John Fitch was born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1743.  At the age of five, while his father was absent from home, courting his stepmother, he heroically extinguished a fire of blazing flax, which would otherwise have consumed the house, and while he was smarting from his burns was cruelly beaten by an elder brother, who misapprehended the case of the little boy, very much as the world did that of the man he became.  The domestic discipline he encountered under the paternal roof was of the severest New England pattern of those days, and between its theology and its economy he grew out of shape, like a thrifty pumpkin between two rocks.  He loved to learn, but had few books and little schooling.  His taste tended to mechanism, and he was apprenticed to a stingy clock-maker, who obliged him to work on his farm and kept him ignorant of his trade.  Getting his liberty at last, he set up brass-founding, on a capital of twenty shillings, and made money at it.  Then he went into the manufacture of potash, in which he was less successful.  He married a wife who proved more caustic than the potash and more than a match for his patience.  He settled his affairs so as to leave her all his little property in the most manageable shape, and left her with two children, to seek a separate fortune in the wide world.  The war of the Revolution found him at Trenton, New Jersey, a man of some substance, acquired as a silversmith and peddler of silver and brass sleeve-buttons of his own manufacture.  It made him an officer and then an armorer in the Continental service.  As a fabricator of patriotic weapons, he incurred the displeasure of his Methodist brethren by working on the Sabbath, and lost his orthodoxy in his disgust at their rebukes.  Towards the close of the Revolution, getting poor in fact by getting rich in Continental money, he endeavored to save himself by investing in Virginia land-warrants, went to Kentucky as a surveyor, and became possessed of sixteen hundred acres of that wilderness.  On a second expedition down the Ohio, early in 1782, he fell into the hands of the savages, in the most melodramatic style, was led captive through the vast forests and swamps to Detroit, had a very characteristic and remarkable prison-experience under British authority at Prison Island, was exchanged, and by a sea-voyage reached his home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, at the close of the same year.  Immediately after the establishment of peace, he formed a company to speculate in Ohio lands, and made extensive surveys for the purpose of forestalling the best locations.  Mr. Westcott’s book confuses this portion of his chronology by misprinting two or three dates, on the 113th page.  The hopeful game was spoiled by unexpected measures of the Confederated government; but Fitch’s explorations had deeply impressed him with the sublime character of the Western rivers, and when, in April, 1785, the thought first struck him that steam could easily make them navigable upwards