orseback,--for
there were no steam cars,--crossed the Mississippi River, he could
hardly find a white man outside what was then the little town of St.
Louis. The country stretched away west for more than a thousand miles,
with nothing in it but wild beasts and Indians. In much of it there
were no trees, no houses, no human beings. If you shouted as hard
as you could in that solitary land, the only reply you would hear
would be the echo of your own voice; it was like shouting in an empty
room--it made it seem lonelier than ever.

[Footnote 1: See map in paragraph 140.]

192. Emigration to the west, and the man who helped that
emigration.--But during the last hundred years that great empty land
of the far west has been filling up with people. Thousands upon
thousands of emigrants have gone there. They have built towns and
cities and railroads and telegraph lines. Thousands more are going
and will go. What has made such a wonderful change? Well, one man
helped to do a great deal toward it. His name was Robert Fulton. He
saw how difficult it was for people to get west; for if emigrants
wanted to go with their families in wagons, they had to chop roads
through the forest. That was slow, hard work. Fulton found a way that
was quick, easy, and cheap. Let us see who he was, and how he found
that way.

193. Robert Fulton's boyhood; the old scow; what Robert did for his
mother.--Robert Fulton was the son of a poor Irish farmer in
Pennsylvania.[2] He did not care much for books, but liked to draw
pictures with pencils which he hammered out of pieces of lead.

Like most boys, he was fond of fishing. He used to go out in an old
scow, or flat-bottomed boat, on a river near his home. He and another
boy would push the scow along with poles. But Robert said, There is
an easier way to make this boat go. I can put a pair of paddle-wheels
on her, and then we can sit comfortably on the seat and turn the wheels
by a crank. He tried it, and found that he was right. The boys now
had a boat which suited them exactly.

[Illustration: ROBERT FULTON'S PADDLE-WHEEL SCOW.]

When Robert was seventeen, he went to Philadelphia. His father was
dead, and he earned his living and helped his mother and sisters,
by painting pictures. He staid in Philadelphia until he was
twenty-one. By that time he had saved up money enough to buy a small
farm for his mother, so that she might have a home of her own.

[Footnote 2: Fulton was born in Little Brit