Never on any continent had such an inaccessible region been pierced by such a highway.The total length of the whole network of canals in Great Britain did not equal that of the waterway which the New Yorkers now undertook to build.The lack of roads, materials, vehicles, methods of drilling and efficient business systems was overcome by sheer patience and perseverance in experiment.The frozen winter roads saved the day by making it possible to accumulate a proper supply of provisions and materials.As tools of construction, the plough and scraper with their greater capacity for work soon supplanted the shovel and the wheelbarrow, which had been the chief implements for such construction in Europe.Strange new machinery born of Mother Necessity was now heard groaning in the dark swamps of New York.
These giants, worked by means of a cable, wheel, and endless screw, were made to hoist green stumps bodily from the ground and, without the use of axe, to lay trees prostrate, root and branch.A new plough was fashioned with which a yoke of oxen could cut roots two inches in thickness well beneath the surface of the ground.
Handicaps of various sorts wore the patience of commissioners, engineers, and contractors.Lack of snow during one winter all but stopped the work by cutting off the source of supplies.
Pioneer ailments, such as fever and ague, reaped great harvests, incapacitated more than a thousand workmen at one time and for a brief while stopped work completely.
For the most part, however, work was carried on simultaneously on all the three great links or sections into which the enterprise was divided.Local contractors were given preference by the commissioners, and three-fourths of the work was done by natives of the State.Forward up the Mohawk by Schenectady and Utica to Rome, thence bending southward to Syracuse, and from there by way of Clyde, Lyons, and Palmyra, the canal made its way to the giant viaduct over the Genesee River at Rochester.Keeping close to the summit level on the dividing ridge between Lake Ontario streams and the Valley of the Tonawanda, the line ran to Lockport, where a series of locks placed the canal on the Lake Erie level, 365miles from and 564 feet above Albany.By June, 1823, the canal was completed from Rochester to Schenectady; in October boats passed into the tidewaters of the Hudson at Albany; and in the autumn of 1825 the canal was formally opened by the passage of a triumphant fleet from Lake Erie to New York Bay.Here two kegs of lake water were emptied into the Atlantic, while the Governor of the State of New York spoke these words:
"This solemnity, at this place, on the first arrival of vessels from Lake Erie, is intended to indicate and commemorate the navigable communication, which has been accomplished between our Mediterranean Seas and the Atlantic Ocean, in about eight years, to the extent of more than four hundred and twenty-five miles, by the wisdom, public spirit, and energy of the people of the State of New York; and may the God of the Heavens and the Earth smile most propitiously on this work, and render it subservient to the best interests of the human race."Throughout these last seven years, the West was subconsciously getting ready to meet the East halfway by improving and extending her steamboat operations.Steamboats were first run on the Great Lakes by enterprising Buffalo citizens who, in 1818, secured rights from the Fulton-Livingston monopoly to build the Walk-in-the-Water, the first of the great fleet of ships that now whiten the inland seas of the United States.Regular lines of steamboats were now formed on the Ohio to connect with the Cumberland Road at Wheeling, although the steamboat monopoly threatened to stifle the natural development of transportation on Western rivers.
The completion of the Erie Canal--coupled with the new appropriation by Congress for extending the Cumberland Road from the Ohio River to Missouri and the beginning of the Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake and Ohio canals, reveal the importance of these concluding days of the first quarter of the nineteenth century in the annals of American transportation.Never since that time have men doubted the ability of Americans to accomplish the physical domination of their continent.With the conquest of the Alleghanies and of the forests and swamps of the "Long House"by pick and plough and scraper, and the mastery of the currents of the Mississippi by the paddle wheel, the vast plains beyond seemed smaller and the Rockies less formidable.Men now looked forward confidently, with an optimist of these days, to the time "when circulation and association between the Atlantic and Pacific and the Mexican Gulf shall be as free and perfect as they are at this moment in England" between the extremities of that country.The vision of a nation closely linked by wellworn paths of commerce was daily becoming clearer.What further westward progress was soon to be made remains to be seen.
