In the late seventeenth century back in the East, English explorers were boldly crossing the river fall lines (by portaging: they had not yet begun to construct canals) and were also starting to clamber up and over the Appalachian Mountains. They were becoming very well aware of the presence, some hundreds of miles away to their west, of the Mississippi River.
More important, so were the French. While the English began somewhat timidly making their way toward this river from their colonial outposts in the East, the French headed swiftly toward it from their clusters of forts and settlements around the Great Lakes. In doing so, they were determined not merely to find this river but to own it.
It was Louis Jolliet and a Jesuit priest named Jacques Marquette who succeeded in locating it and formally seizing it. They first crossed from Lake Huron into Lake Michigan, then paddled up the Fox River past where Green Bay stands today, made a portage of a mere two miles through a tangle of swampy grassland before reaching another, south-flowing stream—today’s Wisconsin River. A simple seventy miles of canoeing with the current down this pretty little river, and then, voilà!—the rolling gray immensity of the country’s mightiest waterway. It was June 17, 1673. The river they had first heard of from Iroquois lake traders back up in the frigid north was now here in its vast reality; and from the strength and direction of the stream, there could be no doubt that voyaging down it would take them eventually all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
They sailed their tiny craft through 450 miles of rips and boils and roaring river waters. They slid past the confluences with other giant rivers—the Des Moines, the Missouri, the Ohio, and the Arkansas. And then suddenly, a frisson of nervousness: they became troubled at the increasing likelihood of meeting armed scouts of the fiercely protective Spaniards, who they knew controlled the river’s lower reaches and of whom local Indians now began to bring reports.
So they laid their claim: to the north of the junction with the Arkansas, all of this huge river and its watershed now belonged to the majesty and dignity of New France. Until the Louisiana Purchase was signed in 1804, this claim was widely accepted—with one major exception: the status of one of the Mississippi’s largest tributaries to the east, the Ohio.
This the French keenly wanted, too, but for decades after the Jolliet and Marquette expedition, they found themselves running into stiff and unyielding resistance from the British. And for a quite understandable reason: the Ohio River’s watershed drained lands on the far side of the Appalachians, lands that Britons had now energetically started to settle and farm.
The simmering dispute over the ownership of the Ohio reached its boiling point 1749, when a magnificently named New French naval officer, Pierre-Joseph de Céloron de Blainville, sailed down the Ohio and claimed it in a manner that was traditional in Europe, but which to this new world was famously inventive. Beneath prominent trees that stood at the confluences of half a dozen of the tributaries of the Ohio, Céloron secreted specially made lead plates, formally announcing the annexation of the surrounding territory for his monarch.
Each of these plates was hammered from solid metal, shaped like a rough tablet about a foot long and seven inches wide. And on each was engraved a portentous message of seizure in the name of the royal governor of Canada, the equally exalted-sounding Roland-Michel Barrin, Marquis de La Galissonière. A blank space was left in the middle to insert the name of each tributary being claimed: few imperial pronouncements can have been so sonorous:
L’an 1749 du regne de Louis XV Roy de France, nous Céloron, commandant d’un detachement envoie par Monsieur le Mis. de La Galissonière, commandant general de la Nouvelle France, pour retablir la tranquillité dans quelques villages sauvages de ces cantons, avons enterré cette plaque au confluent de l’Ohio et de Tchadakoin ce 29 Juillet, près de la rivière Oyo, autrement Belle Rivière, pour monument du renouvellement de possession que nous avons pris de la ditte rivière Oyo, et de toutes celle qui y tombent, et de toutes les terres des deux côtes jusque aux sources des dittes rivières ainsi qu’en ont jouy ou du jouir les précédents rois de France, et qu’ils s’y sont maintenus par les armes et par les traittes, spécialement par ceux de Riswick d’Utrecht et d’Aix la Chapelle.
As translated about 1877 by historian Orsamus Holmes Marshall:
In the year 1749, of the reign of Louis the 15th, King of France, we Celeron, commander of a detachment sent by Monsieur the Marquis de la Galissoniere, Governor General of New France, to reëstablish tranquillity in some Indian villages of these cantons, have buried this Plate of Lead at the confluence of the Ohio and the Chatauqua, this 29th day of July, near the river Ohio, otherwise Belle Riviere [Beautiful River], as a monument of the renewal of the possession we have taken of the said river Ohio and of all those which empty into it, and of all the lands on both sides as far as the sources of the said rivers, as enjoyed or ought to have been enjoyed by the kings of France preceding and as they have there maintained themselves by arms and by treaties, especially those of Ryswick, Utrecht and Aix la Chapelle.
Fine sounding this may have been to Gallic ears, but to the English colonists on the far side of the Appalachians, this annexation by buried plates was as preposterous as it was bizarre—a gesture akin, as one historian put it, impresciently, “to planting a flag on the moon.” And it was one of the many factors that helped to spawn a period of intense skirmishing between locally based French and British militias. It was part of the fighting that was to become known in North America as the French and Indian War, or “the war that made America,” as some have called it.
