
Railroad cars, however, do not take the place of some boats on the
Ohio. Look out on the Monongahela at Pittsburg and you may see large
fields of boats,--many acres of barges, for there are barges on the
river still, though they do not look like the old ones. They are of
great size and are sometimes made of steel. The coal, taken from the
hill out of which it is dug, is run on a trestle along the river and
dumped into one of these boats. At Pittsburg the barges wait for the
water to rise to a “coal-boat” stage,--that is, until there is a depth
of at least eight feet all the way down the river Then a number of
barges are lashed together and a steamboat pushes them down the stream.
The water often comes up suddenly, and the coal must be rushed to
market while the high water lasts. A single towboat sometimes takes to
New Orleans several acres of coal from the great Pittsburg coal seam.
This lies flat under the hilltops and is mined from the edges where the
rivers have cut down through the coal, far into the beds of rock that
lie below.
[Illustration: FIG. 46. COAL BARGES, PITTSBURG]
On the Monongahela the United States owns fifteen dams with locks, and
the river is thus “slacked” far up into West Virginia. The dams change
the river into a series of long, still ponds, which are deep enough to
float the coal barges. Below Pittsburg, in the Ohio, is another dam
which sets the water back and makes a harbor for the city.
There is no coal to send down the Allegheny, but there are logs to
be rafted, and there is much oil, for the river flows through the
petroleum region around Oil City. Some of this is taken to refineries
at Pittsburg and made ready for use. Much natural gas is obtained by
boring and is used in the city for warming houses and for cooking.
[Illustration: FIG. 47. PITTSBURG AT NIGHT]
A cloud of smoke from the soft coal burned in so many shops and
furnaces hangs over the lower parts of Pittsburg and has given it
the name of “The Smoky City.” James Parton says that on the first
morning of his visit there he felt sure that he was rising very early,
for the street lamps were all burning and he ate his breakfast in a
room lighted by gas. As the room was filled with people, he thought
Pittsburg was very enterprising, and himself along with it, but he was
quite taken aback when he looked at his watch and found that it was
almost nine o’clock. Darker even than the streets are the “rooms” in
which thousands of miners, within a few miles of the city, dig out coal
with their picks and shovels.
If one rides into Pittsburg by night, he will see something finer than
fireworks. The train is likely to whirl him past long rows of fiery
ovens in which coal is being made into coke. And in many towns near by,
as well as along the rivers by the city itself, the jets of flame will
show iron furnaces and steel mills, with grimy workmen moving about in
the strange light.
[Illustration: FIG. 48. FURNACES NEAR PITTSBURG]
The iron ore for these furnaces is brought from many parts of the
country, but chiefly from the lands around lake Superior. It is shipped
down the lakes in large steamers and loaded into cars at Cleveland
or some other port on lake Erie. Instead of carrying the coal to the
ore, the ore is thus brought to the coal, without which it could not be
worked. The reason for this is that Pittsburg is much nearer the places
where most of the iron is to be used. If the coal of Pennsylvania were
taken to the iron mines of Minnesota and the furnaces built there,
much of the iron and steel would have to be carried back a long way to
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other parts of the East.
Glass mills form an important part of the city’s industries and have
been in operation for a long time. Bottle glass is manufactured here,
besides three fourths of all the plate glass of the United States.
Perhaps it is because bottles are made in Pittsburg that we find here
also the largest cork factory in the world.
Pittsburg is proud of the fact that she handles more tons of freight in
a year than any other city in the world. Indeed, the tonnage is greater
than that of New York and Chicago taken together.
The old “point” between the rivers is filled with tall buildings.
Inclined railways run up the steep bluffs on the further side of each
river and lead to the beautiful streets and the homes where many of
the people live. For Pittsburg is not all coal and furnaces and smoke,
but has fine churches, the great Carnegie Library and Museum, and many
schools. But it is mostly because of the coal and the rivers that we
find here a splendid city.
Sixty-three miles down the Ohio river, on its left bank, is Wheeling,
the largest city in West Virginia. The business streets lie close
to the Ohio, and the houses extend up the steep slope to the east,
while over a high ridge comes the old National Road from the valley of
Wheeling creek. Wheeling was the goal of many heavily laden wagons in
the days of the pike, and because of the river and many railroads has
a large trade to-day. It was settled in 1770 and is one of the oldest
towns on the river.
On the north bank of the great stream, in the southwest corner of Ohio,
is the largest city on the river. As late as 1900 Cincinnati had a few
thousand more people than Pittsburg, but a “greater Cincinnati” would
not be so large as a “greater Pittsburg.”
In Cincinnati, as in Pittsburg, men do business on the low grounds by
the river, where offices and mills and shops crowd one another, and
the smoke of soft coal hangs as a cloud above. Business hours over,
the well-to-do merchants climb out of the grimy town to the top of the
bluffs, and there find, in a clearer air and along open and beautiful
avenues, their comfortable homes. Down town the turbulent river
sometimes comes up forty or fifty feet beyond its usual level and makes
trouble in the busy city, but Mt. Auburn and Walnut Hills are disturbed
neither by smoke nor by floods.
Rivers do not often flow in straight lines, and it is very common for
them to change their courses along their flood plains. This habit
of shifting belongs alike to great and small streams, whether the
Mississippi or the brook in the meadow. The Ohio, like other rivers,
often writes the letter S, and in so doing at this point has swung off
from its old north bank, leaving a low plain with room enough for a
hundred thousand people to carry on their business. There is always
some good reason which has led to the settlement and growth of a town,
and the history of Cincinnati shows no exception.
It was in early winter, 1788, when cakes of ice were already floating
on the river, that a number of men sailing downstream stopped here
and began a settlement. The place was not readily named. It is said
that the matter was left to a frontier schoolmaster, and he did not
lose the chance to show how much he knew. He saw that the Licking
river comes into the Ohio on the Kentucky side just opposite. So
he set down an L. He next remembered an ancient word _os_, meaning
“mouth,” and he put that down. Then he considered that _anti_ means
“opposite” and that _ville_ means “town.” So he wrote the whole
name,--_L-os-anti-ville_,--_Losantiville_,--“the town opposite the
mouth of Licking.”
We might wonder whether a town with a name like that would ever grow
into a great city. It did not have to try, for it was not long before
General St. Clair, who had come there, made fun of the name and
insisted upon a new one. He and other officers of the American army had
formed a society commemorating their experience in the Revolution, and
in honor of the Roman patriot Cincinnatus had called themselves the
Order of Cincinnati. St. Clair thought this a good name for the town,
and Cincinnati it has been since that time.
The place has its nickname also, and its people like to call it the
Queen City, which seems to go very well with Beautiful River. Another
name, rarely used and not very pleasing, perhaps, to those who live
there, is “Porkopolis,” which came from the fact that for forty years
before the American Civil War more pork packing was done in Cincinnati
than anywhere else in the country.
[Illustration: FIG. 49. RIVER FRONT, CINCINNATI]
Sir Charles Lyell, an Englishman who saw Cincinnati in 1842, speaks
of the “pork aristocracy,” explaining that he means the men that had
grown rich by packing pork, and not the pigs that he saw running in the
streets. This shows how new some of our large business centers are,
though it would be a great mistake to suppose that pigs and cows now
run loose in western cities. In those days such places were teaching
the country how to “pack fifteen bushels of corn into a pig,” and how
to send the produce of the farms to distant cities or other lands in
such a way as to get the most money for the least freight.
When Charles Dickens visited this country many years ago he went to
Cincinnati, and spoke well of the place. This was a great compliment,
for the famous English story-teller was hard to suit when he was
looking at anything American. If he could come back to Cincinnati now,
he might find even more to please and surprise him.
Cincinnati has always made much use of the river. There were little
boats in which the owners carried notions and such things as a country
store sells, peddling them from one settlement to another along the
banks. There were barges and flatboats bearing families and farm
produce. Then came steamboats, which carried everything,--passengers,
grain, coal, merchandise, and even circuses and menageries. We can
imagine the excitement among the small boys of a river town when the
circus boat told of its arrival by the fierce blast of a loud steam
whistle. There are steamboats yet and a busy river front, but great
railroads center here, and trains run to Pittsburg and Philadelphia,
Cleveland and New York, Chicago and St. Louis, Nashville and New
Orleans. A vast business is done. There are many schools, and to-day
Cincinnati can boast of her music, of her pictures and museums, and of
the fine pottery that she makes. She has thrown off the schoolmaster’s
clumsy name, she has many better things than pork, and she is widely
known as one of America’s great cities.
An early writer says that the Ohio is “by far the noblest river in the
universe.” He writes this in the beginning of a history of Louisville,
a book which was printed in 1819. This in itself shows that Louisville
is one of the old cities of the Ohio valley. It is not so large as
Cincinnati or Pittsburg, but it is the chief city of the great state of
Kentucky.
The old boatmen, finding that the current was rapid at a certain point,
called it the “falls of the Ohio.” A ledge of hard rocks in the bed of
the river caused the rapids and made it no easy task to navigate boats.
Finally a canal was dug by which the rapids might be avoided at low
water.
It was this ledge in the river that started the town and finally
made a city out of Louisville, for boats going in either direction
naturally stopped at the falls. There was another reason, too, as we
shall see when we learn something of the “Wilderness Road,” which
crossed Kentucky from the eastern mountains and came out on the river
at Louisville. Back from the river also lay the rich and fertile Blue
Grass country for which Kentucky is famous.
The canal was ready to take steamboats around the ledge in 1831.
Some of these boats had interesting names, such as the _Enterprise_,
the _Vesuvius_, the _Comet_, the _Volcano_, the _New Orleans_, the
_Cincinnati_, the _Experiment_, the _Rifleman_, and the _Rising States_.
