PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE
Kentucky on the Ohio River. By 1800 two-hundred thousand migrants had passed westward through the Cumberland Gap Within the vast Ohio watershed, rivers were prime conduits for migration and commerce, and during the 1780s farmers, adept at building homes and boats with little more than an axe, built flatboats and began transporting agricultural products down the Ohio River to the Mississippi and beyond. Of note, the Ohio Company pioneers who founded Marietta in 1788 were each required to carry a musket, a bayonet, six flints, powder horn and pouch, priming wire and brush, half pound of powder, one pound of musket balls and a pound of buckshot. Also, one 30-pound pack, one hoe, and one axe to be carried in the company wagon. (McCullough, 2019, 33)
Fig. 17.
Ohio River Flatboat
Commercial production of flatboats soon followed, and Brownsville, Elizabethtown (future Elizabeth) on the Monongahela and Pittsburgh at the origin of the Ohio became major boat- building centers from which migrants could float down-river to the west with their families, farm animals, and possessions. On its 981-mile flow west from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi the Ohio River passed by the Cincinnati Ohio settlement and ‘Falls of the Ohio’ below Louisville Kentucky, while providing the border between Ohio, Indiana and Illinois to the north and Virginia (future West Virginia) and Kentucky to the south. The rapids below Louisville dropped 24 feet over two miles and were the major impediment to traffic on the Ohio. This was not considered insurmountable by enterprising early settlers and Steven Devol built his first square-rigger up-river at Marietta in 1800, the 110-ton brig St Clair , which Revolutionary War hero Commodore Abraham Whipple then
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