This refusal of the thickly populated Eastern States, which had been
largely the source of supply in the Revolutionary War, to furnish their
share of soldiery, threw the brunt of the Canadian expeditions upon
the south-western sections, and thus contributed to the Union in another
and less evident manner. The volunteers from those trans-Allegheny
regions would never forget the hardships of their journeys through the
roadless North-west. Frontier militiamen, who hewed their way through
pathless woods and subsisted on roots and berries because there were
no roads on which to bring supplies; officers, who guided their commands
to streams and found them too small in midsummer, when most needed,
to transport their troops; artificers, who built boats on the Great
Lakes and could not get armaments to them,--these men were unlikely
to allow constitutional objections to lie in the way of future
improvements in the Western Territories. They placed the blame for the
failure of the campaigns in those parts to lack of means of
communication. The freshly cut military roads were strewn with the
ruins of flour-barrels, cordage, and various equipment, abandoned in
transit.
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