By Archer B. Hulbert A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway Volume 21 of the Chronicles of America Series ∴ Allen Johnson, Editor Assistant Editors Gerhard R. Lomer Charles W. Jefferys Abraham Lincoln Edition New Haven: Yale University Press Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press 1920 Copyright, 1920 by Yale University Press...

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

The Man Who Caught the Vision 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. The reports of those who had penetrated this wilderness—of those who had seen the barren ranges of the Alleghanies, the fertile uplands of the Unakas, the luxuriant blue-grass regions, the rich bottom lands of the Ohio and Mississippi, the wide shores of the inland seas, or the stretches of prairie in

The Red Man's Trail For the beginnings of the paths of our inland commerce, we must look far back into the dim prehistoric ages of America. The earliest routes that threaded the continent were the streams and the tracks beaten out by the heavier four-footed animals. The Indian hunter followed the migrations of the animals and the streams that would float his light canoe. Today the main lines of travel and transportation for the most part still cling to these primeval pathways. In their wandering

The Mastery of the Rivers It would perhaps have been well, in the light of later difficulties and failures, if the men who at Washington's call undertook to master the capricious rivers of the seaboard had studied a stately Spanish decree which declared that, since God had not made the rivers of Spain navigable, it were sacrilege for mortals to attempt to do so. Even before the Revolution, Mayor Rhodes of Philadelphia was in correspondence with Franklin in London concerning the experiences of Eu

A Nation on Wheels In early days the Indian had not only followed the watercourses in his canoe but had made his way on foot over trails through the woods and over the mountains. In colonial days, Englishman and Frenchman followed the footsteps of the Indian, and as settlement increased and trade developed, the forest path widened into the highway for wheeled vehicles. Massachusetts began the work of road making in 1639 by passing an act which decreed that "the ways" should be six to ten rods wi

The Flatboat Age In the early twenties of the last century one of the popular songs of the day was The Hunters of Kentucky. Written by Samuel Woodworth, the author of The Old Oaken Bucket, it had originally been printed in the New York Mirror but had come into the hands of an actor named Ludlow, who was playing in the old French theater in New Orleans. The poem chants the praises of the Kentucky riflemen who fought with Jackson at New Orleans and indubitably proved That every man was half a hors

The Passing Show Of 1800 Foreign travelers who have come to the United States have always proved of great interest to Americans. From Brissot to Arnold Bennett, while in the country they have been fed and clothed and transported wheresoever they would go—at the highest prevailing prices. And after they have left, the records of their sojourn that these travelers have published have made interesting reading for Americans all over the land. Some of these trans-Atlantic visitors have been jaundiced

The Birth Of The Steamboat The crowds who welcomed the successive stages in the development of American transportation were much alike in essentials—they were all optimistic, self-congratulatory, irrepressible in their enthusiasm, and undaunted in their outlook. Dickens, perhaps, did not miss the truth widely when, in speaking of stage driving, he said that the cry of "Go Ahead!" in America and of "All Right!" in England were typical of the civilizations of the two countries. Right or wrong, "Go

The Conquest Of The Alleghanies The two great thoroughfares of American commerce in the first half of the nineteenth century were the Cumberland Road and the Erie Canal. The first generation of the new century witnessed the great burst of population into the West which at once gave Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin a place of national importance which they have never relinquished. So far as pathways of commerce contributed to the creation of this veritable new republic in the Midd

The Dawn Of The Iron Age Despite the superiority of the new iron age that quickly followed the widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and a chivalry in the "good old days" of the stagecoach, the Conestoga, and the lazy canal boat, which did not to an equal degree pervade the iron age of the railroad. When machinery takes the place of human brawn and patience, there is an indefinable eclipse of human interest. Somehow, cogs and levers and differentials do not have the same appe

The Pathway of the Lakes As one stands in imagination at the early railheads of the West—on the Ohio River at the end of the Cumberland Road, or at Buffalo, the terminus of the Erie Canal—the vision which Washington caught breaks upon him and the dream of a nation made strong by trans-Alleghany routes of commerce. Link by link the great interior is being connected with the sea. Behind him all lines of transportation lead eastward to the cities of the coast. Before him lies the giant valley where

The Steamboat And The West Two great fields of service lay open before those who were to achieve by steam the mastery of the inland waterways. On the one hand the cotton kingdom of the South, now demanding great stores of manufactured goods, produce, and machinery, was waiting to be linked to the valleys and industrial cities of the Middle West; and, on the other hand, along those great eastward and westward rivers, the Ohio and Missouri, lay the commerce of the prairies and the Great Plains. Bu

The history of the early phase of American transportation is dealt with in three general works. John Luther Ringwalt's Development of Transportation Systems in the United States (1888) is a reliable summary of the general subject at the time. Archer B. Hulbert's Historic Highways of America, 16 vols. (1902-1905), is a collection of monographs of varying quality written with youthful enthusiasm by the author, who traversed in good part the main pioneer roads and canals of the eastern portion of t

Archer Hulbert completed a fifteen-part series from 1902-1905 on the historic highways of America, which he distilled into this one volume for the Chronicles of America Series . Project Gutenberg offers thirteen of the fifteen volumes in the historic roads series. We are also missing the sixteenth volume from our collection, which is an index of the other fifteen volumes....

The Chronicles of America Series has two similar editions of each volume in the series. One version is the Abraham Lincoln edition of the series, a premium version which includes full-page pictures. A textbook edition was also produced, which does not contain the pictures and captions associated with the pictures, but is otherwise the same book. This book was produced to match the textbook edition of the book. We have retained the original punctuation and spelling in the book, but there are a fe

On Page 28 , pack-saddles was hyphenated between two lines for spacing. The word was used inside a quote, so prior references may not give us the right transcription. However, it is the best information that we have available. On page 22, packsaddle was not hyphenated and appeared in the middle of a line. A word with the same prefix, pack-horse, was consistently spelled with a hyphen. We transcribed the word without the hyphen, because the evidence suggests that the author intended packsaddles w