comforting to think there has been some improvement in our country highways. Such accounts as this would have a tendency to influence the most skeptical.
The rivers were also great highways for emigration, particularly such streams as the Ohio which flowed west. With the building of the great canals new and more stable methods of travel were at the disposal of prospective travelers and there was an increase in the great tide of homeseekers. The smaller inland rivers were not likely so largely used by these armies of pioneers as some have thought. For instance, in a history of one of the interior counties of Ohio (which is divided by one of the best rivers in the West) is a twenty-five page description of the first immigrants, and of only one does it say: "James Oglesby was a very early settler . . . and is said to have traveled up the Muskingum and Walhounding rivers in true Indian style in a canoe." And, though the Ohio river was always a great highway to the West and Southwest, it was used less perhaps in the early days of the immigration than later. Flat and keel boats
