The National Road

The lack of easy and cheap transportation was a huge obstacle to western development.  The settlers found if difficult to reach their new homes.  Once there, supplies of salt, iron, hardware, fabrics, and food stuffs could be obtained only at great expense from the East.

The farmers produced maize, wheat, meats, and livestock, but these left little profit margin after the cost of getting the product to market.  It required a month to carry goods from central Ohio to Baltimore.  By 1820 three thousand wagons passed back and forth carrying western merchandise valued at 18 million dollars.

Internal improvements had to be made.  Indian trails became rough pioneer roadways, then developed into turnpikes.  Long before the War of 1812, Jefferson and other statesmen conceived of a great highway connecting the seaboard with the interior.When Ohio became a state in 1802, five percent of the sale of public lands were designated for building roads extending eastward.  In 1811, the greatest undertaking of its kind in the history of America began with 10 million dollars.

The Cumberland Road, known to settlers as the National Road, started at Cumberland, Maryland and pushed through the Alleghenies to Wheeling, West Virginia.  John McAdam of England developed the method of construction - laying crushed limestone over a prepared road bed in three layers, each layer packed down by traffic before the next was laid.  Curved to provide drainage in areas where spring rains were known to cause flooding, it worked well.

When it was proposed to extend further west to Indiana and Illinois by means of tolls, opinions raged.  Upkeep would be paid by the tolls, even extending roads to the north and south eventually.  While legal and constitutional battles went on, so did construction.  Columbus, Ohio in 1833,  Indianapolis in 1840, finally to Vandalia, Illinois.  Plans to take it to Jefferson City, Missouri were never completed. 

Cost was originally $10,000 a mile but became $13,000 a mile from West Virginia onward.  Until 1860 the National Road was a busy thoroughfare.  Lined with hospitable farmhouses and fast-growing towns, hardly a day passed without several covered wagons going by.  Citizens gathered to hear the travelers stories, news from the big Eastern cities like New York and Washington, even gossip from the next county.   The taverns and road houses offered a respite from travel and provided food and lodging.    Once the railroads and steamboats came, travel was easier and these small towns  faded from history, but in some parts of the rural Midwest you can still travel on what once was the iconic National Road that was so much a part of American history.

Next time...The Steamboat
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On May 27, 1831, Jedediah Smith, one of the nation's most important trapper-explorers is killed by Comanche Indians on the Santa Fe Trail.  Smith's role in opening the Far West was not fully appreciated until his far-ranging journeys were documented.  He "filled in the blanks" on many of the early explorers maps and gave a picture of the America West before it was settled.

It's My Town!

For years there had been rumors that Joseph Smith espoused polygamy in the church, and by the early 1840s everyone in the Nauvoo community believed that Smith and his inner circle had cast off monogamy on the basis of a "revelation from God".  Within his own community controversy raged over the sanction of polygamy and division was in the air.  Outside the community, tongues wagged with disapproval, and many with questionable morals of their own, expressed outrage at the desecration of the American family.

In 1844, despite (or to spite) the opinions of those around him, Smith announced his candidacy for the office of President of the United States.  (Can you imagine the media circus today?  Sure we can!)  In June a small group of dissenters published the Nauvoo Expositor which challenged the doctrine of polygamy, charged Smith with unethical financial practices and derided him for his aspirations for national leadership.

In response to the newspaper, the Nauvoo City Council ordered the press destroyed as a public nuisance.  Smith (the Mayor) sent the city marshal to do just that.  The newspaper's editors fled to the county seat of Carthage and spread the word of the violation of the freedom of the press. (Sounds familiar) Throughout Illinois, editors and speakers painted Smith as a tyrant, destroying the Constitution.  They cursed his followers as "libertines."  Mobs formed to demand the governor disperse the Mormons and arrest their leader. 

Smith placed Nauvoo under martial law and told his troops, "my sword is unsheathed in a determination that the people shall have rights."  Surrounding communities became fearful of their own safety, the Governor mobilized the states' militia and Smith prepared to flee to the West. 
In the end, however, he ordered his men to disarm and then surrendered, along with his brother Hyrum and five other church leaders, to the authorities in Carthage. 

Next time...The Conclusion of the Suffering of Zion
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On this Day in Pioneer History: "On June 5, 1922, the discoverer of Klondike gold, George W. Carmack, dies.  Carmack was the first to discover gold along the Klondike River in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1896.  He died at the age of 61 a wealthy man.

The Suffering of Zion - Part 1

In 1830, Joseph Smith and five followers founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints near Palmyra, New York.  Smith had built the church from nothing, dispatched missionaries throughout America and into Europe and gathered thousands to worship God and build Zion in the New World.

In Nauvoo, Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi River, the church turned a swamp land into one of the state's most populous and prosperous cities of the 1830s.  The "Saints" as they called themselves created an ideal society where no one went hungry or barefoot, where no one was illiterate or a prisoner.  That success made them a target for outsiders who were called "Gentiles" by the church.  The church claimed God favored them over the non-Mormons.  They lived in communal type of groups and they were strongly anti-slavery.  All of these roused bitter hatred of the people they lived around them. 

In Missouri, they were tarred and feathered, threatened with castration and generally harassed.  In 1838 the governor of Missouri called out the militia against them asserting that "they must be treated like enemies and exterminated or driven out of the state."  The church went back to Illinois where Smith drafted a charter establishing an independent theocracy in Nauvoo.  On June 24, 1844, Smith conferred for the last time with followers - by nightfall he and six others had turned themselves over to authorities to avoid the local mob's threat of mass slaughter.  Smith's charges were treason.

Next time...Polygamy?

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Today in Pioneer History:  "On May 22, 1843, a massive wagon train, made up of 1,000 settlers and 1,000 head of cattle, sets off down the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri. Known as the "Great Emigration," the expedition came two years after the first modest party of settlers made the long, overland journey to Oregon.