"The vast inland navigation of these United States!" It is an
interesting fact that Washington should have had his first glimpse of
this vision from the strategic valley of the Mohawk, which was soon
to rival his beloved Potomac as an improved commercial route from the
seaboard to the West, and which was finally to achieve an unrivaled
superiority in the days of the Erie Canal and the Twentieth Century
Limited.

We may understand something of what the lure of the West meant to
Washington when we learn that in order to carry out his proposed journey
after the Revolution, he was compelled to refuse urgent invitations
to visit Europe and be the guest of France. "I found it indispensably
necessary," he writes, "to visit my Landed property West of the
Apalacheon Mountains.... One object of my journey being to obtain
information of the nearest and best communication between Eastern
& Western waters; & to facilitate as much as in me lay the Inland
Navigation of the Potomack."

On September 1, 1784, Washington set out from Mount Vernon on his
journey to the West. Even the least romantic mind must feel a thrill in
picturing this solitary horseman, the victor of Yorktown, threading the
trails of the Potomac, passing on by Cumberland and Fort Necessity and
Braddock's grave to the Monongahela. The man, now at the height of his
fame, is retracing the trails of his boyhood--covering ground over which
he had passed as a young officer in the last English and French war--but
he is seeing the land in so much larger perspective that, although
his diary is voluminous, the reader of those pages would not know that
Washington had been this way before. Concerning Great Meadows, where
he first saw the "bright face of danger" and which he once described
gleefully as "a charming place for an encounter," he now significantly
remarks: "The upland, East of the meadow, is good for grain." Changed
are the ardent dreams that filled the young man's heart when he wrote to
his mother from this region that singing bullets "have truly a charming
sound." Today, as he looks upon the flow of Youghiogheny, he sees it
reaching out its finger tips to Potomac's tributaries. He perceives a
similar movement all along the chain of the Alleghanies: on the west
are the Great Lakes and the Ohio, and reaching out towards them from the
east, waiting to be joined by portage road and canal, are the Hudson,
the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and the James. He foresees these st