Chapter I: of the text; and it has been shown, in the course of the

narrative of the pilgrimage, how other districts were slowly settled in the face of savage opposition. Although driven back in numerous Indian wars, these American borderers had come to the Ohio valley to stay.

We have seen the early attempt of the Ohio Company to settle the valley. Its agents blazed the way, but the French and Indian War, and the Revolution soon following, tended to discourage the aspirations of the adventurers, and the organization finally lapsed. Western land speculators were as active in those days as now, and Washington was chief among them. We find him first interested in the valley, through broad acres acquired on land-grants issued for military services in the French and Indian War; Revolutionary bounty claims made him a still larger landholder on Western waters; and, to the close of the century, he was actively interested in schemes to develop the region. We are not in the habit of so regarding him, but both by frequent personal presence in the Ohio valley, and extensive interests at stake there, the Father of his Country was the most conspicuous of Western pioneers. Dearly did Washington love the West, which he knew so well; when the Revolutionary cause looked dark, and it seemed possible that England might seize the coast settlements, he is said to have cried, "We will retire beyond the mountains, and be free!" and in his declining years he seemed to regret that he was too old to join his former comrades of the camp, in their colony at Marietta.

As early as 1754, Franklin, in his famous Albany Plan of Union for the colonies, had a device for establishing new states in the West, upon lands purchased from the Indians. In 1773, he displayed interest in the Walpole plan for another colony,--variously called Pittsylvania, Vandalia, and New Barataria--with its proposed capital at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. There were, too, several other Western colonial schemes,--among them the Henderson colony of Transylvania, between the Cumberland and the Tennessee, the seat of which was Boonesborough. Readers of Roosevelt well know its brief but brilliant career, intimately connected with the development of Tennessee and Kentucky. But the most of these hopeful enterprises came to grief with the political secession of the colonies; and when the coast States ceded their Western land-claims to the new general government, and the Ordinance of 1787 provided for the organization of the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, there was no room for further enterprises of this character.[A]

The story of the Ohio is the story of the West. With the close of the Revolution, came a rush of travel down the great river. It was more or less checked by border warfare, which lasted until 1794; but in that year, Anthony Wayne, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, broke the backbone of savagery east of the Mississippi; the Tecumseh uprising (1812-13) came too late seriously to affect the dwellers on the Ohio.

There were two great over-mountain highways thither, one of them being Braddock's Road, with Redstone (now Brownsville, Pa.) and Pittsburg as its termini; the other was Boone's old trail, or Cumberland Gap. With the latter, this sketch has naught to do.

By the close of the Revolution, Pittsburg--in Gist's day, but a squalid Indian village, and a fording-place--was still only "a distant out-post, merely a foothold in the Far West." By 1785, there were a thousand people there, chiefly engaged in the fur-trade and in forwarding emigrants and goods to the rapidly-growing settlements on the middle and lower reaches of the river. The population had doubled by 1803. By 1812 there was to be seen here just the sort of bustling, vicious frontier town, with battlement-fronts and ragged streets, which Buffalo and then Detroit became in after years. Cincinnati and Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City, had still later, each in turn, their share of this experience; and, not many years ago, Bismarck, Omaha, and Leadville. From Philadelphia and Baltimore and Richmond, there were running to Pittsburg or Redstone regular lines of stages for the better class of passengers; freight wagons laden with immense bales of goods were to be seen in great caravans, which frequently were "stalled" in the mud of the mountain roads; emigrants from all parts of the Eastern States, and many countries of Europe, often toiled painfully on foot over these execrable highways, with their bundles on their backs, or following scrawny cattle harnessed to makeshift vehicles; and now and then came a well-to-do equestrian with his pack-horses,--generally an Englishman,--who was out to see the country, and upon his return to write a book about it.

At Pittsburg, and points on the Alleghany, Youghiogheny, and Monongahela, were boat-building yards which turned out to order a curious medley of craft--arks, flat- and keel-boats, barges, pirogues, and schooners of every design conceivable to fertile brain. Upon these, travelers took passage for the then Far West, down the swift-rolling Ohio. There have descended to us a swarm of published journals by English and Americans alike, giving pictures, more or less graphic, of the men and manners of the frontier; none is without interest, even if in its pages the priggish author but unconsciously shows himself, and fails to hold the mirror up to the rest of nature. With the introduction of steamboats,--the first was in 1811, but they were slow to gain headway against popular prejudice,--the old river life, with its picturesque but rowdy boatmen, its unwieldy flats and keels and arks, began to pass away, and water traffic to approach the prosaic stage; the crossing of the mountains by the railway did away with the boisterous freighters, the stages, and the coaching-taverns; and when, at last, the river became paralleled by the iron way, the glory of the steamboat epoch itself faded, riverside towns adjusted themselves to the new highways of commerce, new centers arose, and "side-tracked" ports fell into decay.

[Footnote A: See Turner's "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era," in _Amer. Hist. Rev._, Vol. I.; also, Alden's "New Governments West of the Alleghanies," _Bull. Univ. Wis._, Hist. Series, Vol. II.]