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Show 4537 Freeman- D 2556 rivers of the United States and Canada. Previously I had had some experience with the Yukon. If you care to have those specified in detail I will do it. Q. There are one or two I would like to have you mention in detail. Suppose you mention those rivers which have been great trade routes in the United States which you have been on. A. That was touched on quite intimately in my book that I completed two or three years ago called Waterways of Western Wanderings. After voyaging the Ohio, then the Mississippi from the source to the mouth, then the Yellowstone from the Mississippi to New Orleans, I endeavored to record the way in which the early pioneers crossed the Alleghanies to the forks of the Ohio where the Allegheny and Monongahela come together; Washington's early surveying there; the first voyages of the South; the way the Ohio route was used, first by the explorers then as a battleground of the Indians in the French and Indian wars and the Revolution, and finally as a commercial route for the settlements, then as the settlements pushed beyond the Missouri how they still used the Ohio and went down the Mississippi, then used the Missouri up stream following the route of Lewis and Clark, and finally down the Columbia on the other side. The inevitable route has been the river and I was traveling it for its light on earlier history. |