No physical characteristic of the United States has contributed so greatly to the nationalization of the country and its people, as the topography of its rivers.  From the very earliest days they have been the pathways along which proceeded exploration and settlement.  Our forefathers, when they found the narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast which they had at first occupied, becoming crowded, according to their ideas at the time, began working westward, following the river gaps.  Up the Hudson and westward by the Mohawk, up the Susquehanna and the Potomac, carrying around the falls that impeded the course of those streams, trudging over the mountains, and building flatboats at the headwaters of the Ohio, they made their way west.  Some of the most puny streams were utilized for water-carriers, and the traveler of to-day on certain of the railroads through western New York and Pennsylvania, will be amazed to see the remnants of canals, painfully built in the beds of brawling streams, that now would hardly float an Indian birch-bark canoe.  In their time these canals served useful purposes.  The stream was dammed and locked every few hundred yards, and so converted into a placid waterway with a flight of mechanical steps, by which the boats were let down to, or raised up from tidewater.  To-day nothing remains of most of these works of engineering, except masses of shattered masonry.  For the railroads, using the river’s bank, and sometimes even part of the retaining walls of the canals for their roadbeds, have shrewdly obtained and swiftly employed authority to destroy all the fittings of these waterways which might, perhaps, at some time, offer to their business a certain rivalry.

The corporation known as the Ohio Company, with a 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, 1787—­the 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.