It was a wonderful life on the river, and Louisville got her share of
the gain of it, as she now shares the traffic of the railroads. To-day
she is a rich and beautiful city of two hundred thousand people.
CHAPTER XI
THE GREAT VALLEY
Alexander Spotswood was a famous governor of the colony of Virginia. He
was of Scottish parentage, but he was born in Morocco, where his father
was a surgeon. The lad grew up to serve his country as a soldier, and
was wounded by a cannon ball in a great war then going on in Europe.
In 1710 the king sent him to Virginia to be governor, an office which
he filled for twelve years. The people liked him, though he made some
enemies because he kept his soldierly ways and did not always speak in
gentle phrases. He was a kind, warm-hearted man, nevertheless, loving
his family and friends. His energy, too, was well known, and he was
always ready to further a new scheme.
Because he started the first iron furnaces in America he was called
the “Tubal Cain of Virginia,” Tubal Cain being known in sacred history
as the first of metal workers. Nothing was more important to the
colonists than iron, for they could not always bring tools and kettles
and nails and gun metal from England. The governor showed his practical
ability in other ways. He brought over Germans who knew how to raise
grapes and make wine. He was interested in teaching the Indians, and
at one time he sent out ships and caught “Blackbeard,” who, with his
fellow-pirates, was prowling about the coast. When the young Benjamin
Franklin, in Boston, heard of the capture he wrote a poem about it.
In that day nearly all of Virginia was in the “tide-water country,” but
Spotswood had often heard of the valley beyond the Blue Ridge. He made
up his mind to go and see this region, and brought together a party to
make the journey. They took their servants and pack horses and carried
provisions and many bottles of the wine which the Germans had made.
There was good hunting in the unbroken forest and they had all the
venison and other wild meat they could have wished.
A good map of Virginia will show us Harpers Ferry, where the Potomac
river runs through a deep gap in the Blue Ridge. Looking along the
range to the southwest, we shall find, about eighty miles away, Swift
Run Gap, not so low a pass, but one which made it easy to cross the
mountains and go down into the lowlands along the Shenandoah river.
Spotswood and his friends climbed one of the peaks of the Blue Ridge
and named it Mt. George, after the king. Another peak was named
Alexander for the governor. Down by the Shenandoah they buried a bottle
(the historian of Virginia thinks that by this time they must have had
several that were empty), and in the bottle was a paper stating that
they took possession in the name of the king. They called the river the
Euphrates, but the name did not cling to it. We may be glad of that,
for the Indian name of Shenandoah is much more musical.
[Illustration: FIG. 50. LURAY, SHENANDOAH VALLEY]
If Spotswood had crossed the lowlands, he would have found himself
among other mountains running parallel to the Blue Ridge. Between the
two ranges is the valley of the Shenandoah, or, as it is quite as often
called, the valley of Virginia. The land is flat and the soil deep and
rich. The soft shales and limestone of ancient higher lands have wasted
away here, between the higher mountains on either side, and thus we
find a valley and a fertile valley floor.
The place was wild and lonely when this band of explorers visited it,
but to-day it is a country rich in interest and associations. If we go
northeast we shall pass Winchester, which became famous in the Civil
War. In another part of the valley is Luray, where the limestones have
been dissolved under the ground, making a large cavern with beautiful
stalactites. Still going northward, we shall pass Harpers Ferry on our
right and cross the Potomac. On our right also, after we cross the
river, is Antietam, where a severe battle was fought between Lee and
McClellan. A little farther on is Hagerstown, Colonel Rochester’s old
home, in the state of Maryland.
The next move would take us over into Pennsylvania, through
Chambersburg and Carlisle, about which we already know, and across the
Susquehanna to Harrisburg. On our right, as we go up into Pennsylvania,
is the low South mountain, which is the Blue Ridge continued. All this
time we are in the Great Valley. The valley of Virginia is but a part
of the whole, which reaches through several states and everywhere has
the Blue Ridge on the southeast and other ridges of the Appalachian
mountains on the northwest. Every part of the valley is thickly
settled and has fine houses and homes, because its soil produces good
crops and makes the people prosperous.
[Illustration: SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN REGION]
Spotswood’s journey opened the way for families from the tide-water
region to settle beyond the mountains, but they were not the
only settlers. It was easy for the people of the Great Valley in
Pennsylvania, where the land was earlier taken up, to push to the
southwest along the same valley. They found smoother traveling and
better farms than if they had gone up into the mountains on the west.
So we see that the valley, leading southwest, guided the stream of
emigrants in that direction. The result was that the valley of Virginia
was occupied partly by people entering through Pennsylvania, and partly
by those who, like Spotswood, came through passes in the Blue Ridge. It
was thirty years later, when most of the land was still a wilderness,
that we find George Washington crossing these same mountains to survey
for Lord Fairfax. His path lay between Harpers Ferry and Swift Run Gap.
In this valley, during the Civil War, “Stonewall” Jackson, Sheridan,
and other well-known generals took their armies up and down, and fought
a number of battles. The rich farms and full barns of the valley played
no small part in the strife by furnishing food for the soldiers.
The headwaters of the James river are in the Great Valley. One branch
flows southwest and another northeast. These come together and go
out to the southeast by a gap in the Blue Ridge. To-day we come up
the Shenandoah by the Norfolk and Western Railway, which continues
along these branches of the James. Before long we reach Roanoke, a
flourishing city just inside the Blue Ridge. Then follows the crossing
of the New river, which flows northwest across the valley on its long
course to the Ohio.
[Illustration: FIG. 51. JAMES RIVER GAP IN THE BLUE RIDGE, FROM THE
WEST]
Now we are looking toward Tennessee, and the Great Valley soon takes
us to several long streams which help to form the Tennessee river. The
heads of these streams we shall find in Virginia, and their names are
the Holston, the Clinch, and Powell’s river. The Great Valley in this
southwestern part of Virginia is really divided into several valleys by
long and rather high ridges that separate these rivers.
The main line of the Southern Railway, between Washington and
Knoxville, runs along the valley of the Holston river and crosses from
Virginia into Tennessee at Bristol.
After we come into Tennessee the ridges that separate the streams fall
away again, and we find one great valley, about forty miles wide. On
the northwest the Cumberland plateau and the Cumberland mountains rise
above it. On the southeast there loom up the Great Smoky mountains on
the border of North Carolina. Great Smoky is only another name for the
Blue Ridge, for it is the same range, only higher and wider than it is
farther north.
Although this valley is a part of the Great Valley, it is commonly
called the valley of east Tennessee, its people using the home name
as they do in Virginia. The Holston, the Clinch, and Powell’s river
are not the only branches of the Tennessee. Out of the Great Smoky
mountains there flow from the east the French Broad, the Little
Tennessee, and the Hiwassee. Knoxville stands a little below the place
where the Holston and French Broad flow together, and Chattanooga is a
hundred miles farther down, where the Tennessee, now a lordly stream,
leaves the Great Valley and flows westward through a deep valley in the
Cumberland plateau. This lesson in geography we must learn well, with
the help of a map, and we shall then see what the pioneers did as they
followed the rivers between the mountains.
It is an old road that runs from Pennsylvania to Tennessee by the
valley. It took the pioneer across the Potomac through Winchester and
Staunton in Virginia. Farther on was a fortified place, Fort Chissel,
built in 1758, which was on the way to the Watauga Settlement and
Cumberland Gap. Of Watauga we must now tell, and of the Cumberland Gap
in the next chapter.
Watauga is the name of a small river which flows out of the mountains
on the east, into the Great Valley, and enters the Holston. In a
pleasant spot on the banks of this stream the first settlement of
white men in Tennessee was made. Some of the people had come along the
valley from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and others had climbed over the
mountains from North Carolina because of the wrongs they had suffered
there.
Many of these men and women had come from the north of Ireland.
They were not of Irish but of Scotch blood, their ancestors having
originally come from Scotland to make the north of Ireland their home.
For this reason they are often called Scotch-Irish, but whatever we
name them, we are to remember that they were sturdy and intelligent
people. Conscientious and loyal Presbyterians they were in faith, and
by nature brave and full of endurance. Their fathers had shed their
blood for freedom on Scottish fields, and the sons were not likely to
be frightened by a wilderness full of red savages.
[Illustration: FIG. 52. HILLY FARM LANDS IN THE GREAT VALLEY, NEAR
KNOXVILLE]
Besides the Scotch-Irish, there were many Germans who had followed the
valley from Pennsylvania, and there were Huguenots also, besides a few
Hollanders and Swedes. A fort was built on the little river, and around
this defense grew up the Watauga Settlement. There was no Tennessee in
those days.
Many of the settlers had followed down the valleys from earlier homes
in Virginia, and it never occurred to them that they were not still
living in Virginia, and able to call on the colony for help. But after
a time a man came to the settlement who was a surveyor, and for some
reason he thought that he would run the boundary line of Virginia
farther west. When he had done it, what was the surprise of every one
to find that they were not in Virginia at all! If they belonged to any
colony, it was to North Carolina. Unfortunately there was a lack of
good government in that colony, and the prospect of belonging to it
was not a pleasant one; indeed, some of the settlers had run away from
North Carolina, and had felt safer because the great mountains rose
between them and their former home.
There seemed nothing to do but to make a government of their own, so
they formed the Watauga Association, about which writers of American
history have said a good deal. It would be interesting to see a copy
of the constitution that was drawn up by these backwoodsmen, but it
has been lost, with little hope that it will ever be recovered. It
is known, however, that there was a committee of thirteen, really a
legislature. This committee chose five of their own number to form
a court, which had a clerk and a sheriff and made laws for all the
settlers. Roosevelt, in his _Winning of the West_, says that these
pioneers were the first to build a “free and independent community” in
America.