In the rest of the world, this was part of the very much greater Seven Years’ War, a costly episode that by the eventual British victory—formalized by the Treaty of Paris of February 1763—altered borders and the shapes of nations and resulted in land exchanges stretching from India to the Caribbean. Most important of all, the trouncing of the French in North America led to the establishment of Canada as a British possession.
In the context of this particular story, the war led also to formal cession in 1763 of the Ohio River valley to the British. The initial idea was that these newly acquired lands west of the Appalachians were to be left as a reserve for Indians; in fact they became de facto British territory, because so many land-hungry British settlers were trekking over the hills and decorating the region with homesteads. The settlements of these colonists had the effect of pushing the frontier of French-owned lands several hundred miles farther to the west, across to the west bank of the Mississippi. And to make certain that matters in these newly demarcated territories remained stable and secure, the British then built a series of forts, the first of them constructed at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, and where the Ohio River starts: today’s city of Pittsburgh.
The British victory helped win prominence for a twenty-six-year-old scion of the Virginia tobacco-growing gentry, George Washington. His own victory while fighting the French in the Ohio Valley would help in his appointment forty years later as the first president of the United States. But it also played a more immediate role in his visionary decision to use the country’s rivers—and to build artificial rivers, as well—as a means of joining the newly discovered vastness of America into one.
It all started because a grateful King George II back in England had promised his loyal American lieutenant some twenty thousand acres of prime Ohio Valley land as reward for his battlefield services. The newly won British control of the Ohio watershed then gave Washington and his friend and colleague in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, the gleam of an idea: in order to encourage the settlement of this valley by Americans, should they now perhaps attempt to forge a physical link between, on the one hand, those settlers who lived in the valleys of the Potomac and James Rivers on the eastern side of the Appalachians and, on the other hand, those in the newly conquered lands on the western side?
A physical link could mean creating a network of roads, of course. But it occurred to George Washington that it would be far more
effective and economical to construct a brand-new river of sorts, to carve it clear across the intervening hills, linking valley to valley by water. It had been done before, in Europe, where it had proved a considerable commercial success: the valleys could be connected by a shipping canal.
The land Washington had been given—which he later expanded by buying still more, eventually owning sixty thousand acres—lay at the confluence of the Ohio and the Kanawha Rivers. The Kanawha’s source on the west side of the Appalachians and the sources of both the Potomac and the James Rivers on the east side of the same mountain chain were a scant thirty-three miles apart. So it seemed eminently reasonable at least to try to create canals linking these particular streams.
And so in the late 1780s, once the Revolutionary War was over, the first practical steps were taken, plans were drawn up, and constructions were commenced that might in time create a series of passageways. The East of the country could in theory now be united with its Middle West across fully a thousand miles, entirely by water. George Washington would be the first to attempt to do so.
THE PIVOT AND THE FEATHER
Rivers—whether broad, deep, and influenced by tides; or cold, narrow, and interrupted by rapids and waterfalls—had always been central to the development of the young George Washington. And in his maturity there was one expedition, taken entirely by river, that changed everything.
Washington had been born beside a creek that flowed into the Potomac, and he spent much time fishing and swimming in the inlets of Chesapeake Bay. He rode out across the Allegheny foothills to explore the upper reaches of the James River and the Shenandoah, and he cut his teeth as a surveyor in their wilderness valleys, learning the craft, winning the license that would propel him to his first job, at seventeen, as the official colonial surveyor of Culpeper County.
During the wars against the French, he became all too familiar with the winding progress of the Ohio River, and he had been granted land at the confluence of the Ohio with the Kanawha. His heroic crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, the first crucial move in the War of Independence, remains one of the most famous riverine expeditions mounted in American history.
But it was a very much longer river expedition, undertaken after the war was over, in September 1784, that cemented Washington’s lifelong belief that waterways were vital to America’s expansion and consolidation. By now he had retired from the military, had stunned the world by resigning his military commission, and returned to Virginia to continue planting tobacco.
But he was restless. His fond memories of the victorious Ohio campaign against the French thirty years before, and his new awareness that settlers were now streaming across the mountains to make homes for themselves in these new-won western lands, prompted him to mount an expedition to the western frontier, to see for himself a little of frontier life. His plan was to venture from the bluff overlooking the Potomac where stood his family home—Mount Vernon—and make his way by horse along the river valleys to the small British fort-city of Pittsburgh.
He began by traveling due west along the Potomac, passing rivers named the Monocacy and the Conococheague, the Cacapon and the Antietam, and his old friend the Shenandoah. As he pressed on and up into the hills where the forests closed in, the streams became smaller and faster, rivers became creeks, creeks became rills. In the far west of Maryland most of them—the Savage and the Bear and the Muddy and the fancifully named Rhine—ceased being in any way navigable, even by small canoe, and became mere springs, trickles, and sources.
