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Alleghenies, Washington, at the close of the Revolution, gave himself wholly up to this commercial problem. Before peace was declared he left the Continental camp at Newberg and made a long, dangerous tour up the Mohawk Valley, examining carefully the portages to Wood Creek at Rome, and to Lake Otsego at Canajoharie. With that far-sighted shrewdness which, of itself, made him a marked man, he felt that this route which avoided the mountains was the great rival of his Potomac River. Yet he was no narrow partisan. Returning from his tour he wrote Chevalier de Chastellux from Princeton, October 12, 1783: "Prompted by these actual observations, I could not help taking a more extensive view of the vast inland navigation of these United States and could not but be struck with the immense extent and importance of it, and with the goodness of that Providence, which has dealt its favors to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wisdom enough to improve them. I shall not rest contented, till I have explored the western country, and traversed those lines, or great part of them, which