[ROBERT FULTON]
(1765-1815).
[191. What Mr. Livingston said about Louisiana; a small family in a big house; settlements in the west; the country beyond the Mississippi River.]—Even before we bought the great Louisiana country, we had more land than we then knew what to do with; after we had purchased it, it seemed to some people as though we should not want to use what we had bought for more than a hundred years. Such people thought that we were like a man with a small family who lives in a house much too large for him; but who, not contented with that, buys his neighbor's house, which is bigger still, and adds it to his own.
If a traveller in those days went across the Alleghany Mountains[1] to the west, he found some small settlements in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, but hardly any outside of those. What are now the great states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were then a wilderness; and this was also true of what are now the states of Alabama and Mississippi.
If the same traveller, pushing forward, on foot or on horseback,—for there were no steam cars,—crossed the Mississippi River, he could hardly find a white man outside what was then the little town of St. Louis. The country stretched away west for more than a thousand miles, with nothing in it but wild beasts and Indians. In much of it there were no trees, no houses, no human beings. If you shouted as hard as you could in that solitary land, the only reply you would hear would be the echo of your own voice; it was like shouting in an empty room—it made it seem lonelier than ever.
1 See map in paragraph [140].
[192. Emigration to the west, and the man who helped that emigration.]—But during the last hundred years that great empty land of the far west has been filling up with people. Thousands upon thousands of emigrants have gone there. They have built towns and cities and railroads and telegraph lines. Thousands more are going and will go. What has made such a wonderful change? Well, one man helped to do a great deal toward it. His name was Robert Fulton. He saw how difficult it was for people to get west; for if emigrants wanted to go with their families in wagons, they had to chop roads through the forest. That was slow, hard work. Fulton found a way that was quick, easy, and cheap. Let us see who he was, and how he found that way.
[193. Robert Fulton's boyhood; the old scow; what Robert did for his mother.]—Robert Fulton was the son of a poor Irish farmer in Pennsylvania.[2] He did not care much for books, but liked to draw pictures with pencils which he hammered out of pieces of lead.
| ROBERT FULTON'S PADDLE-WHEEL SCOW. |
Like most boys, he was fond of fishing. He used to go out in an old scow, or flat-bottomed boat, on a river near his home. He and another boy would push the scow along with poles. But Robert said, There is an easier way to make this boat go. I can put a pair of paddle-wheels on her, and then we can sit comfortably on the seat and turn the wheels by a crank. He tried it, and found that he was right. The boys now had a boat which suited them exactly.