There then came a defining moment of local geography: one low ridge of mountains lay ahead, and on its far side Washington and his team discovered the beginnings of a downward slope where all the trickles and creeks and rills poured no longer eastward but instead to the west. The ridge marked a true tipping point. They were crossing the Eastern Divide; they had left the basin of the Atlantic Ocean behind them and had entered the drainage of the Mississippi River. They had entered what was then, spiritually if perhaps not technically, the West.
The Youghiogheny, the only river to rise in far western Maryland and send its waters to the Mississippi, eventually gave George Washington a navigable route to the Ohio Valley. Downstream from here it joins the Monongahela, which eventually merges with the Allegheny at what is now the city of Pittsburgh.
The Youghiogheny River, which the men found flowing north with the grain of the mountain ranges, is the only river that rises in Maryland—very much an Eastern state and one of the original thirteen—and empties its waters into the faraway and very Western entity of the Mississippi. They hoisted their canoes down into it; they bumped down it to still water, and found it then duly connected with the Monongahela, which the group then took downstream to its confluence with the Allegheny, at the fort where Pittsburgh now stands. The junction of these two by now quite large streams forms the Ohio, and downstream from the small settlement stretched its own broad reach of water, spearing southwestward to lands that were still quite empty but evidently full of promise and filling with newcomers.
There were settlers at the confluence—hundreds only, but those among them skilled as boatbuilders were making a bustling business. Washington took his expedition onward down the Ohio and could hardly avoid noticing how it was becoming a highway, almost crowded, with newly built Pittsburgh boats running in tandem with him, all carrying young men and their families downstream. On the prow of each craft, a man would invariably be standing, gazing this way and that, peering intently at the passing shores. Once in a while he might cry out at the sight of a favorable-looking inlet or a flattening meadow-to-be or a stand of interesting-looking trees, and he would order his boat to turn in to land and would moor it and leap ashore to see what promise the land might hold.
Some of these families might then stay put. The passersby could see places on the riverbanks with scatterings of survey flags or crude signs marking a claim to ownership. Farms, hamlets, and small villages were springing up all along the river, and every so often, tracks were curving up the banks and vanishing into the woods, marking the sites where men were cutting roads into the hills, making farms even farther away. The place was a bustle of activity. America was being built here, farm by humble farm, along the banks of the Ohio. George Washington was witness to a moment of creation.
After two hundred miles of steady sailing, he reached the spread of lands that the former English king had given him, at the point where the Kanawha River comes into the Ohio from the left. This seemed as appropriate a place as any, and Washington ordered the party to leave the broad, slow Ohio and turn up into the Kanawha. They sailed back through the hills as far as possible, noting where it narrowed, speeded up, and became a creek, and finally with an inevitable short portage, he and his men crossed back over the divide, high on the Alleghenies. Once on the hills’ downward slopes, the men reached the white-water headstreams of the James River, and once it became navigable, they floated back down eastward through Virginia to the fall line at Richmond and thence across the alluvial flats and back into Chesapeake Bay, up to the Potomac, and finally to Mount Vernon and home.
If not especially long by later pioneering standards, this had been a remarkable journey, and Washington returned from it with a singular conviction.
The settlers he had met in the Ohio Valley, he reasoned, were in a peculiarly vulnerable position. They were still few in number, and they were surrounded—by the French to their west, by the Spaniards to their south, and by the English loyalists and royalists up north in Canada. If these Ohio settlers did not feel intimately conjoined to their fellow Americans across the hills back east, they might well throw in their lot with some non-Americans who might take better care of them. They might well trade first and foremost with the Spaniards, sending their farm produce down the Mississippi to New Orleans. It would be an altogether easier and less expensive means of making a living than trying to sell goods that needed to be hauled and hefted back to the East.
So Washington issue
d a dire warning to the governor of Virginia, in a letter he wrote on October 10, 1784. The Western settlers, he said (and underlining the point that he spoke from his own observations), “stand as it were upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way.”
The implication was obvious. Were this feather touch ever to turn them to Spain or France and against the original colonies, the newborn America for which Washington had fought so bitterly would be doomed. All that would remain would be a small coastal country clinging to the edge of a vast continent ruled by Europeans of uncertain—meaning non-British—reliability. Washington found this prospect utterly unacceptable.
He knew of one certain solution, however. He knew that the one true cement that would indissolubly bind the new settlers to the men and markets and institutions of the United States would be money—by the practice of trade and commerce.
The settlers—energetic, adventurous men and women, full of spunk and ideas and courage, who were made of the stuff that would make the ever-enlarging nation truly great—could worship whichever gods they chose, could adopt whatever local politics they wished, and could choose customs and callings quite different from those they left behind. But Washington confidently asserted that if they could perform all their important business dealings not with foreigners but with the United States, if they could feel themselves bound to their forebears by money, then they could and would remain contentedly members of the Union. The United States would, as a consequence of the new-forged economic bond, remain powerfully and perhaps permanently united.
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers Page 18