survey near Newport a scene
full of meaning to one who has a taste for history. Traveling along the
heights on the highway that was once the red man's trail, he can enjoy
a wide prospect from this vantage point. Deep in the valley glitters
the little Juniata, route of the ancient canoe and the blundering barge.
Beside it lies a long lagoon, an abandoned portion of the Pennsylvania
Canal. Beside this again, as though some monster had passed leaving
a track clear of trees, stretches the right of way of the first
"Pennsylvania," and a little nearer swings the magnificent
double-tracked bed of the railroad of today. Between these lines of
travel may be read the history of the past two centuries of American
commerce, for the vital factors in the development of the nation have
been the evolution of transportation and its manifold and far-reaching
influence upon the expansion of population and commerce and upon the
rise of new industries.

Thus all the rivals in the great contest for the trade of the West
speedily reached their goal, New York with the Erie and the New York
Central, and Pennsylvania and Maryland with the Pennsylvania and the
Baltimore and Ohio. But what of this West for whose commerce the great
struggle was being waged? When the railheads of these eager Atlantic
promoters were laid down at Buffalo on Lake Erie and at Pittsburgh on
the Ohio they looked out on a new world. The centaurs of the Western
rivers were no less things of the far past than the tinkling bells borne
by the ancient ponies of the pack-horse trade. The sons of this new
West had their eyes riveted on the commerce of the Great Lakes and the
Mississippi Valley. With road, canal, steamboat, and railway, they were
renewing the struggle of their fathers but for prizes greater than their
fathers ever knew.

New York again proved the favored State. Her Mohawk pathway gave her
easiest access to the West and here, at her back door on the Niagara
frontier, lay her path by way of the Great Lakes to the North and the
Northwest.

CHAPTER X. As one stands in imagination at the early railheads of
the West--on the Ohio River at the end of the Cumberland Road, or at
Buffalo, the terminus of the Erie Canal--the vision which Washington
caught breaks upon him and the dream of a nation made strong by
trans-Alleghany routes of commerce. Link by link the great interior is
being connected with the sea. Behind him all lines of transportation
lead eastward to t