II. Transportation and the Colonization of the West

Look down from the top of almost any American skyscraper today and you will see a fascinating world in motion, especially at night. Great lanes of automotive traffic in multiple lines stream swiftly by. Trains glide in and out of congested railway stations. Steamships and tugs ply the bays and rivers, while air transports roar overhead. It is a round-the-clock medley of sight and sound. But it was not always so, as we shall see by a rapid review of developments from the dawn of the nineteenth century.PFF4 434.2

The first national pike, or highway, was authorized in 1806 by the United States Congress. Its goal was to connect the Eastern seaboard with the great Mississippi Valley. The first section, completed about 1818, was called the Cumberland Road, extending from Fort Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, West Virginia. Then, in 1825, interest turned to canals, as the new Erie Canal opened a water route between the East and the Midwest. Next came the revolutionary triumph of steam, destined to displace the established means of transportation that had been employed without material change for thousands of years. The steamship and then the steam locomotive—aptly called the iron horse—began to appear, two of the latter in England in 1825 and 1826, one in France in 1827, and Germany’s first in 1834.PFF4 434.3

Robert Fulton learned of the paddle-wheeled Charlotte Dundas, modestly operating on the Clyde Canal in Scotland, and conceived the idea of the famous side-wheeler, the Clermont, which made her epochal maiden trip up the Hudson in 1807, from New York City to Albany—150 miles in 32 hours In 1811 the first regular steamboat to ply the Mississippi, the New Orleans was launched. The S. S. Savannah made her trans-Atlantic run, under combined steam and sail, from Savannah to Liverpool in 1819. But regular steamship runs across the Atlantic were not established until 1838. ^{7Frederic L. Paxson, History of the American Frontier, 1762-1893, pp. 155, 156 158:Harold U. Faulkner, American Economic History, pp. 186, 275; 276.} The westward flow of population became a marked characteristic. When the settlers increased, the great bosom of the Mississippi became dotted with craft. From 1837 on to the outbreak of the Civil War, steamboat traffic was at its height. ^{8Frederic L. Paxson, op. Cit., p. 158.} And this travel broke up the intellectual isolationism.PFF4 435.1

The first locomotive to run in the Western Hemisphere was in 1829’ on the Delaware and Hudson road. And in 1830 the Baltimore and Ohio (thirteen miles in length), and the Charleston and Hamburg in South Carolina, were opened for regular public use. Only one hundred miles were in operation in the United States in 1832. But by 1842 the iron rails had reached the Great Lakes, at Buffalo, then Chicago in 1852, and the Mississippi in 1854. ^{9Harold U. Faulkner, op. cit., pp. 285, 286; Frederic L. Paxson, op. cit., chap. 44; Archibald L. Bouton, An Outline History of Transportation, pp. 28, 29.}PFF4 435.2

With the development of the railroad, new cities sprang up along the traveled way, with mail and express service paralleling as permanent institutions. West of the Mississippi large territories were assigned as Indian reserves by government treaty, and the wilderness frontier was gradually pushed farther to the West. The great Mississippi Valley boom was at its peak in 1837, and land sales were at their best. A stream of farmers and miners spread westward, and Michigan became a State in 1837.PFF4 436.1