Cumberland and Fort Necessity and Braddock's grave to the
Monongahela. The man, now at the height of his fame, is retracing
the trails of his boyhood--covering ground over which he had
passed as a young officer in the last English and French war--but
he is seeing the land in so much larger perspective that,
although his diary is voluminous, the reader of those pages would
not know that Washington had been this way before. Concerning
Great Meadows, where he first saw the "bright face of danger" and
which he once described gleefully as "a charming place for an
encounter," he now significantly remarks: "The upland, East of
the meadow, is good for grain." Changed are the ardent dreams
that filled the young man's heart when he wrote to his mother
from this region that singing bullets "have truly a charming
sound." Today, as he looks upon the flow of Youghiogheny, he sees
it reaching out its finger tips to Potomac's tributaries. He
perceives a similar movement all along the chain of the
Alleghanies: on the west are the Great Lakes and the Ohio, and
reaching out towards them from the east, waiting to be joined by
portage road and canal, are the Hudson, the Susquehanna, the
Potomac, and the James. He foresees these streams bearing to the
Atlantic ports the golden produce of the interior and carrying
back to the interior the manufactured goods of the seaboard. He
foresees the Republic becoming homogeneous, rich, and happy.
"Open ALL the communication which nature has afforded," he wrote
Henry Lee, "between the Atlantic States and the Western
territory, and encourage the use of them to the utmost...and
sure I am there is no other tie by which they will long form a
link in the chain of Federal Union."

Crude as were the material methods by which Washington hoped to