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single railway track. Who can believe that any portion of this Central West, covered with swamps and primeval forests, could have been so greatly prized a century and a quarter ago? Yet this was true. It was not the river front at Cincinnati, nor the lake shore at Cleveland or Chicago. These spots then could have been bought for the shortest songs—and what was in that day considered of priceless value could today be bought for $30 an acre. These were the portages between the Cuyahoga and the Muskingum, the Scioto and the Sandusky, the Maumee and the Wabash, etc. So all-important were these strips of land in the eyes of Washington, that by the famous Ordinance of 1787 they were voted by Congress "common highways and forever free." But this was one of Washington's most determined ambitions, that the headwaters of the Virginia rivers and the headwaters of the Ohio rivers, both north and south, should be surveyed and made ready for the century when the West should pour its riches toward the Atlantic seaboard. "The navigation of the Ohio," he wrote in 1784 to General Harrison, "being well