review; the keel-boat meant more than canoe or pirogue, the barge or flat-boat more than the keel-boat, the brig and schooner more than the barge, and the steamboat far more than all preceding species. We affirmed that the change of craft on our rivers was more rapid than on land, because of the earlier adaptation of steam to vessels than to vehicles. But it is in point here to observe that, slow as were the changes on land, they were equally significant. The day of the freighter and the corduroy road was a brighter day for the expanding nation than that of the pack-horse and the bridle-path. The cost of shipping freight by pack-horses was tremendous. In 1794, during the Whiskey Insurrection in western Pennsylvania, the cost of shipping goods to Pittsburg by wagon ranged from five to ten dollars per hundred pounds; salt sold for five dollars a bushel, and iron and steel from fifteen to twenty cents per pound in Pittsburg. What must have been the price when one horse carried only from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty pounds? The freighter represented a
