,
began working westward, following the river gaps. Up the Hudson and
westward by the Mohawk, up the Susquehanna and the Potomac, carrying
around the falls that impeded the course of those streams, trudging over
the mountains, and building flatboats at the headwaters of the Ohio, they
made their way west. Some of the most puny streams were utilized for
water-carriers, and the traveler of to-day on certain of the railroads
through western New York and Pennsylvania, will be amazed to see the
remnants of canals, painfully built in the beds of brawling streams, that
now would hardly float an Indian birch-bark canoe. In their time these
canals served useful purposes. The stream was dammed and locked every few
hundred yards, and so converted into a placid waterway with a flight of
mechanical steps, by which the boats were let down to, or raised up from
tidewater. To-day nothing remains of most of these works of engineering,
except masses of shattered masonry. For the railroads, using the river's
bank, and sometimes even part of the retaining walls of the canals for
their roadbeds, have shrewdly obtained and swiftly employed authority to
destroy all the fittings of these waterways which might, perhaps, at some
time, offer to their business a certain rivalry.

The corporation known as the Ohio Company, with a great purchase of land
from Congress in 1787, by keen advertising, and the methods of the modern
real-estate boomer, started the tide of emigration and the fleet of boats
down the Ohio. The first craft sent out by this corporation was named,
appropriately enough, the "Mayflower." She drifted from Pittsburg to a
spot near the mouth of the Muskingum river. Soon the immigrants began to
follow by scores, and then by thousands. Mr. McMaster has collected some
contemporary evidence of their numbers. One man at Fort Pitt saw fifty
flatboats set forth between the first of March and the middle of April,
1787. Between October, 1786, and May, 1787--the frozen season when boats
were necessarily infrequent--the adjutant at Fort Harmer counted one
hundred and seventy-seven flat-boats, and estimated they carried
twenty-seven hundred settlers. A shabby and clumsy fleet it was, indeed,
with only enough seamanship involved to push off a sand-bar, but it was a
great factor in the upbuilding of the nation. And a curious fact is that
the voyagers on one of these river craft hit upon the principle of the
screw-propeller, and put it to effective