PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE
The great American river migration was well established by 1820. It is impressive that the two great American stories of river (Ohio River) and land (Oregon Trail) migration would be overlapped by the great 19 th century ocean (Atlantic) migration from Europe to North America of over five million souls - all prior to the 1861-65 American Civil War. The first river steamboat was built at Pittsburgh in 1811 . Pittsburgh, along with Brownsville and Elizabethtown (Elizabeth) on the Monongahela, were already recognized as centers of flatboat construction. Pittsburgh, Louisville and Cincinnati subsequently became major centers of Mississippi River-style Steamboat production and, by 1835 , nearly 700 boats were built on the Ohio River. “In the early years of the steamboats and through the Civil War, the fastest and most efficient way of travel was waterways. Railroads were not plentiful, and good roads were hard to build and maintain”. (Engstrom, 2005)
Fig. 19. Cincinnati on the Ohio, 1800, by A. J. Swing – consisted of about 30 buildings and a population of 750 Public Domain American author Rinker Buck had much to say about the impact of this early American migration. “As much as the writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or, say, Andrew Jackson’s bank war in the 1830s, it was the inland rivers that formed America during its first, seminal burst of growth. During the early decades of the 19 th century, the massive flatboat traffic down the Ohio and the Mississippi established the westward drive and political outlook that eventually allowed America to straddle the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This riverine movement began a half century before the more celebrated era of the ‘pioneers’ crossing the western plains in covered wagons in the 1850s” (Buck, 2022). “The rivers also carried a much larger migration. During the first five decades of the 19 th century, more than 3,000,000 migrants ventured down the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys to the swelling southwestern frontier. In the 1840s and 1850s, a comparative trickle – fewer than 500,000 travelers – crossed the plains west of the Missouri River by overland routes, primarily the Oregon and California trails. Still the dusty journey via covered wagon remains
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