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Findlay's attention." In the comprehensive designs of Henderson, now a judge, for securing a "graphic report of the trans-Alleghany region in behalf of his land company", Boone divined the means of securing the financial backing for an expedition of considerable size and ample equipment.
The sequence, which did not occur to me until I read recently the diary of that trans-Alleghany journey, gives Washington a new, if a homelier, majesty. Napoleon the Great has spoken his praise of Washington as a general. Many of our own historians agree that it is very doubtful if without Washington the struggle for independence would have succeeded. Other men were important.
There was little indeed that the Westerners could do to help the cause of the eastern patriots, and most of them, if left alone, would have been only distant spectators of the conflict. But orders given to the British agents and commanders called for the ravaging of the trans-Alleghany country; and as a consequence the West became an important theater of hostilities.
By 1854, this line, the Erie, the New York Central and the Baltimore and Ohio all reached the Ohio River or Lake Erie. During the next six years these four lines took over two-thirds of the flour traffic and practically all the merchandise and live-stock traffic between the eastern cities and the trans-Alleghany region, leaving to the Erie Canal the forest products and grain.
Any history of any Indian inroad will give examples such as I have mentioned above. See McAfee MSS., John P. Hale's "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers," De Haas' "Indian Wars," Wither's "Border War," etc.
Two land companies, organized almost simultaneously, actively promoted the preliminaries necessary to settlement, despatching parties under expert leadership to discover the passes through the mountains and to locate the best land in the trans-Alleghany.
The war was thus another and important link in the chain of events by which the west was won; and had any link in the chain snapped during these early years, the peace of 1783 would probably have seen the trans-Alleghany country in the hands of a non-American power. Mr.
The elaborate and detailed information brought back by Henry Scaggs exerted an appreciable influence, no doubt, in accelerating the plans of Richard Henderson and Company for the acquisition and colonization of the trans-Alleghany. But while the "Long Hunters" were in Tennessee and Kentucky the same region was being more extensively and systematically explored by Daniel Boone.
Nowhere outside of the trans-Alleghany country would the rise of a Lincoln have been possible. While the Ohio country the lower half of the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois was throwing off its frontier character, the remoter Northwest was still a wilderness frequented only by fur-traders and daring explorers.
Dunmore in his speech enumerates 19 men, women, and children who had been killed by the Indians in 1771, '72, and '73, and these were but a small fraction of the whole. "This was before a drop of Shawnee blood was shed." "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers," p. 262, gives an example that happened in 1772. "Am. Archives," IV., Vol. I. Letter of Col. Wm. Preston, Aug. 13, 1774.
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