The Paths of Inland Commerce; A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, by Archer Butler Hulbert

Published: New Haven, Yale University Press, 1920

Volume 21 of The Chronicles of America series - Travel by Indian trails, rivers, wagon, flatboat, steamboat, trains, and on the Great Lakes, etc. Nice bibliographical notes section

CONTENTS:

PREFACE
CHAPTER I. The Man Who Caught The Vision
CHAPTER II. The Red Man's Trail
CHAPTER III. The Mastery Of The Rivers
CHAPTER IV. A Nation On Wheels
CHAPTER V. The Flatboat Age
CHAPTER VI. The Passing Show Of 1800
CHAPTER VII. The Birth Of The Steamboat
CHAPTER VIII. The Conquest Of The Alleghanies
CHAPTER IX. The Dawn Of The Iron Age
CHAPTER X. THE PATHWAY OF THE LAKES
CHAPTER XI. The Steamboat And The West
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

If the great American novel is ever written, I hazard the guess that its plot will be woven around the theme of American transportation, for that has been the vital factor in the national development of the United States. Every problem in the building of the Republic has been, in the last analysis, a problem in transportation. The author of such a novel will find a rich fund of material in the perpetual rivalries of pack-horseman and wagoner, of riverman and canal boatman, of steamboat promoter and railway capitalist. He will find at every point the old jostling and challenging the new pack-horsemen demolishing wagons in the early days of the Alleghany traffic; wagoners deriding Clinton's Ditch; angry boatmen anxious to ram the paddle wheels of Fulton's Clermont, which threatened their monopoly. Such opposition has always been an incident of progress; and even in this new country, receptive as it was to new ideas, the Washingtons, the Fitches, the Fultons, the Coopers, and the Whitneys, who saw visions and dreamed dreams, all had to face scepticism and hostility from those whom they would serve.

A. B. H.

Worcester, Mass., June, 1919.