%199.  A Steamboat on the Delaware.%—­Rude as this means of travel seems to us, the men of 1790 were quite satisfied with it, and absolutely refused to make use of a better one.  Had you been in Philadelphia during the summer of 1790 and taken up a copy of The Pennsylvania Packet, you could not have failed to notice this advertisement of the first successful steamboat in the world: 

     %The Steam-Boat

Is now ready to take Passengers, and is intended to set off from Arch Street Ferry in Philadelphia every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for Burlington, Bristol, Bordentown and Trenton, to return on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays—­Price for Passengers, 2/6 to Burlington and Bristol, 3/9 to Bordentown, 5/. to Trenton.  June 14. tu.th ftf.%

This boat was the invention of John Fitch, and from June to September ran up and down the Delaware; but so few people went on it that he could not pay expenses, and the boat was withdrawn.

%200.  To the Great West.%—­From Philadelphia went out one of the great highways to what was then the far West, but to what we now know as the valley of the Ohio.  The traveler who to-day makes the journey from Philadelphia to Pittsburg is whisked on a railroad car through an endless succession of cities and villages and rich farms, and by great factories and mills and iron works, which in the days of Washington had no existence.  He makes the journey easily between sunrise and sunset.  In 1790 he could not have made it in twelve days.

%201.  Towns beyond the Alleghany Mountains.%—­Though the country between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi had been closed to settlement from 1763 to 1776 by the King’s proclamation, it was by no means without population in 1790.  At Detroit and Kaskaskia and Vincennes were old French settlements, made long before France was driven out of Louisiana.  But there were others of later date.  The hardy frontiersman of 1763 cared no more for the King’s proclamation than he did for the bark of the wolf at his cabin door.  The ink with which the document was written had not dried before emigrants from Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania were hurrying into the valley of the Monongahela.

In 1769 William Bean crossed the mountains from North Carolina, and, building a cabin on the banks of Watauga Creek, began the settlement of Tennessee.  James Robertson and a host of others followed in 1770, and soon the valleys of the Clinch and the Holston were dotted with cabins.  In 1769 Daniel Boone, one of the grandest figures in frontier history, began his exploits in what is now Kentucky, and before 1777 Boonesboro, Harrodsburg, and Lexington were founded.

[Illustration:  %Model of Fitch’s steamboat%[l]]

[Footnote 1:  Now in the National Museum, Washington.]