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, 1787the 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 use. The story is told in the diary of Manasseh Cutler, a member of the Ohio Company, who writes: "Assisted by a number of people, we went to work and constructed a machine in the form of a screw, with short blades, and placed it in the stern of the boat, which we turned with a crank. It succeeded to perfection, and I think it a very useful discovery." But the discovery was forgotten for nearly three-quarters of a century, until John Ericsson rediscovered and utilized it. Once across the divide, the early stream of immigration took its way down the Ohio River to the Mississippi. There it met the outposts of French power, for the French burst open that great river, following their missionaries, Marquette and Joliet, down from its headwaters in Wisconsin, or pressing up from their early settlements at New Orleans. Doubtless, if it had not been that the Mississippi afforded the most practicable, and the most useful highway from north to south, the young American people would have had a French State to the westward of them until they had gone much further on the path toward national manhood. But the navigation of the Mississippi and its tributaries was so rich a prize, that it stimulated alike considerations of individual self-interest and national ambition. From the day when the first flatboat made its way from the falls of the Ohio to New Orleans, it was the fixed determination of all people living by the great river, or using it as a highway for commerce, that from its headwaters to its mouth it should be a purely American stream. It was in this way that the Mississippi and its tributaries proved to be, as I have said, a great influence in developing the spirit of coherent nationality among the people of the young nation. Indeed, no national Government could be of much value to the farmers and trappers of Kentucky and Tennessee that did not assure them the right to navigate the Mississippi to its mouth, and find there a place to trans-ship their goods into ocean-going vessels. From the Atlantic seaboard they were shut off by a wall, that for all purpose of export trade was impenetrable. The swift current of the rivers beat back their vessels, the towering ranges of the Alleghanies mocked at their efforts at road building. From their hills flowed the water that filled the Father of Waters and his tributaries. Nature had clearly designed this for their outlet. As James Madison wrote: "The Mississippi is to them everything. It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable waters of the Atlantic coast formed into one stream." Yet, when the first trader, in 1786, drifted with his flatboat from Ohio down to New Orleans, thus entering the confines of Spanish territory, he was seized and imprisoned, his goods were taken from him, and at last he was turned loose, penniless, to plod on foot the long way back to his home, telling the story of his hardships as he went along. The name of that man was Thomas Amis, and after his case became known in the great valley, it ceased to be a matter of doubt that the Americans would control the Mississippi. He was in a sense the forerunner of Jefferson and Jackson, for after his time no intelligent statesman could doubt that New Orleans must be ours, nor any soldier question the need for defending it desperately against any foreign power. The story of the way in which Gen. James Wilkinson, by intrigue and trickery, some years later secured a partial relaxation of Spanish vigilance, can not be told here, though his plot had much to do with opening the great river. The story of navigation on the Mississippi River, is not without its elements of romance, though it does not approach in world interest the story of the achievements of the New England mariners on all the oceans of the globe. Little danger from tempest was encountered here. The natural perils to navigation were but an ignoble and unromantic kind-the shifting sand-bar and the treacherous snag. Yet, in the early days, when the flatboats were built at Cincinnati or Pittsburg, with high parapets of logs or heavy timber about their sides, and manned not only with men to work the sweeps and hold the steering oar, but with riflemen, alert of eye, and unerring of aim, to watch for the lurking savage on the banks, there was peril in the voyage that might even affect the stout nerves of the hardy navigator from New Bedford or Nantucket. For many long years in the early days of our country's |