river, leaving Louisville far down stream. When incredulity was conquered, they were filled with delight and admiration. After a ride of a few miles up the river, the "New Orleans" returned to her anchorage.

As there was not a sufficient depth of water on the Falls of the Ohio to permit a safe passage downward, it was determined to surprise Cincinnati by returning to that city. This was done, and the reception was even more enthusiastic than that of a few days before. The first was marked by universal incredulity as to the future of steamboat navigation, the second by unbounded confidence in Mr. Roosevelt and his predictions. With a rise in the river, the "New Orleans" proceeded to her destination. She entered the New Orleans and Natchez trade and never returned to the Ohio River.

Other steamboats were constructed, now that the great fact had been demonstrated. The whole phase of trade on Western waters was changed, and instead of the Ohio merchants and farmers shipping their cargoes of thirty tons in keelboats, they were forwarded in steamboats of four hundred tons burden. This gave a new touch of increased vigor to domestic commerce, and an era of progress was clearly started that would soon place Ohio and her people in the forefront of Western development.

CHAPTER VI.

THE OPERATIONS OF AARON BURR IN OHIO

N the year 1805 Aaron Burr made his first visit to the West. It was the beginning of one of the most wrangled over and absorbing incidents in American history. For more than a century, historians and partisans have disputed over his plans and intentions. The State of Ohio was a conspicuous theater of his schemes, and some of her most distinguished citizens were important characters in connection with his so-called conspiracy. It is not the purpose in these pages to enter into the merits of this dramatic incident in the picturesque life of Aaron Burr. It will be helpful, however, to a full understanding of his operations in Ohio, to know something of the man, his career, and the events in connection with his sensational movement.

When Aaron Burr stepped from the high office of the Vice-Presidency of the United States and started for the West, he was just past his forty-ninth year. He was in the zenith of his intellectual vigor, and had closed a career in public life allotted to but few men in the Nation's history. Fame, flattery, power, honors and obloquy had been heaped upon him in a superlative degree. An outcast in politics, hated by his enemies and rejected by his own party, he turned his organizing genius to new fields, and out of his brain came visions and schemes that inseparably connect his name with one of the most disturbing events in our pioneer period.

Burr's forbears were of the best, and he had back of him a blue-blooded New England lineage. His grandfather on his mother's side, was Jonathan Edwards, the distinguished New England divine and the first

American theologian of his time. Jonathan Edwards, himself, could trace his ancestry direct to Alfred the Great.

His father was the Reverend Aaron Burr, D.D., also a noted divine and president of Princeton College. The Burrs were distinguished in the colonial history of Connecticut. Colonel Andrew Burr, a collateral ancestor, was at the capture of Louisburg in 1745. Peter Burr, another ancestor, was Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut and one of the early graduates of Harvard College. Another, Samuel Burr, graduated from Harvard in 1697 and became the head of the famous Grammar School at Charlestown, Massachusetts. And still another, John Burr, ranks as the founder of the school system of Connecticut. Aaron Burr's troubles commenced early in life; before he was two years old, he had lost father, mother and grandparents, and thus orphaned and alone, he with his little sister, was taken to raise by his uncle Timothy Edwards. This uncle was a strict and gloomy Puritan, living always in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and thus, in the formative period of his life, young Burr, deprived of the love of a mother and the warm companionship of a father, grew up in an atmosphere of coldness, inappreciation and formality. The frank and impulsive spirit of boyhood was absent and he became old before his time. Much of the defective character of his manhood can be attributed to his barren child life.

The ample estate of his father furnished him an education, and at the age of sixteen he graduated with honors from Princeton. For a year after his