The two most important men of this little state in the wild forest show
us that the settlers came from widely different places. James Robertson
was one, and he came over the mountains from North Carolina. John
Sevier was the other, and he came down the valley from Virginia. We
shall need to know what sort of men these were.
James Robertson belonged to the Scotch-Irish people. He was not one
of the very first settlers at Watauga, but came in the second year,
1770. He had no early education, and his wife, an intelligent woman,
taught him to read. He went alone over the mountains, with only his
horse and gun, in search of a place for a home. He found the settlers
and admired the place which they had chosen, but on his way back in
the fall he lost his horse and got his powder wet. He wandered about,
almost starved, until he met some hunters, who helped him home. He told
his neighbors of the lands in the valley, and as soon as the winter
was over his own family and sixteen others started out for Watauga.
He built a log house, went to work on the land, and by his wisdom and
energy soon came to be a leader of the new colony.
John Sevier did not come until 1772. His father had been a settler in
the Shenandoah valley, and John followed the streams, as we have traced
them, to the Great Valley. He was by birth a gentleman, using that word
to mean a man born of cultivated parents and familiar with the world.
He was well educated and was acquainted with prominent men, such as
Franklin and Madison. Both he and Robertson were good fighters, as we
shall see.
It was not long before seven hundred Indian warriors, angry because the
white people had made homes on their hunting grounds, stole in upon
the settlement. An Indian woman, Nancy Ward by name, who felt kindly
toward the whites, secretly warned them of the attack, so that when
the savages came they found all the men, women, and children in the
fort. It was not much of a fort, but it saved their lives. The Indians
kept up the attack for six days, but the colonists, led by Sevier and
Robertson, held out against them and killed a number of their braves.
When nearly a week had passed the red men, tired of the siege, went off
through the forest.
[Illustration: FIG. 53. FROM THE PINNACLE, CUMBERLAND GAP, LOOKING
NORTHEAST ALONG THE CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS. THE GREAT VALLEY AT THE RIGHT]
At one time, when some lawless whites had killed an Indian without
reason, the members of the tribe were very angry and threatened to
avenge the murder. Robertson, thinking that he could soften their
anger, went alone among the fierce Cherokees. He told them that the
Watauga people were very sorry the man had been killed, and that they
would try to find and punish the murderer. As the Indians believed
Robertson to be an honest man, they did as he asked them to do and the
settlers were not disturbed.
The Watauga colonists had to live in a very rough and simple way.
They built their cabins of logs, with what were called puncheon
floors,--that is, floors made of thick, rude slabs. Frequently a big
slab served for a table, three-legged stools for chairs, and a row
of pegs for a wardrobe. Roosevelt says that the dress of the men was
largely copied from that of the Indians, and included a fur cap,
leggings of buckskin or elk hide, and a fringed hunting shirt. A heavy
rifle was carried, which was usually fired from a rest.
Garments and bed clothing were made of wool, which was spun at home
by the wives and daughters. The women worked hard from morning till
night, and the men had many things to do. There were lands to be
cleared, crops to be raised, and game to be hunted and dressed. Besides
all these occupations it was necessary to keep a constant lookout for
hostile savages and to have all means of defense ready in case of a
sudden attack. The Indians were so crafty and deceitful that only
the closest watchfulness saved the palefaces from danger and death.
Sometimes an unwary hunter, hearing the gobbling of a turkey or the
call of an owl, would come out into an open place only to be laid low
by the red man’s bullet. These experiences developed a strong and brave
people.
The settlers often bartered things because they had no money, and
they were ignorant of many of the ways of civilized life. Some of the
frontiersmen did not know that tea leaves should be steeped and used
for a drink, and tried to eat them with butter or salt.
When a boy was twelve years old he had to begin to take a man’s part.
A gun was given to him, and he was placed at a loophole in the fort to
help keep off the savage foe. Thus the boys grew up to be real men,
knowing little fear, able to take care of themselves, and helping to
build one of the great states of the American Union.
CHAPTER XII
TO KENTUCKY BY THE CUMBERLAND GAP
Dr. Thomas Walker was a man of Virginia. He had attended William
and Mary College, and was well educated for his times. As the agent
of a land company which had a grant of new lands in Kentucky, he,
with several companions, made a hard journey of six months into the
wilderness. They started at Charlottesville in Virginia, went through
the Blue Ridge into the Great Valley, and then followed the valley
southwest. One of Walker’s companions bore the name of Ambrose Powell,
and as they followed one of the long streams that flow to the southwest
to form the Tennessee, they named it Powell’s river. His son afterwards
was an officer in the Revolution, and it is said that A. P. Hill, a
well-known Confederate general in the Civil War, was his great-grandson.
These were, in fact, no common men who, in the year 1750, ventured out
into the forest, over the roughest trails we can imagine, among wild
animals and savage men. Following down Powell’s river, the travelers
saw rugged mountains on their right, the Cumberland range. As they
wished to explore the forests of Kentucky, they were looking for a
chance to pass the mountains, and by and by they came in sight of a
deep notch, cut at least a thousand feet below the top of the mountain
ridge (Fig. 54).
[Illustration: FIG. 54. CUMBERLAND GAP FROM THE EAST]
They turned aside to this and followed it out of the Great Valley.
They had to climb up about five hundred feet through a wooded ravine
in order to reach the top of the pass, and there was a similar slope
on the other side. This brought them to an open valley and to a river,
which they followed through a gap in another mountain range, the
Pineville mountains.
Dr. Walker called the first pass the Cumberland Gap, in honor of a
well-known Englishman, and the name has survived even to the present
day. In like manner we have the Cumberland mountains. Walker did not go
far enough west to find the beautiful Kentucky lands on the Ohio river.
After wandering about in the high, rough country of eastern Kentucky,
he finally reached his Virginia home without having accomplished much
in the service of his company.
But he had found and named what has become one of the most famous
historical places in America, the Cumberland Gap. He was not the first
man to go through it, for the Indians had long been familiar with it.
Their trail had traversed it for no one knows how many generations.
Not only did it lead directly to the open, fertile country west of
the mountains, but beyond it the warrior’s trail stretched northward
through the woods to the Ohio river.
The Watauga Settlement was about fifty miles eastward from the
Cumberland Gap. As the hardy pioneers did not make much of following
a forest trail for fifty miles, the Watauga colony was next door to
Kentucky, and the great gap in the Cumberland mountains was only a step
farther on, either for them or for travelers to the West who might
choose this route.
We must now follow the fortunes of the most famous of Kentucky hunters
and pioneers, who, while he did not find or name the Cumberland Gap,
often went through it, and is remembered by most people in connection
with it. This man was Daniel Boone.
We could not find a better example of the movement along the Great
Valley to the southwest than the life of Boone; for his childhood was
spent on what was then the frontier, and his experience was like that
of hundreds of others similarly reared.
[Illustration: FIG. 55. DANIEL BOONE]
Boone was born near the Schuylkill river in Pennsylvania in 1734, two
years after the birth of Washington. This part of Pennsylvania was
still on the edge of the wilderness, and from his early boyhood Boone
knew all about the Indians. His family were Quakers, and he himself
was quiet and thoughtful, learning to read from the Quaker wife of
his eldest brother, but getting most of his education in the fields
and woods. Though he could read, he spelled almost as badly as did
Nicholas Herkimer. Boone had some experience as a blacksmith, which,
his biographer says, taught him how to mend his traps and guns. He used
to hunt in the woods in winter, helping thus to feed the family, and
with the skins which he took to Philadelphia he bought powder, lead,
and hunting knives.
When Boone was about sixteen years old his family decided to move.
They went along the Great Valley, as many were doing in those days,
crossed the Potomac, and traveled far through the valley of Virginia.
Then they turned east, crossed the Blue Ridge, and made a home in the
valley of the Yadkin river in North Carolina. They were thus east of
the mountains, and across, to the west, was the Watauga Settlement.
While his home was in North Carolina Boone had an experience which
helped him to be a rugged pioneer, for he went up to Virginia and
across the mountains with General Braddock, serving as wagoner and
blacksmith. He found himself in dangerous quarters in the battle, where
many of the teamsters were shot, but he managed to cut his horses
loose, mounted one of them, and escaped.
On this expedition he made friends with John Finley, and together they
planned to go at some future time to Kentucky by the Cumberland Gap and
enjoy the fine hunting in the forests of the West. Finley had already
made a journey down to the falls of the Ohio river.
At home Boone lived, like all others in those valleys, in a small log
cabin chinked with clay and warmed by a large fireplace, in which, says
his biographer, “the young wife (for Boone was now married) cooked
simple meals of corn mush, pumpkins, squashes, beans, potatoes, and
pork, or wild meat of many kinds.”
Boone spent his time in farming, working at the forge, and hunting; but
he liked hunting best, and was never so happy as in the thick forest
alone with his gun. He often went on long hunting trips, returning with
bear’s meat, venison, bear’s oil, and furs, the last to be sold for
other things needed at home.
[Illustration: FIG. 56. PINEVILLE GAP, WHERE THE CUMBERLAND RIVER
PASSES PINEVILLE MOUNTAIN A FEW MILES BEYOND CUMBERLAND GAP]
In 1767 Boone and one or two friends made a hunting tour into Kentucky,
though they did not know they were so far west as that. As they were
kept there by heavy snows, they camped at a “salt lick” and lived by
shooting the buffaloes and other animals that came to get the salt.
The hunters returned to their homes in the spring and did not go out
until 1769. Meantime John Finley was peddling in that south land, and
one day surprised Boone, and himself, too, by knocking at the door of
Boone’s cabin. He made the hardy pioneer a long visit, and in the
spring, having talked it all over many times, they set out for Kentucky.
They crossed the Blue Ridge and the Great Valley and came to Cumberland
Gap. This was Boone’s first journey to the great pass. It is pleasant
now to stand in the gap at the top of the pass and think of the time
when Boone with his hunting friends made their way up from the east and
went happily down through the woods to the strange country on the west.
