The Paths of Inland Commerce; A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway

From the opening

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.

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

Inland America, at the birth of the Republic, was as great a mystery to the average dweller on the Atlantic seaboard as the elephant was to the blind men of Hindustan.

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