rownsville, and do it all
over again?"

[Footnote A: "In the evening of the same day I ran my Boats into
a small Creek about one mile above the old Fort Missack; Reposed
ourselves for the night, and in the morning took a Rout to the
Northwest."--Clark's letter to Mason.]

APPENDIX A.

Historical outline of Ohio Valley settlement.

Englishmen had no sooner set foot upon our continent, than they began
to penetrate inland with the hope of soon reaching the Western Ocean,
which the coast savages, almost as ignorant of the geography of the
interior as the Europeans themselves, declared lay just beyond
the mountains. In 1586, we find Ralph Lane, governor of Raleigh's
ill-fated colony, leading his men up the Roanoke River for a hundred
miles, only to turn back disheartened at the rapids and falls, which
necessitated frequent portages through the forest jungles. Twenty
years later (1606), Christopher Newport and the redoubtable John
Smith, of Jamestown, ascended the James as far as the falls--now
Richmond, Va.; and Newport himself, the following year, succeeded in
reaching a point forty miles beyond, but here again was appalled by
the difficulties and returned.

There was, after this, a deal of brave talk about scaling the
mountains; but nothing further was done until 1650, when Edward Bland
and Edward Pennant again tried the Roanoke, though without penetrating
the wilderness far beyond Lane's turning point. It is recorded that,
in 1669, John Lederer, an adventurous German surgeon, commissioned as
an explorer by Governor Berkeley, ascended to the summit of the Blue
Ridge, in Madison County, Va.; but although he was once more on the
spot the following season, with a goodly company of horsemen and
Indians, and had a bird's-eye view of the over-mountain country, he
does not appear to have descended into the world of woodland which
lay stretched between him and the setting sun. It seems to be well
established that the very next year (1671), a party under Abraham
Wood, one of Governor Berkeley's major-generals, penetrated as far
as the Great Falls of the Great Kanawha, only eighty miles from the
Ohio--doubtless the first English exploration of waters flowing into
the latter river. The Great Kanawha was, by Wood himself, called New
River, but the geographers of the time styled it Wood's. The last
title was finally dropped; the stream above the mouth of the Gauley
is, however, still known as New. These several adven