At one time they were taken by Indians, who plundered their camp and
stole all their furs. Most of the party were discouraged and went back
to the settlements, but Boone and one companion were angry at their
loss and determined to stay and make it good. This was like Boone, who
knew nothing of fear, and who did not easily give up what he wanted to
do.
He made several trips to Kentucky and greatly liked the new country. At
length, having decided to take his family with him and make his home
there, he became the leader of the pioneers that went out under the
Transylvania Company, as it was called.
They built a fort and founded a place named Boonesborough, after the
great hunter. But he was much more than a hunter, being now a military
commander and doing surveying also for people who were taking up tracts
of new land. Houses and forts were built, forests were cleared, and
crops were raised. Such was the beginning of the state of Kentucky.
It was not all simple and pleasant work, however. In 1768, the year
before Daniel Boone and John Finley went through the Cumberland Gap,
a great company of Indians had gathered at Fort Stanwix, which we
remember from the battle of Oriskany, and by a treaty had given to the
English the rights to the Kentucky region. But the powerful Cherokees
of the southern mountains were not at Fort Stanwix, and they had
something to say about the settlement of Kentucky lands. So Boone
called them together at a great meeting on the Watauga river, and
bought the Kentucky forests from them. This was the time when an old
chief said to Boone, “Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I
believe you will have much trouble settling it.” The old Indian was
right,--they did have much trouble. Cabins were burnt, and settlers
were slain with gun and tomahawk, but Boone and many others with him
would admit no failure. People began to pour in through the Cumberland
Gap, until more forests were cleared, the towns grew larger, and the
Indians, who do not like to fight in the open country, drew back to the
woods and the mountains.
Boone marked out the trail which was afterwards known as the Wilderness
road. It had also been known as Boone’s trail, Kentucky road, Virginia
road, and Caintuck Hog road. A man who went out with Boone in one of
his expeditions to Kentucky kept a diary, and in it he gives the names
of some of the new settlers. One of these was Abraham Hanks, who was
Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather. It was no easy journey that these men
made to Kentucky, and no easy life that they found when they got there,
but they planted the first American state beyond the mountains, and the
rough pioneers who lived in cabins and ate pork, pumpkins, and corn
bread were the ancestors of some of our most famous men.
The Wilderness road has never been a good one, and is no more than
any other byroad through a rough country to-day. Sometimes the early
travelers, who always went in companies for safety, would be too tired
to go on until they had stopped to rest and to get cheer by singing
hymns and saying prayers. But they made the best of it, for they knew
that they were going to a fine country, which would repay them for
their sufferings.
[Illustration: FIG. 57. CORNFIELD NEAR CUMBERLAND GAP]
Boone and five other men were once in camp by a stream, and were lucky
enough to have with them the story of _Gulliver’s Travels_. One of the
young men, who had been hearing the book read by the camp fire, came in
one night bearing a couple of scalps that he had taken from a pair of
savages. He told his friends that “he had been that day to Lulbegrud
and had killed two Brobdingnags in their capital.” The stream near
which it happened is still called Lulbegrud creek. These wilderness men
made the best of things, and though they worked hard and fought often,
they were a cheerful and happy company. They were not spoiled by having
too many luxuries, and they did not think that the world owed them a
living without any effort on their part.
Beginning about the time of the Declaration of Independence, many
people found the way to Kentucky by the Great Valley, the Cumberland
Gap, and the Wilderness road. When fifteen years had gone by there were
seventy thousand people in Kentucky, along the Ohio river. Not all
had come by the gap, for some had sailed down the river; but they all
helped to plant the new state.
Moreover in fighting off the Indians from their own cabins and
cornfields they had protected the frontiers of Virginia and others of
the older states, so that Kentucky was a kind of advance guard beyond
the mountains, and led the way for Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and other
great states in the West and South.
Down in the heart of Kentucky, by the Ohio river, is a land long known
as the Kentucky Blue Grass region. The “blue grass,” as it is called,
grows luxuriantly here, as do grain and tobacco, for the soils, made
by the wasting of limestone, are rich and fertile. Wherever the soil
and climate are good, crops are large and the people thrive. They have
enough to eat and plenty to sell, and thus they can have good homes,
many comforts, books, and education.
If the pioneers had had to settle in the high, rough, eastern parts
of Kentucky, it would not have been worth while to suffer so much to
get there; but they were on the way to the Blue Grass country. Even
before the coming of the white man there were open lands which, perhaps
by Indian fires, had lost their cover of trees. Such lands are often
called prairies. These prairies, however, were not so flat as those of
Illinois, and they were bordered by groves and forests. There were fine
streams everywhere, and near by was the great Ohio, ready to serve as a
highway toward Philadelphia or New Orleans.
[Illustration: FIG. 58. KENTUCKY BLUE GRASS]
The Wilderness road came out on the river at the falls of the Ohio, and
here, as we have learned, a city began to spring up, partly because
of the falls and partly because of the Blue Grass region lying back
of it. In this region we find the state capital, and here, along the
roads, may be seen old mansions belonging to well-to-do descendants
of the plucky men who came in by the Wilderness road or steered their
flatboats down the Ohio.
If we go back to Cumberland Gap, we shall see that many things have
happened since Boone’s time. In the pass and on the Pinnacle, a
thousand feet above on the north, are ridges of earth, which show where
busy shovels threw up defenses in the Civil War; for armies passed
this way between Kentucky and the valley of Tennessee, and made the gap
an important point to be seized and held.
The road through the gap is still about as bad a path as one could
find. Near it on the east side of the mountains is yet to be seen a
furnace of rough stones, built in those early days for smelting iron.
But there is little else to remind us of that far-off time. To-day you
may, if you choose, pass the mountains without climbing through the
gap, for trains go roaring through a tunnel a mile long, while the echo
of the screaming whistles rolls along the mountain sides.
[Illustration: FIG. 59. THREE STATES MONUMENT, CUMBERLAND GAP]
On the flat grounds just inside the gap is Middlesboro, a town of
several thousand people, with wide streets and well-built shops and
houses. Only a few miles away are coal mines from which thousands of
tons of coal are dug, and this is one reason why the railroads are
here. There are endless stores of fuel under these highlands, and men
are breaking into the wilderness as fast as they can.
But if we climb through the gap as Boone did, or ride a horse to the
Pinnacle, we may look out upon the wonderful valley below, stretching
off to the foot of the Great Smoky mountains, whose rugged tops carry
our eyes far over into North Carolina. Or we may turn the other way and
follow Boone’s trail to the Blue Grass. Down in the gap is a rough,
weather-beaten pillar of limestone about three feet high and leaning as
the picture shows (Fig. 59). It is almost, but not quite, where three
states come together, for it is here, at the Cumberland Gap, that the
corners of Virginia and Kentucky meet on the edge of Tennessee.
CHAPTER XIII
FRONTIER SOLDIERS AND STATESMEN
Not long before the Revolution began some treacherous whites in the
western country had murdered the whole family of the friendly Indian
chief, Logan. This aroused the tribes and led to war. A piece of flat
land runs out between the two streams where the Great Kanawha river
joins the Ohio, in what is now West Virginia. Here, on a day early in
October, 1774, twelve hundred frontiersmen were gathered under the
command of an officer named Andrew Lewis.
These backwoods soldiers were attacked by a thousand of the bravest
Indian warriors, commanded by Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief. It was a
fierce struggle and both sides lost many men, but the pioneers held
their ground, and the red men, when they had had enough fighting, went
away. This battle at Point Pleasant finished what is sometimes known
as Lord Dunmore’s War, so called because it was carried on under Lord
Dunmore, the last governor that the English king sent out to Virginia.
The successful white men were now free to go down the Ohio river and
settle on the Kentucky lands. Among the patriots fighting for their
frontier homes were our old friends James Robertson and John Sevier
of Watauga, and another young man, Isaac Shelby. We are to hear
again about all these, for they were men likely to be found whenever
something important was to be done.
The Great Kanawha is the same stream that we have called the New river
where it crosses the Great Valley in Virginia. We are learning how many
great rivers help to make up the Ohio, and what an important region the
Ohio valley was to the young country east of the mountains.
The settlements of which we have just read were all south of the Ohio
river, for north of the river the Americans did not possess the land.
This means that the country which now makes up the states of Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois was in foreign hands. The people were largely
French and Indians, but they were governed by the British.
In order to defeat the Americans, the British, in all the years of
the Revolutionary War, were stirring up the Indian tribes against the
patriots. Just as St. Leger had Indian allies in New York, so British
agents bribed the Indians of the West and South to fight and make as
much trouble as possible.
George Rogers Clark was a young Virginian who had gone out to Kentucky,
which then belonged to the mother state. He heard that Colonel Henry
Hamilton, who commanded the British at Detroit, was persuading the
Indians of that region to attack the frontier. He set out for Virginia,
saw Patrick Henry, the governor, Thomas Jefferson, and other leading
men, and gained permission to gather an army. This was in 1777, the
year of Oriskany and Saratoga. He spent the winter enlisting soldiers,
gathering his forces at Pittsburg.
Late the next spring they went in boats down the Ohio to the point
where the muddy waters of the Mississippi come in from the north. This
alone was a journey of a thousand miles.
[Illustration: FIG. 60. GEORGE ROGERS CLARK]
Up the Mississippi from that place was Kaskaskia, on the Illinois
side. It is now a very small village, but it is the oldest town on the
Mississippi river and was the first capital of Illinois. In the time
of the Revolution it was governed by the British, although most of the
people were French. Clark and his little army soon seized the place and
made the people promise obedience to the new government.
There was another important old place called Vincennes, on the Wabash
river, in what is now Indiana.
