. The story of agriculture in the United States. ening came they camped by the roadside, where theyvisited after supper, laughing over the adventures andhardships of the journey. Sometimes bands of moverswith long pack-trains of horses filed along the valleyssouth of Pennsylvania and Maryland until they reachedWatauga; and from here they passed by the WildernessRoad through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. Thedistance from Philadelphia to Louisville by this route wasabout 825 miles. When the Ohio River was reached, or the TennesseeRiver in the south, the journey was quite apt to be con-tinued by
. The story of agriculture in the United States. ening came they camped by the roadside, where theyvisited after supper, laughing over the adventures andhardships of the journey. Sometimes bands of moverswith long pack-trains of horses filed along the valleyssouth of Pennsylvania and Maryland until they reachedWatauga; and from here they passed by the WildernessRoad through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. Thedistance from Philadelphia to Louisville by this route wasabout 825 miles. When the Ohio River was reached, or the TennesseeRiver in the south, the journey was quite apt to be con-tinued by water. The single traveller in search of a PIONEER FARMERS OF THE WEST 107 location to which he would later bring his family mightgo down the river in a canoe or in a pirogue —a hol-lowed-out log. Others took their chances of wreck andof Indian attack on a raft. But most of those whomoved goods and famihes did so in a kind of flatboatknown as an ark. This was from thirty to fifty feetin length and ten or fifteen feet wide. It was roofed over,. A Flatboat except at one end. At both prow and stern were oarsmento guide the craft away from logs and sandbars, keepingit in the current, where it floated at the rate of a few milesan hour. Leaving the Ohio River at some convenient point, thetravellers went overland to their new location, or upsome smaller stream into Kentucky on the south or Ohioon the north. For this purpose a keel boat was used,long and narrow and propelled against the current bymen with poles. At some times the numbers of those who thus travelledwestward were larger than at others. After the Revolu-tion, hard times in the East led many to seek their for- io8 AGRICULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES tunes in the West. So, too, at the time of the Embargo(1807-9) and the War of 1812, when Eastern farmers hadless sale abroad than formerly for their products, thou-sands took this way of finding a better living. Soon theUnited States government saw the necessity of making
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectagriculture, bookyear
