the Ohio in low-water months was exasperatingly slow. One pilgrim to Ohio spent ninety days en route from Killingly, Connecticut, to Marietta, Ohio—thirty-one of them being spent in getting from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, down the Monongahela and Ohio to Marietta! The journey from Connecticut in a cart drawn by oxen to the Monongahela took but twice the time needed to come down the rivers to Marietta on a "Kentucky" flatboat![1] With high-water, and going down stream, a hundred miles a day could be covered.[2]
That the first pioneers into the interior of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana preferred land routes to water is plain to the most casual reader of the history of the pioneer period. Such great entrepots as Wellsburg, Ohio, Limestone, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana (all on the Ohio), attest the fact that the travel to the interior was by land routes and not by the smaller rivers.
And so, throughout historic times, one rule has held true in the region now under
