CHAPTER XIII
INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS
After the purchase of Louisiana and the explorations of Lewis and Clark, the number of settlers who went from the eastern part of the country to find new homes in the West kept on increasing as it had been doing since Boone, Robertson, and Sevier had pushed their way across the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, twenty-five or thirty years earlier.
These pioneers, if they went westward by land, had to load their goods on pack-horses and follow the Indian trail. Later the trail was widened into a roadway, and wagons could be used. But travel by land was slow and, hard under any conditions.
Going by water, while cheaper, was inconvenient, for the travellers must use the flatboat, which was clumsy and slow and, worst of all, of little use except when going down stream.
The great need both for travel and for trade, then, was a boat which would not be dependent upon wind or current, but could be propelled by steam. Many men had tried to work out such an invention. Among them was John Rumsey, of Maryland, who built a steamboat in 1774, and John Fitch, of Connecticut, who completed his first model of a steamboat in 1785.
In the next four years Fitch built three steamboats, the last of which made regular trips on the Delaware River, between Philadelphia and Burlington, during the summer of 1786. It was used as a passenger boat, and it made a speed of eight miles an hour; but Fitch was not able to secure enough aid from men of capital and influence to make his boats permanently successful.
The first man to construct a steamboat which continued to give successful service was Robert Fulton. Robert Fulton was born of poor parents in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, in 1765, the year of the famous Stamp Act. When the boy was only three years old his father died, and so Robert was brought up by his mother. She taught him at home until he was eight, and then sent him to school. Here he showed an unusual liking for drawing.
