Waterways of Westward Expansion - The Ohio River and its Tributaries

Transcriber’s Note: Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the text body. Also images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break, causing missing page numbers for those image pages and blank pages in this ebook.

THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY CLEVELAND, OHIO 1903

COPYRIGHT, 1903 BY The Arthur H. Clark Company ALL RIGHTS RESERVED





In the study of Waterways of Westward Expansion, the Ohio River—the “Gateway of the West”—occupies such a commanding position that it must be considered most important and most typical. Such is its situation in our geography and history that it is entitled to a most prominent place among Historic Highways of America which greatly influenced the early westward extension of the borders and the people of the United States. Not until a late period in the expansion era—the day of steam navigation—did the Great Lakes rise to importance as highways of immigration, and south of the Ohio River Basin there was no westward waterway of importance. The day of the keel-boat and barge was of moment in the broadening of the American sphere of influence on this continent, and nowhere is the study of these ancient craft made to so good advantage as on the Ohio and its tributaries.
This monograph is devoted, therefore, to the part played by this waterway as a road into the West. The two introductory chapters, concerning Céloron and the first occupation of the Old Northwest, added to previous volumes of this series (iii, iv, v, and vi), complete the legendary and historical setting necessary for a proper view of the Ohio in the first momentous years of the nineteenth century. The occupation and filling of the southern shores of the Ohio was the story of Volume VI; the story of the filling of the northern shore is outlined in the second chapter of this book. With the position of the first colonies and settlements in the great valley well comprehended, and a conception of the origin of the different colonies and their varied types, the next logical step in our study is the rise of the river trade and its evolution.