A hundred years ago (1809) one Nicholas Roosevelt, commissioned of Robert
Fulton (the inventor of the steamboat) and others, was sent to Pittsburgh
to build the first steamboat to be launched in western waters. So
confident was this young man of the success of steamboat navigation of the
Ohio and Mississippi that, on his journey of inspection, he purchased
coal-mines along the way and arranged to have the coal piled up on the
river bank against the time of its need by boats whose keels had not been
laid and whose existence even depended upon the approval of eastern
capitalists. It suggests the prevision of the nephew, Theodore Roosevelt,
in making provision for the coaling of ships in the east long before the
Spanish War was in sight. I was on the Marquette-Joliet portage the very
day that this same nephew was predicting with like confidence to the
people of St. Louis that the Mississippi would be deepened till from the
lakes to the gulf it should be a course for seagoing vessels. Champlain
suggested the Panama Canal three hundred years before its building.
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