When Colonel Hamilton heard what Clark was doing he led an army of five
hundred men, many of whom were Indians, from Detroit to Vincennes. It
took them more than two months to make the journey. Clark sent some of
his men with boats and provisions and cannon down the Mississippi, up
the Ohio, and up the Wabash. He, with most of his little force, went
across the prairie. It was a winter march and they had to wade through
flood waters for a part of the way.
He found the food and the guns and soon captured Hamilton and his
army. This was the last of British government between the Ohio river
and the Great Lakes. At the close of the war the American messengers,
who were in Paris arranging for peace, could say that they already had
possession of all the land this side of the Mississippi, so no excuse
was left for the British to claim it. In this way one frontier soldier
saved several great states for his country.
The frontiersmen had beaten Cornstalk at Point Pleasant in 1774. Clark
had won the prairie country five years later; and the next year, 1780,
saw the great victory of Kings Mountain.
Lord Cornwallis was now chief general of the British. He had conquered
the southern colonies, the Carolinas and Georgia. Two of his officers,
Tarleton and Ferguson, were brave and active commanders, and they were
running over the country east of the mountains keeping the patriots
down. Ferguson gathered together many American Tories and drilled them
to march and fight.
[Illustration: FIG. 61. ON THE FRENCH BROAD, BETWEEN ASHEVILLE AND
KNOXVILLE]
The Watauga men, just over the mountains to the west, were loyal
patriots. Ferguson heard of them and sent them a stormy message. He
told them to keep still or he would come over and scatter them and hang
their leading men.
They were not used to talk of this kind and they determined to teach
Ferguson a lesson. Isaac Shelby rode in hot haste from his home to John
Sevier’s log house on the Nolichucky river. When he arrived he found
all the neighbors there; for Sevier had made a barbecue, and there was
to be a big horse race, with running and wrestling matches. Shelby
took Sevier off by himself and told him about Ferguson. They agreed to
call together the mountain men and go over the Great Smokies to punish
the British general.
On September 25, 1780, they came together at Sycamore Shoals on the
Watauga river. Almost everybody was there, women and children as well
as men. Four hundred sturdy men came from Virginia under William and
Arthur Campbell. These two leaders and most of the men in the valley
were sons of old Scotch Covenanters, and they were determined to win.
A stern Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Samuel Doak, was there. He
had as much fight in him as any of them, and as they stood in their
rough hunter’s garb he called upon God for help, preaching to them from
the words, “The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.”
They set out at once through the mountains, driving beef cattle for
part of their food supply, and every man armed with rifle, tomahawk,
and scalping knife. Roosevelt says there was not a bayonet or a tent in
their army. The trail was stony and steep, and in the higher mountains
they found snow. They marched as quickly as they could, for they wanted
to catch Ferguson before Cornwallis could send more soldiers to help
him.
On the way several hundred men from North Carolina, under Benjamin
Cleveland, joined them. They had appointed no commander when they
started, but on the march they chose one of the Campbells from Virginia.
When Ferguson found that they were pursuing him and that he must fight,
he took up a strong position on Kings Mountain, in the northwest corner
of South Carolina. This hill was well chosen, for it stood by itself
and on one side was too steep for a force to climb.
Ferguson called his foes a “swarm of backwoodsmen,” but he knew that
they could fight, or he would not have posted his own army with so much
care. He felt sure of success, however, and thought that Heaven itself
could hardly drive him off that hill.
As the patriot leaders drew near the British camp they saw that many
of their men were too weary to overtake the swift and wary Ferguson,
should he try to get away. So they picked out about half of the force,
nearly a thousand mounted men. These men rode all night, and the next
day approached the hill. Those who had lost their horses on the way
hurried on afoot and arrived in time to fight. When close at hand the
riders tied their horses in the woods, and the little army advanced to
the attack on foot.
They moved up the three sides of the hill. Ferguson was famous for his
bayonet charges, and the patriots had no bayonets. So when the British
rushed down on the center of the advancing line the mountaineers gave
way and the enemy pursued them down the hill. Then the backwoodsmen on
the flanks rushed in and poured shot into the backs of the British.
Turning to meet these new foes, the regulars were again chased up the
hill and shot by the men who had fled from their bayonets. Thus shrewd
tactics took the place of weapons. At length the gallant Ferguson
was killed, the white flag was hoisted, and the firing stopped. Many
British were slain, and all the rest, save a very few who escaped in
the confusion, were made prisoners.
[Illustration: FIG. 62. JOHN SEVIER]
It was a wonderful victory for the men from the valley. They had come
from a region of which Cornwallis had hardly dreamed, and they had
destroyed one of his armies and killed one of his best commanders. The
battle turned the tide of the Revolution in the South, but the victors
hurried back as quickly as they had come. They were not fitted for a
long campaign, and, besides, they had left their homes dangerously
open to attacks from savages. It was, however, the one battle of the
Revolution against white foes alone that was planned, fought, and won
by the men of the frontier.
As soon as John Sevier returned to the valley he found plenty of Indian
fighting to do. He was skilled in this, and with the Watauga men, who
called him “Chucky Jack” and were devoted to him, he was a terror to
the red men of the southern mountains. He knew all their tricks and how
to give them back what he called “Indian play.” At one time he took a
band of his followers and made a daring ride into the wildest of the
Great Smokies, to attack some hostile tribes. He burned their villages,
destroyed their corn, killed and captured some of their warriors, and
got away before they could gather their greater numbers to crush him.
We must not forget James Robertson, who all this time was doing his
part of the farming and the fighting and the planning for the new
settlements. Already the Watauga country began to have too many people
and was too thickly settled to suit his temper, and he was thinking
much about the wilderness beyond, near the lower part of the Cumberland
river. In a great bend on the south bank of that stream he founded
Nashborough in 1779, naming it in honor of Oliver Nash, governor of
North Carolina. Five years later it became Nashville, and now we do not
need to explain where it was.
Robertson went out by the Cumberland Gap, but soon left Boone’s
road and went toward the west, following the trails. When he and
his followers reached the place and decided upon it as suitable for
settlement, they planted a field of corn, to have something to depend
on for food later.
The next autumn a large party of settlers went out to Nashborough.
Robertson’s family went with them. They did not go through the woods,
but took boats to go down the Tennessee river. Their course led them
along the Tennessee to the Ohio, then up the Ohio a few miles to the
mouth of the Cumberland, and up the Cumberland to their new home. They
had a long, dangerous voyage, and some of the party were killed, for
the savages fired on them from the banks.
One of the boats, carrying twenty-eight grown people and children,
had a number of cases of smallpox on board. The Indians attacked this
boat and killed or captured the four sick travelers. For their deed
the savages were badly punished, for they took the disease, which soon
spread widely among the tribes.
For a long time after Nashville was begun the pioneers had fierce
encounters with the Indians, and in spite of all their care many lives
were lost. Robertson was the strong man of the place, and was rewarded
with the confidence of the people.
When Tennessee became a state he helped to make its constitution. He
was a member of the state Senate in 1798, and lived long enough to keep
some of the Indians from helping the British in the War of 1812. He
died in 1814.
[Illustration: FIG. 63. JAMES ROBERTSON]
He was brave, and willing to endure hardship, discomfort, and
suffering in a good cause. He went alone over the snows to Kentucky
to get powder, and returned in time to save the little town from
destruction. The Indians killed his own son, but he would not give up
the settlement. Plain man though he was, he gained honor from the men
of his time, and wrote his name on the pages of American history.
We must learn a little more of Isaac Shelby, whom we have seen fighting
hard at Point Pleasant and Kings Mountain. He was born in the Great
Valley, at Hagerstown. When he was twenty-one years old he moved to
Tennessee and then across to Kentucky. He fought in the Revolution
in other battles besides that of Kings Mountain, and before he went
to Kentucky he had helped to make laws in the legislature of North
Carolina.
[Illustration: FIG. 64. SEVIER MONUMENT, KNOXVILLE]
It is rather strange to read that Kentucky was made a “county” of
Virginia. This was in 1776. In 1792, largely through Shelby’s efforts,
Kentucky was separated from Virginia and became a state by itself. It
was the first state beyond the mountains, being four years older than
Tennessee and eleven years ahead of Ohio.
Isaac Shelby was the first governor of Kentucky, from 1792 to 1796,
and years later he was governor again. He fought in the War of 1812,
and his name is preserved in Shelbyville, a town of Kentucky. The Blue
Grass region has been called the “dark and bloody ground” from the
strifes of the red tribes and the troublous days of the first settlers,
but Shelby lived to see it the center of a prosperous state.
[Illustration: FIG. 65. OLD STATEHOUSE AT KNOXVILLE]
John Sevier, too, had more honors than those of a noble soldier.
In front of the courthouse at Knoxville is a plain stone monument
raised in his memory (Fig. 64), and down a side street is an old
dwelling, said to be an early statehouse of the commonwealth which is
still associated with his name. In 1785 the state of “Franklin” was
organized and named in honor of the illustrious Benjamin; but North
Carolina, being heartily opposed to the whole proceeding, put an end
to it without delay. Sevier, as governor of the would-be state, was
imprisoned, but escaped, to the delight of his own people, who were
always loyal to him. They sent him to Congress in a few years and in
1796 made him the first governor of Tennessee. He enjoyed many honors
until his death in 1815, which came soon after that of his more quiet
friend, James Robertson. Both of these wilderness men had much to do
with planting the American flag between the Appalachian mountains and
the Mississippi river.
CHAPTER XIV
CITIES OF THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS
In the old days it took the traveler weeks to go from Pennsylvania or
the Potomac river to the valley of east Tennessee. He might camp in
the woods, living on the few provisions he could carry and on what he
could shoot in the forest, or he might share the humble homes of chance
settlers on the way.
