e
mountains, though not {30} lofty, were rugged and covered with dense
forests and tangled undergrowth. There were few doorways to the great
open spaces beyond. On the far north the southward intrusion of the
ocean, known as Hudson Bay, opened a precarious way, important in the
early days of the white man's period, possibly to become important
again in our own, but negligible during the intervening years. From
the south, entrance could be had by the Mississippi and its
tributaries, offering for most of the year ten thousand miles of
navigable waters. In the east the St Lawrence system, stretching three
thousand miles westward from the sea, and the Hudson and Mohawk rivers,
passing through a gap in the Alleghanies, offered still more convenient
access.

Early and late in the history of the white man's America the land and
the trade of the interior have been the prize sought by rival nations
and rival cities, and the possession of a speedy and convenient route
has been the means of securing the prize. The later warfare was less
spectacular than the old, but no less keen. The navvy took the place
of the Indian, pick and shovel and theodolite the place of bow and
musket, and a lower freight {31} by a cent on a bushel of wheat became
the ammunition in place of the former glass beads or fire-water. But
seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen on Hudson
Bay, Spaniards and Frenchmen on the Mississippi, Frenchmen and
Englishmen on the St Lawrence, Dutchmen and Englishmen on the Hudson,
did not strive more eagerly for control than the Montreal and Halifax,
Portland and Boston and New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore and New
Orleans of the nineteenth century. The struggle became especially
intense when the advancing flood of settlers cut their way through the
Appalachian woods and burst into the prairies of the Mississippi
valley. There was no longer a ten-year struggle to clear a space of
forty or fifty acres; at once the soil was ready for the plough. For a
few years the grain of the valley states was needed for their own
inrushing settlers, but a surplus grew rapidly and had to find an
outlet in the east or in Europe. The miraculous speed of western
settlement and the magnitude of the prize at stake soon centred public
interest on the question of the route which was to provide this outlet.

The Mississippi route was the first to be {32} developed. In canoe and
pirogue, bateau, flatboat, and ark,