til 1817 in less than a score of keel boats, which made the
voyage downstream from Louisville to New Orleans in about forty days,
and upstream in ninety. When, then, a steamboat succeeded in making a
return voyage in twenty-five days, it was hailed as an epoch-making
performance. In the next year twenty steamboats were competing for the
river traffic; and three years later (1820) seventy-two were in actual
service. Yet the steamboat did not drive the flatboat from the Western
rivers. So late as 1840 one fifth of the freight handled on the lower
Mississippi was carried in flatboats or barges.

The rapid rise of this internal commerce between the farmer of the
Northwest and the cotton planter of the South increased the ability of
both to purchase manufactures in the Eastern markets. Both sections had
wants which they could not supply by their simple household industries.
They had to import not only their farming implements, but most of those
articles, useful or ornamental, which were thought indispensable to a
higher civilization. "Spots in Tennessee, in Ohio, and Kentucky,"
comments an English traveler, "that within the lifetime of even young
men, witnessed only the arrow and the scalping knife, now present the
traveler with articles of elegance and modes of luxury which might rival
the displays of London and Paris." Most of this stock was transported
over the mountains from Philadelphia or Baltimore. In 1820, three
thousand wagons carried to Pittsburg, the distributing center of the
West, nearly eighteen million dollars' worth of merchandise.

The commercial interests of the East were quick to see the possibilities
of this new market. An eager rivalry sprang up between the merchants of
New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Everywhere ways and means of
cheaper transportation were discussed. In this subject the Western
farmer was vitally interested, for freight charges added nearly one
third to the cost of merchandise transported over the mountains. The
cotton planter of the Seaboard States, also, feeling the competition of
the Southwest, where riverways were abundant and easily navigable, saw
the need of better roads to tidewater, in order to lessen the cost of
marketing his produce.

The popular demand for better roads was not recent. All the States had
encouraged, directly or indirectly, the building of turnpikes and
bridges. Between 1793 and 1812, Pennsylvania had chartered fifty-five
turnpike companies, and other