Now he enters a vestibuled train and is rolled over a smooth iron road
along the streams and between the mountains. Starting one day, he will
find when he wakes the next morning that the sun is rising over the
Great Smokies, while around him are the rich rolling fields that border
the Tennessee river.
If the traveler wishes to see the land and learn what men have done
in a hundred years, he will leave the train at Knoxville. A carriage
or an electric car will carry him between blocks of fine buildings to
a modern hotel, where he will find food and bed and places to read,
write, rest, or do business, as he likes. Around him is a busy city
stretching up and down its many hills. Before long he will wander down
to the banks of the Tennessee river and see the boats tied at the
wharf, or he will cross the great bridge to the hills beyond and look
back over the city.
[Illustration: FIG. 66. STREET IN KNOXVILLE]
On those hilltops are pits dug in the woods, and some veteran of the
Union or the Confederate army will tell him that these are ammunition
pits. The old soldier will point across to where Fort Sanders stood,
and will describe those days in 1863 when Longstreet came up and laid
siege to the town, which was garrisoned by Burnside and his army.
Our traveler need do little more than cross the great bridge at
Knoxville to find quarries of marble; and if he goes up and down for
a few miles, he will see rich deposits of this stone. It is prized
because it shows many colors,--cream, yellow, brown, red, pink, and
blue. The colors often run into each other in curious and fantastic
ways, and the slabs and blocks when polished are beautiful indeed.
These marbles have been used to adorn some of the finest buildings in
America, including the National Capitol.
[Illustration: FIG. 67. ON THE CAMPUS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE]
Around Knoxville are fine farms also, just as we find them about
Harrisburg, Hagerstown, Winchester, and almost everywhere else in the
Great Valley. Our view (Fig. 52) is taken near Knoxville and shows
sloping fields always ready to bear good crops. The soils have been
made by the wasting of the top parts of these same beds of marble and
of other rocks found along with it.
In Knoxville, on the edge of the city, is the University of Tennessee,
with many buildings upon its campus. It is an excellent school and an
old one as well, having been founded in 1794. It was first named Blount
College, from one of the prominent public men of the valley at that
time, and is now one of the foremost schools of the South.
Only seven years before that date two old Revolutionary soldiers rode
through the woods and picked out these lands, which were given to them
as a reward for their service in the war. Here they built as a defense
against the savages a wooden fort, with log cabins at the corners and
a stockade with a stout barred gate. Such a fort was greatly needed in
those days whenever a new settlement was made. After the two soldiers
had planted corn they went back to North Carolina to bring their
families over the mountains. This was the beginning of Knoxville, which
grew up around the fort and soon spread over the hills and down to the
river. The settlement was named in honor of Henry Knox, who was an able
general in the Revolution and a good friend of George Washington.
Now the railroads reach out in every direction. They bring in the
iron ore and the limestones of the valley. They also run up into the
Cumberland Gap, and to Harriman, Tennessee, and bring back stores of
coal, thus making Knoxville a place for working iron. To the east the
Southern Railroad leads up the French Broad (Fig. 61) through deep
gorges into the heart of the Great Smokies at Asheville, and across the
Blue Ridge to the lowlands of North Carolina.
All this is very different from the samp mortars and the puncheon
floors of early times, but the pioneers had a keen eye for the soil and
the waters and the trees, and it is these which have helped to make the
valley rich to-day.
[Illustration: FIG. 68. MARBLE QUARRY NEAR KNOXVILLE]
We must not forget that off to the west James Robertson had founded
a city that is even older than Knoxville. In the great bend of the
Cumberland, on its south bank, in northern Tennessee, stands Nashville,
as we have already seen.
If we visit a large city in one of the countries of Europe, we are
quite likely to be told, or to read in our guidebook, that its
history goes back hundreds of years, and any town that was started
only a hundred years ago would there seem young. But we measure age
differently in America, and a town like Nashville, founded in 1780, we
think is old indeed. It is not easy to remember, as we ride along the
streets and see the shops and mansions of Nashville to-day, that this
was once a place of log cabins, and that the first settlers had to
sleep always with one ear open for the Indian’s war cry.
That James Robertson had to learn to read from his wife did not keep
Nashville from becoming one of the centers of education and refinement
in the South. It would take several lines to record the names of all
the colleges and universities that now have their seat in this city.
Robertson was the sort of man who, with the opportunities of to-day,
might have been the president of one of these schools, or he might
perhaps have gained a fortune with which to help in their support.
Farther west, on the Mississippi river, stands Memphis, a city still
larger than Nashville; indeed, few southern states can boast of so
many cities as Tennessee possesses. Besides these, there are fertile
valleys, fine rivers and mountains, productive forests, beds of iron
ore and coal, comfortable farms, and thriving towns. The state is rich,
too, in historical associations. Every part of Tennessee saw the dark
days of the Civil War, and in the fields south of Nashville a great
battle was fought.
When John Sevier went down the Tennessee river on his Indian raids
he noticed that the stream, making a great bend, turns away from
the valley and flows by a deep gorge through the highlands of the
Cumberland plateau. We can take the train now at Knoxville, and a ride
of a little more than a hundred miles will bring us to this place.
[Illustration: FIG. 69. STATE HOUSE, NASHVILLE]
By the river is a steep, high ground known as Cameron hill. Let us
go up to the top and look around. Stretching away at our feet on the
east is Chattanooga. Part of the city as we see it from Cameron hill
is shown in the picture (Fig. 70). Beyond is the Tennessee, and we
are looking up the river to the northeast. The bridge which we see is
the only bridge across the river at Chattanooga, even though it is
now a large and busy city. In the distance is high ground, a part of
Missionary Ridge, famous in the story of the Civil War.
If we turn around and look southward, we shall see Lookout Mountain,
rising fifteen hundred feet above the river. A battle was fought on the
steep slopes of this mountain also; and a few miles to the southeast
is Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest battle grounds of the war. On
the edge of the city, kept with care, is the National Cemetery, where
rest the bodies of more than twelve thousand soldiers, northern and
southern, who perished in the neighborhood of Chattanooga. Now all the
region is peaceful, and only the tablets of iron and bronze, set up by
the government on every battlefield in the neighborhood, tell the story
of the conflict as it raged about the city.
Like Knoxville, Chattanooga has much coal and iron, is the center of
a number of railways, and does much business. The railways run up the
valley to Virginia, and south to Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia. They
stretch even further southward to Mobile and New Orleans, while the
lines to the west reach Memphis and Nashville. Chattanooga is sometimes
called the “Gate City” because it stands near the opening of the Great
Valley into the wide plains along the gulf of Mexico. The place,
originally called Ross’s Landing, was not settled until 1836, when
Knoxville and Nashville were about fifty years old. It has a noble site
and may well become a great city.
Here passed the boats that bore the first settlers to Robertson’s
colony on the Cumberland. There are no Indians now to shoot from the
banks, and you will see on the river only rafts of logs floating down
from the forests in the mountains.
[Illustration: FIG. 70. CHATTANOOGA, LOOKING NORTHEAST FROM CAMERON
HILL. MISSIONARY RIDGE IN THE DISTANCE]
Atlanta also is often called the “Gate City” of the South. It stands
more than a thousand feet above the sea, in northern Georgia, where
the Appalachian mountain range is tapering down toward the southern
plains. Because Atlanta is so high it is cooler in summer than most
southern cities, and is always free from the scourge of yellow fever
and cholera.
It is a natural site for a city, for here at the end of the great
mountain system the long lines of railway that follow the Atlantic
coast swing around to the west, passing on to the Mississippi and down
to Mobile and the ports on the gulf of Mexico. Other railways reach
Atlanta from Chattanooga and Knoxville in the Great Valley, and still
others lead the way to Savannah and the Atlantic coast. Thus twelve
lines of railway reach out from Atlanta like the spokes of a wheel and
connect the city with all parts of the South. Let us take a map of the
United States and draw a line through Richmond, Louisville, Nashville,
and New Orleans. Notice how many states lie southeast of this line,
and remember that of all the towns which they contain Atlanta is the
largest and most important. Indeed, in trade and influence it surpasses
many northern cities which are much larger.
[Illustration: FIG. 71. ATLANTA: BROAD STREET, LOOKING NORTH]
Atlanta saw stirring times in the Civil War. It was small then, having
but about ten thousand people. In 1864 most of it was burned to the
ground, and we may truly say that it has grown to its present size in
the short period since that time. To-day its population numbers more
than one hundred thousand. During the recent Spanish War the Department
of the Gulf made its headquarters here, so that Atlanta appears to be
sought both in war and in peace. The city was used as the capital of
Georgia soon after the Civil War, and in 1877 the people of the state
voted that it should always be the seat of government. Since that time
they have erected a capitol costing a million dollars, adorning the
interior with marbles from their own quarries.
[Illustration: FIG. 72. FULTON BAG AND COTTON MILLS, ATLANTA]
A few years ago an exposition was held at Atlanta to show the world
the achievements and hopes of the great South. Everybody knew that
the South raised cotton, but Atlanta wished to prove that the South
could also spin and weave her famous product. Mr. W. G. Atkinson was
the governor of Georgia at that time. During the exposition a day was
chosen in which something unusual should be done. Men went out into a
field in the morning and picked some cotton. It was ginned and spun
and woven in double-quick time. Then tailors took some of the cloth,
cut it, fitted it, and sewed it into a suit of clothes. Governor
Atkinson put on the suit and visited the grounds of the exposition.
In the morning the cotton was in the field, in the evening it was on
the governor. Suits are not made so quickly as that on ordinary days,
but the South spins and weaves millions of dollars’ worth of cotton,
turning the mill wheels with southern coal or with the waters of swift
southern streams.
