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In 1834, an adventuresome man named Jesse Christman, who lived along the Lackawanna River, decided to go west. He had heard that the grass was much greener in Illinois than it ever was in Pennsylvania.
To get there, Christman decided to travel along the brand-new Pennsylvania Canal. He obtained a canal boat that was seven feet wide and 29 feet long. He named it the “Hit Or Miss,” and somehow persuaded his wife and more than a few relatives to go along.
In early October, the determined Christman set off down the North Branch Canal, headed toward Northumberland.
In all, Christman had 10 passengers as well as “the necessary requisites for the comforts of a family, to wit: beds, tables, chairs, stoves, cooking utensils, poultry, pigeons, etc., etc.,” according to a newspaper, the Hollidaysburg Aurora.
At Northumberland, the “Hit Or Miss” entered the main canal that coursed along the Susquehanna River’s west bank.
When the boat reached the Juniata River, Christman took the “Hit Or Miss” into the canal that went west along the Juniata. His plan was to sell the boat when he reached the end of the line – the Allegheny Mountain. He would use the new portage railroad to transport his family, poultry, furniture and baggage over the mountain. Once they had crossed over, he would figure out how to proceed on to Illinois.
The portage railroad, which had opened in March 1834, consisted of a series of stationary steam engines that used ropes to pull flatcars on rails up specially graded incline planes. Thirty-six miles long, it linked two towns on opposite sides of the mountain – Hollidaysburg on the east and Johnstown on the west.
But when Christman when he reached Hollidaysburg, he encountered John Dougherty, who was the proprietor of the Reliance Transportation Line.
Dougherty told Christman “that it would be practicable to pass the boat, together with the family and cargo, over the towering heights of the Allegheny Mountain and safely to land the same in the basin at Johnstown, whence they might proceed by water to St. Louis.”
Nothing quite like this had been attempted before, but Christman, clearly a risk-taker, readily agreed, and Dougherty prepared a railroad car that he thought would carry the “Hit Or Miss” over the mountain. The Hollidaysburg newspaper didn’t say how Christman persuaded his wife to go along with such an arrangement, but she did.
The next morning, the “Hit Or Miss” was hoisted out of the canal and onto the flatcar. By noontime, Christman and crew had clambered aboard the boat, ready for their elevated adventure.
“They began their progress over the rugged Allegheny,” a passenger wrote later. ” The whole family were comfortably located in the cabin of the boat, which appeared to glide up the heights.”
As some family members prepared supper, others “were lying on their downy pillow, occasionally aroused by the hissing of the steam from the engines at the head of the inclined plains,” the unidentified passenger wrote.
The Christman family spent the night on the summit, and in the morning descended the west side. As the passenger reported in an article printed in the Hollidaysburg newspaper:
“On Tuesday, our boat and crew left the sunny summit of the Allegheny and smoothly glided her iron way to Johnstown, where she astonished the natives. She was safely deposited in her own element in the (canal) basin at Johnstown on the same evening.”
Did the “Hit Or Miss” ever reach Illinois? The old newspaper records don’t say, but the Hollidaysburg paper reported on Oct. 18, 1834 that the boat was “now on its way to the Far West.”
The Aurora reported concluded his story by saying Christman’s voyage over the Allegheny “will no doubt, induce others to follow the example.”
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John L. Moore is an author and storyteller based in Northumberland, Pa. Information about the eight non-fiction books in his Frontier Pennsylvania Series is available online at johnleonmoore.blogspot.com