who have been its controlling spirits since their entrance. Of these the rivermen were a part, moved by one and the same force politically. Some were of the North and some came up from the South, and they wrangled for years over the problems solved by the Civil War.
But now, turning specifically to our classification, let us glance at the first generation of Ohio rivermen: those who knew these waters before and during Revolutionary days. At the outset it is clear that their tasks are as strange to us as the sights upon which their eyes feasted and the sounds which day and night were sounding in their ears. They were engaged in the only trade known in the valley then—the fur trade. At about midsummer, or a little earlier, the fur trade of the entire Ohio Basin focused at the mouth of the Monongahela for transportation to Philadelphia and Baltimore or on the lower Ohio for shipment by canoe down the Ohio and Mississippi. When the curtain of actual history arose on the Ohio River, the fur traders formed the motley background in the drama in which Céloron, Contrecœur,