[Illustration: FIG. 73. GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, ATLANTA]
Atlanta is not only at the southern end of the mountains, but it is
on the divide which separates the streams of the gulf from those
of the Atlantic. On the one hand, not far away, is the Ocmulgee,
flowing to the ocean, while westward, and distant but a few miles,
the Chattahoochee flows toward the gulf. The latter river has been
harnessed by man, and eleven thousand horse power measures the amount
of energy that can be carried over the wires to Atlanta to move its
cars and turn the wheels of its factories. The mills not only spin the
cotton of the gulf plains but also turn out fertilizers, work up the
timber of the region, and make a multitude of other things to swell the
city’s trade with her neighbors.
[Illustration: FIG. 74. IRON FURNACE, BIRMINGHAM]
Appropriate to her needs, Atlanta has had since 1887 a school of
technology, in which she teaches her sons how to develop the great
resources of the South. Here are shops and departments of engineering,
and, not least, instruction in making textiles, so that the cotton of
southern fields need no longer go to Massachusetts or to England to be
spun and woven.
The youngest great town of the southern mountain region was started
on an old cotton plantation in 1871, thirty-four years before the
writing of these lines. The people knew that in Alabama as well as in
Tennessee coal and iron are found close together. So men built an iron
town and called it, after one of the greatest furnace towns in the
world, Birmingham. It is a noisy, busy place, with wide streets, swift
electric cars, and blazing furnaces. To see it grow is like watching a
new Pittsburg rise up in the heart of the South.
From the Berkshire country at the north to the southern end of the
Appalachians, there are to-day thriving towns and fertile fields. No
longer does the mountain wall cut off the products of the West from the
markets of the East. Yet hardly a hundred years ago the eastern strip
of country was practically shut off from the whole territory drained by
the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Indian trails and rough roads were the
only means of communication between the two sections. Great as are the
natural resources of both regions, their prosperity has been bound up
in the development of roads and railways, and is due in large measure
to the energy, foresight, and self-sacrifice of those who crossed the
barrier and made it easy for others to follow them.
INDEX
Adams, Charles Francis, cited, 7
Adams, John Quincy, 100
Adirondacks, 32
Albany, N.Y., 6, 10, 15, 16
Alexander, Mt., 130
Alexandria, Va., 41, 86
Allegheny Front, 74, 78, 80, 82
Allegheny Portage Railway, 75, 76, 80
Allegheny river, 111
Allentown, Pa., 79
Altoona, Pa., 77;
description of, 81
Amsterdam, N.Y., 20
Ann, Fort, 32
Annapolis, Md., 88
Antietam, 132
Appalachians, southern, 174
“Arks” on the Susquehanna, 41
Arnold, Benedict, 37
Atkinson, Gov. W. G., 178
Atlanta, Ga., 174–180
Auburn, N.Y., 57
Bald Eagle valley, 80
Baltimore, Md., 53, 86, 101;
growth of, 107
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 99, 101, 102, 110
Barges on the Ohio, 116, 118
Barton, Clara, cited, 82
Bay Road, Mass., 4
Bedford, Pa., 71, 77
Bemis Heights, 38
Bennington, Vt., 38
Berkshires, 5;
railway through, 9, 10
Bethlehem, Pa., 79
Binghamton, N.Y., 52
Birmingham, Ala., 181
Black Rock (Buffalo), 47
“Blackbeard,” 130
Blockhouse at Pittsburg, 112
Blount College, 170
Blue Grass country, 127, 151, 166
Blue mountain, 79
Blue Ridge mountains, 88, 130
Boone, Daniel, early life, 144;
training, 145;
portrait, 145;
moves to North Carolina, 146;
serves with Braddock, 146;
camps in Kentucky, 147;
visits Cumberland Gap, 148;
founds Boonesborough, 148;
buys lands of the Indians, 149;
marks out the Wilderness road, 149
Boonesborough, 148
Boston, Mass., 1, 2, 7, 12
Braddock, General, 69, 90, 91, 146
Braddock, Pa., 83
Brant, Joseph, 33
Bristol, Tenn., 134
British, in New York, 32;
in the Ohio country, 156
Brownsville, Pa., 93, 117
Buffalo, 52, 57, 60, 110;
growth of, 61
Burgoyne, General, 32, 37
Burnside, General, 168
Business, increase of, 114, 118
Cambria Steel Company, 83
Cameron hill, 173
Campbell, William and Arthur, 160
Canajoharie, N.Y., 24
Canals, 44;
Erie, 7, 46, 48, 50–52;
Pennsylvania, 74;
Chesapeake and Ohio, 98–101, 107;
Delaware and Hudson, 53;
at Louisville, Ky., 127
Carlisle, Pa., 71, 79, 132
Carroll, Charles, 101
Carry to Schenectady, the, 19, 22
_Catch-me-if-you-can_, 2
Catskill mountains, 15, 32
Chambersburg, Pa., 71, 132
Champlain, lake, 31, 37
Charlottesville, Va., 142
Chattahoochee river, 179
Chattanooga, Tenn., 135;
description of, 173–175
Cherokee Indians, 139, 149
Chesapeake bay, 86
Chesapeake and Ohio canal, 107;
building of, 98–101
Chicago, 110
Chickamauga, 174
Chissel, Fort, 135
Cincinnati, Ohio, description of, 123–127
Clark, George Rogers, raises an army, 156;
portrait, 157;
captures Kaskaskia and Vincennes, 158
Clay, Henry, stories of, 96, 114
Cleveland, Benjamin, 160
Clinch river, 134
Clinton, De Witt, 44, 49;
stirs up legislature, 40;
portrait, 43;
train, 53, 54
Coal, 104, 118, 122, 153, 170, 181
Cohoes, N.Y., 22
Coke ovens, 108
_Columbia, The_, 2
Columbia, Pa., 69, 74, 76
Columbus, Ohio, 94
Conemaugh river, 75, 82
Conestoga creek, 67
Conestoga Traction Company, 70
Conestoga wagons, 77
Connecticut river, 4
Construction, early railway, 105
Cooper, Peter, 106
Cornstalk, 155
Cornwallis, Lord, 158
Cotton, 178
Cumberland, Fort, 89, 90;
city of, 93, 95, 102
Cumberland Gap, 142, 148, 150, 152
Cumberland mountains, 134, 142
Cumberland river, 164, 174
Cumberland road, 93
Cunard, Samuel, 2
Cunard line, 2, 8
Dams, use of, 119
Danforth, Mr., and salt making, 27
Deerfield valley, 8
Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, 53
Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, 60
De-o-wain-sta, 23
Detroit, 41, 156
Dickens, Charles, 126
Dinwiddie, Governor, 89
Doak, Rev. Samuel, 160
Dongan, Gov. Thomas, 40
Dunlap’s creek, 96
Dunmore, Lord, 155
Duquesne, Fort, 91
Dutch, in New York, 14, 18, 31
Earle, Mrs. Alice Morse, cited, 55
Easton, Pa., 79
Edward, Fort, 31
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, cited, 1
Empire State Express, 56
England, interest of, in fur trade, 18;
railways of, 55
Erie canal, 7, 42, 46, 48, 50–52
Erie, lake, 18, 42, 98
Erie Railroad, 60
Euphrates river, 130
Fairfax, Lord William, 88
Falls of the Ohio, 127, 146, 152
Farms in Pennsylvania, 66
“Feeders” of Erie canal, 52
Ferguson, Patrick, 159
Finley, John, 146, 148
Fishing interests, 104
Flag, perhaps the first American, 34
Flatboats, 117
Floyd, Gen. William, 22
Forbes’s road, 71
Forts:
Orange, 17;
Stanwix, 22, 23, 34, 37, 61, 149;
Schuyler, 23;
Johnson, 26;
Edward, 31;
Ann, 32;
Ticonderoga, 32, 37, 38;
Cumberland, 89, 90;
Duquesne, 91;
Chissel, 135;
Sanders, 168
Franklin, Benjamin, 4, 69, 130
“Franklin,” state of, 166
Frederick, Md., 93
French, in Ohio country, 89
French and Indian War, 69
French Broad river, 135, 159, 170
Frostburg, Md., 90, 93
Fur trade, 18, 24, 40
Furnaces near Pittsburg, 121
Gansevoort, Col. Peter, 34
Gas, natural, 120
“Gate City,” the, 174
Genesee road, 24, 25
Genesee street, Utica, 23
Geneva, 24, 25
George, Mt., 130
Georgetown, D.C., 100
Georgia Institute of Technology, 179
Germans in Pennsylvania, 66;
in Tennessee, 136
Ginseng, 24
Gist, Christopher, 89
Glass mills, 122
Gray, Captain, 2
Great Kanawha river, 155
Great Smoky mountains, 134, 170
Great Valley, the, 71, 130, 132, 134, 136, 139
_Gulliver’s Travels_, 150
Gypsum, 104
Hagerstown, Md., 25, 132, 165
_Half Moon_, the, 15
Halifax, 2
Hambright’s Hotel, 70
Hamburg-American line, 108
Hamilton, Col. Henry, 156
Hancock, Gov. John, 2
Hanks, Abraham, 149
Harlem, 14
Harpers Ferry, 107, 130, 132
