Chapter I: Preface

If the great American novel is ever written, I hazard the guess that its plot will be woven around the theme of American transportation, for that has been the vital factor in the national development of the United States. Every problem in the building of the Republic has been, in the last analysis, a problem in transportation. The author of such a novel will find a rich fund of material in the perpetual rivalries of pack-horseman and wagoner, of riverman and canal boatman, of steamboat promoter and railway capitalist. He will find at every point the old jostling and challenging the new: pack-horsemen demolishing wagons in the early days of the Alleghany traffic; wagoners deriding Clinton's Ditch; angry boatmen anxious to ram the paddle wheels of Fulton's Clermont, which threatened their monopoly. Such opposition has always been an incident of progress; and even in this new country, receptive as it was to new ideas, the Washingtons, the Fitches, the Fultons, the Coopers, and the Whitneys, who saw visions and dreamed dreams, all had to face scepticism and hostility from those whom they would serve.

A. B. H.

Worcester, Mass., June, 1919.

The Paths of Inland Commerce
Chapter Chapter Title Page
Preface vii
I. The Man Who Caught The Vision 1
II. The Red Man's Trail 14
III. The Mastery Of The Rivers 30
IV. A Nation On Wheels 44
V. The Flatboat Age 62
VI. The Passing Show Of 1800 81
VII. The Birth Of The Steamboat 100
VIII. The Conquest Of The Alleghanies 116
IX. The Dawn Of The Iron Age 134
X. The Pathway of the Lakes 154
XI. The Steamboat And The West 174
Bibliographical Note 197
Index 203

THE PATHS OF INLAND COMMERCE

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