peddler of silver
and brass sleeve-buttons of his own manufacture. It made him an
officer and then an armorer in the Continental service. As a
fabricator of patriotic weapons, he incurred the displeasure of his
Methodist brethren by working on the Sabbath, and lost his orthodoxy
in his disgust at their rebukes. Towards the close of the Revolution,
getting poor in fact by getting rich in Continental money, he
endeavored to save himself by investing in Virginia land-warrants,
went to Kentucky as a surveyor, and became possessed of sixteen
hundred acres of that wilderness. On a second expedition down the
Ohio, early in 1782, he fell into the hands of the savages, in the
most melodramatic style, was led captive through the vast forests and
swamps to Detroit, had a very characteristic and remarkable
prison-experience under British authority at Prison Island, was
exchanged, and by a sea-voyage reached his home in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, at the close of the same year. Immediately after the
establishment of peace, he formed a company to speculate in Ohio
lands, and made extensive surveys for the purpose of forestalling the
best locations. Mr. Westcott's book confuses this portion of his
chronology by misprinting two or three dates, on the 113th page. The
hopeful game was spoiled by unexpected measures of the Confederated
government; but Fitch's explorations had deeply impressed him with the
sublime character of the Western rivers, and when, in April, 1785, the
thought first struck him that steam could easily make them navigable
upwards as well as downwards, he cared no more for lands. He had
noticed the mechanical power of steam, but had never seen an engine,
and did not know that one existed out of his own brain. This is the
less wonderful, seeing there were only three then in America, and his
science extended only to arithmetic. When his minister showed him a
drawing of Newcomen's engine, in "Martin's Philosophy," he was
chagrined to find that his invention had been anticipated in regard to
the mode of producing the power, but he was confirmed in his belief of
its availability for navigation. With no better resources than a
blacksmith's shop could furnish, he set himself at work to make a
steam-engine to test his theory. His success is one of those wonders
of human ingenuity struggling with difficulties, moral, financial, and
physical combined, which deserve both a Homer and a Macaulay to
celebrate and record them. He was