Harriman, Tenn., 170
Harrisburg, Pa., 74, 85, 132;
description of, 78
Henry, Patrick, 156
Herkimer, Nicholas, 29, 33, 35, 36
Hessians, 33, 38
Hill, Gen. A. P., 142
_Hit or Miss_, the, 77
Hiwassee river, 135
Hollidaysburg, Pa., 74
Holston river, 134
Honesdale, Pa., 53
Hoosac mountain, 5, 8
Hoosac tunnel, 9–11
Hoosick river, 5
Housatonic river, 5
Howe, General, 32
Hudson, Henry, 15, 16
Hudson river, 15
Huguenots, 136
Hulbert, cited, 105
Illinois, 158
Indiana, 158
Indians, 144, 149, 163, 164;
in New York, 14, 17, 18, 33;
at Watauga, 138;
at Point Pleasant, 155
Indies, hope of reaching, 15
Iron works, 121, 129, 170, 180
Iroquois Indians, 18
Jackson, “Stonewall,” 133
James river, 133;
gap, 134
Jefferson, Thomas, 156
Johns Hopkins University, 108
Johnson, Fort, 26
Johnson, John, 36
Johnson, Sir William, 20
Johnstown, N.Y., 20
Johnstown, Pa., 75, 76, 82
Joppa, 92
Juniata river, 74
Kaskaskia, Ill., 116, 157
Kentucky, 127, 154, 164;
becomes a state, 165
Kings Mountain, 158, 160
Knights, Sarah, 4
Knox, Gen. Henry, 170
Knoxville, 134, 166, 170
Lake Shore Railroad, 110
Lancaster, Pa., 65, 72, 78
Lancaster pike, 65, 67, 70
Lee, Arthur, 113
Lee, Richard Henry, 98
Lee, Gen. Robert E., 132
Legislators allowed boat hire, 87
Lewis, Andrew, 155
Licking river, 124
Limestones, 104, 132, 151, 169
Lincoln, Abraham, 117, 149
Little Falls, N.Y., 22, 42
Little Tennessee river, 135
Liverpool, 110
Locks, 45
Logan, 155
London, 110
Long House, the, 18
Longstreet, General, 168
Lookout Mountain, 173
Losantiville, 124
Louisville, 117, 127
Lulbegrud creek, 151
Luray, 131, 132
Lyell, Sir Charles, cited, 126
McClellan, General, 132
Mail, first, received at Utica, 24
Mail bags, race of the, 109
Mail coaches, 94
Manhattan island, 14, 15
Marble, 104, 168, 171
Maryland, 86
Memphis, 172
Middlesboro, 153
Milestone on Braddock’s road, 90
Missionary Ridge, 173
Mobile, 174
Mohawk valley, 16–19, 31, 42, 59
Monongahela river, 93, 96, 111
Morris, Gouverneur, 42
Mount Vernon, 41, 86
Nash, Oliver, 163
Nashborough (Nashville), 163, 171, 173
National Road, the, 91, 93, 96, 123
New Amsterdam, 14
New Jersey, Scotch-Irish in, 66
New Netherlands, 14
New river (Great Kanawha), 134
New York Central Railway, 20, 30, 58, 60, 62
New York City, 2, 7, 14
New York state, 27;
well adapted for canal, 44
Newburg, N.Y., 60
_Noah’s Ark_, 49
Nolichucky river, 159
Norfolk and Western Railway, 133
North Adams, Mass., 5
_North American Review_, 102
North Carolina, 137, 146
North-German Lloyd line, 108
Ocmulgee river, 179
Ogden, Utah, 109
Ohio Company, 88
Ohio country, French in, 89
Ohio river, 76, 98, 111, 123, 127, 152
Oil City, 120
Omaha, 109
Oneida Indians, 17
Oneida Carrying Place, 22
Onondaga salt, 27, 113
Ontario, lake, 18, 22, 33
Oriskany, 29, 30, 35
Oswego, 32
Oswego river, 22
Otsego lake, 98
Oyster industry, 104
“Packers,” 72
Packets, 50
Parton, James, cited, 120
Penn, William, 66
Pennsylvania, settlement of, 66
Pennsylvania Railroad, 77–85
“Pennsylvania Dutch,” 66
Pennsylvania canal, 74
Phelps, Abner, 9
Philadelphia, 41, 63
Pike, Pittsburg, 72;
Frederick, 93
Pineville gap, 143, 147
Pittsburg, 64, 71, 75, 83, 107, 156;
description of, 111, 115, 120, 122;
pike, 72
Pittsfield, Mass., 5
Point Pleasant, 155
Portage Railway, Allegheny, 75, 76, 80
Post, John, 23, 24
Potomac Company, 99
Potomac river, 86, 106
Powell, Ambrose, 142
Powell’s river, 134, 142
Prairies in Kentucky, 152
Princeton College, 66
Providence, R.I., 4
Puncheon floors, 140
Queen City, the, 124
Queenstown, 110
Quincy, Mass., 53
Railways:
through the Berkshires, 9, 10;
from Albany to Schenectady, 9, 53;
early, 53, 56;
opposition to, 55;
growth of, 60, 109, 181;
West Shore, 59;
Erie, 60;
New York Central, 20, 30, 58, 60, 62;
Wabash, 102;
Baltimore and Ohio, 99, 101, 102, 110;
Southern Pacific, 109;
Union Pacific, 109;
Lake Shore, 110;
Norfolk and Western, 133;
Southern, 134, 170
Reading, Pa., 79
Red Star line, 108
Redstone, 117
Richardson, Judge John, 46
Rivers important in a country’s growth, 5–7, 16, 17, 24, 26, 31, 41,
122, 126, 133
Roads, in New England, 4, 6, 7;
stage, 64;
development of, 72;
indifference to, 87;
national interest in, 92;
Braddock’s, 90;
Cumberland, 93;
Frederick, 93;
National, 91, 93, 96;
Wilderness (Boone’s trail, Kentucky road, Virginia road, Caintuck
Hog road), 127, 149
Roanoke, 134
Robertson, James, goes to Watauga, 137;
pacifies the Indians, 139;
helps protect the new settlement, 155;
founds Nashborough, 163;
trusted by the people, 164;
portrait, 164;
ability, 172
Rochester, N.Y., 25, 52
Rochester, Colonel, 26, 41, 61, 132
“Rolling roads,” 88
Rome, 22, 46, 61
Roosevelt, Theodore, cited, 137, 140, 160
Ross’s Landing, 174
Sails on cars, 105
St. Clair, General, 124
St. Leger, General, 33, 61
Salt, 27, 61, 113
Samp mortars, 21
San Francisco, 109
Saratoga, 38
Schenectady, 19, 42, 47, 61
“Schonowe,” 19
Schuyler, Fort (Utica), 23
Schuyler, Han Yost, 37
Schuylerville, 38
Scotch-Irish, 66, 136
Seneca river, 24
Seneca lake, 25
Settlement:
in New England, 4;
in New York, 14, 24;
in Pennsylvania, 66;
in the Ohio country, 117;
in Tennessee, 135, 170;
in Kentucky, 148
Sevier, John, goes to Watauga, 138;
fights on the frontier, 155;
plans to attack Ferguson, 160;
returns home, 162;
portrait, 162;
monument to, 165;
other honors, 166;
on the Tennessee river, 172
Shelby, Isaac, 155, 159, 165
Shelbyville, 165
Shenandoah valley, 88, 107, 130, 132
Sheridan, 133
Shippensburg, Pa., 71
Shreve, Captain, 117
Slate, 104
“Smoky City, The,” 120
South Mountain, Pa., 132
Southern Pacific Railway, 22
Southern Railway, 134, 170
Speed of early trains, 105
Spotswood, Alexander, 129
Springfield, Mass., 6, 10
Stanwix, Fort, 22, 23, 34, 37, 61, 149
Stark, General, 38
Staunton, Va., 135
Steamboats, 118
Stephenson, George, 53
Stillwater, 38
Susquehanna valley, 26, 41, 46, 104
Swift Run Gap, 130
Sycamore Shoals, 160
Sydney, Australia, 109
Syracuse, 27, 52, 57, 61
Tarleton, Colonel, 159
Teamsters of early days, 64, 69
Tennessee, 134, 154, 164, 172;
University of, 170
Tennessee river, 134, 142, 163, 167, 172, 174
Ticonderoga, 32, 37, 38
Tidewater country, 87, 130
Timber, 104, 180
Toll houses, 68, 87
Toll rates, 94
_Tom Thumb_, 106
Trails, old, 4, 6, 17, 19, 22, 25, 28, 72
Tramways in England, 54
Transylvania Company, 148
Travel, early, 5, 22, 56, 64, 91
Trow Plat, 23
Trunk line, 57
“Tubal Cain of Virginia,” 129
Tudor, Frederick, 4
Twentieth Century Limited, 56
Union Pacific Railroad, 109
University of Tennessee, 170
Utica, 21, 23, 37, 57, 61
Valley of east Tennessee, 135;
of Virginia, 132
Valley, the Great, 71, 130, 132, 134, 136, 139
Valleys as natural roads, 5–7, 16, 17, 22, 24, 26, 31, 41, 126, 133,
142, 152, 156
Van Curler, Arent, 17, 19, 57, 61
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 58
_Ventura_, the, 109
Vincennes, Ind., 158
Virginia, 129, 154;
valley of, 132
Wabash Railway Company, 102
Wabash river, 158
Walker, Dr. Thomas, 142
Ward, Nancy, 139
Washington, D.C., 91, 93, 94
Washington, George, 41, 60, 86, 112, 133;
part taken by, in road making, 88–92, 98
Washington, Lawrence, 89
Watauga Settlement, 135–141, 144, 146, 159
Waterford, 47
West, the, 40, 60
Westfield valley, 6
West Shore Railway, 59
Wheeling, 94, 107, 122
White, Hugh, 21
Whitesboro, 21
Wilderness Road, 127, 149
Willett, Captain Marinus, 35
William and Mary College, 142
Wills creek, 89, 102
Wills mountain, 93
Winchester, Va., 132, 135
Windmills, Dutch, 15
Wood creek, 22, 42
Yadkin valley, North Carolina, 146
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.
Portions of the captions of some illustrations were taken from the List
of Illustrations.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
Page 18: The pronunciation mark above the first “o” in “ĭr-ṓ-kwoi´”
was an inverted “T”, which was only visually approximated here.
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