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, Contrecoeur, Villiers, Washington, and Gist stood out clearly in the dark foreground. Céloron found them here and there in 1750 and sent them back to Virginia with a sharp letter to Governor Dinwiddie. Indeed it was these first rivermen who floated on the Ohio in canoes laden with peltry who brought on apace the Old French War. Nominally, of course, it was that quota of one hundred families with which the Ohio Company promised to people its two hundred thousand acre grant between the Monongahela and Kanawha Rivers which alarmed the Quebec government; but in reality it was the Virginia and Pennsylvania fur traders in whose canoes thousands of dollars' worth of beaver skins were being kept from the St. Lawrence. From village to village these traders passed, securing from the natives their plunder of river and forest. In their long canoes the packs were carefully deposited, and payment was made in goods, of which ammunition and fire-arms were of most worth. Though these were the first rivermen, they as frequently came by land as by water. But, when in their canoes, they were the first to ply the western rivers. They, first of white men, learned the old-time riffles--many of which became known to millions by the names these first _voyageurs_ gave them. They knew islands which have long since passed from sight; they knew the old licks and the old trails. They practiced the lost arts of the woodsman; they had eyes and ears of which their successors in these valleys do not know. They did not become white Indians for, it would seem, they did not mingle as closely with the red-men as did the French; but they became exceedingly proficient in the Indian's woodland wisdom. Browned by the sun and hardened by wind and rain and snow they were a strong race of men; they could paddle or walk the entire day with little fatigue. Yet their day's work was not such usually that it made mere brute machines of them. Not as boisterous as the French on the Great Lakes and their tributaries, these first Americans in the West were yet a buoyant crew; there were songs to be sung as the canoe glided speedily along beneath