The community at Beverly was a very intelligent one, composed mainly of settlers from Massachusetts on the Ohio Company's purchase. The valley of the Muskingum is exceedingly fertile, but it is comparatively narrow and confined by picturesque hills and ridges, broken by water courses. The settlements were mostly in the valley, for the hill lands were rough, covered by poor soil, and were occupied chiefly for grazing. The portion of the valley at Beverly, and south of it, was singularly fertile and pleasing, and very valuable. Its owners and occupants were mostly of New England birth and descent. Their productions had a ready market down the river, and in that age, before railroads, the valley had a great advantage in transportation and supplies over the interior parts of the state. The people were, as a rule, educated in good schools, and they had a college at Marietta and a female college at Zanesville. The proposed improvement of the Muskingum, they believed, would give them another advantage, by securing them water of a depth sufficient for boats in the dry seasons of the year, as well as during the "freshets," which they then had to depend upon, but which at best were not very reliable in their habits, as I found to my cost. This was to be corrected by the "improvement," which, in their delusive hope, was to give them cheap water transportation all the year around. At that time railroads were in their infancy. They have since practically destroyed or crippled all internal navigation on inland rivers, reaching their iron arms over the United States, traversing north and south, east and west--a vast gridiron of roads, in value greater than the market value of all the land in the United States in 1837. Before the first railroad was built in Ohio the Muskingum improvement was completed, but it proved to be a bad investment. The canals of Ohio and this improvement were, perhaps, the necessary forerunner of the railroads to come, but the money expended on them was practically lost. And I believe that the experiment now being made by the United States in the improvement of the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers will end in a like result on a grander scale. By the demolition of the forests which covered this great valley, the supply and distribution of the waters and rivers in this region will be so diminished at certain seasons as to render these water- ways worthless for navigation. Engineers may make dams that will hold water and locks that may lift a steamboat, but if the clearing away of forests prevents the usual fall of rain and causes its absorption into the earth, and if the dispersion of water by its use and waste in cities, are to continue, the dam will not be filled, and the lock will be like a stranded vessel, fit only as a quarry for cut stone, or for a railway arch over a street of asphalt in a growing city. Captain Fearing railed against the steamboats as many now inveigh against the railroads, but these