Excerpt from The Wabash Trade Route in the Development of the Old Northwest Artificial and natural waterways have exerted a definite influence in the history of the Old Northwest. They have promoted and directed the westward movement of population and made possible the development of its resources. The advantages which the waterways offered to commerce stimulated settlement along their shores. When supplemented by Indian trails and later by white men's turnpikes, these trade routes formed a network fairly covering the region. The measurement of this factor in the history of the Old Northwest has been the general object of this research, though as a contribution to the subject the present paper has been limited to an intensive study of one only of the main waterways. During the period of French, British, and American occupation of the Northwest territory, the Wabash route was one of the natural waterways from the lakes to the Mississippi river. The principal links in this chain were Lake Erie, the Miami river, the Wabash river, with the portage connecting them, and the Ohio river. Later, after state governments had been established in this region, a canal known as the Wabash and Erie canal paralleled the earlier natural waterway from Lake Erie to the Ohio river. Such is, in brief, the scope of this inquiry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.