The railroad was just beginning to master its mechanical problems when a new obstacle confronted it in the Potomac Valley.It could not cross Maryland to the Cumberland mountain gateway unless it could follow the Potomac.But its rival, the canal, had inherited from the old Potomac Company the only earthly asset it possessed of any value--the right of way up the Maryland shore.Five years of quarreling now ensued, and the contest, though it may not have seriously delayed either enterprise, aroused much bitterness and involved the usual train of lawsuits and injunctions.
In 1833 the canal company yielded the railroad a right of way through the Point of Rocks--the Potomac chasm through the Blue Ridge wall, just below Harper's Ferry on condition that the railroad should not build beyond Harper's Ferry until the canal was completed to Cumberland.But probably nothing but the financial helplessness of the canal company could have brought a solution satisfactory to all concerned.A settlement of the long quarrel by compromise was the price paid for state aid, and, in 1835 Maryland subsidized to a large degree both canal and railroad by her famous eight million dollar bill.The railroad received three millions from the State, and the city of Baltimore was permitted to subscribe an equal amount of stock.With this support and a free right of way, the railroad pushed on up the Potomac.Though delayed by the financial disasters of 1837, in 1842 it was at Hancock; in 1851, at Piedmont; in 1852, at Fairmont; and the next year it reached the Ohio River at Wheeling.
Spurred by the enterprise shown by these Southerners, Pennsylvania and New York now took immediate steps to parallel their own canals by railways.The line of the Union Canal in Pennsylvania was paralleled by a railroad in 1834, the same year in which the Allegheny Portage Railway was constructed.New York lines reached Buffalo in 1842.The Pennsylvania Railroad, which was incorporated in 1846, was completed to Pittsburgh in 1854.
It is thus obvious that, with the completion of these lines and the building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway through the "Sapphire Country" of the Southern Alleghanies, the new railway era pursued its paths of conquest through the very same mountain passageways that had been previously used by packhorseman and Conestoga and, in three instances out of four, by the canal boat.
If one motors today in the Juniata Valley in Pennsylvania, he can survey near Newport a scene full of meaning to one who has a taste for history.Traveling along the heights on the highway that was once the red man's trail, he can enjoy a wide prospect from this vantage point.Deep in the valley glitters the little Juniata, route of the ancient canoe and the blundering barge.
Beside it lies a long lagoon, an abandoned portion of the Pennsylvania Canal.Beside this again, as though some monster had passed leaving a track clear of trees, stretches the right of way of the first "Pennsylvania," and a little nearer swings the magnificent double-tracked bed of the railroad of today.Between these lines of travel may be read the history of the past two centuries of American commerce, for the vital factors in the development of the nation have been the evolution of transportation and its manifold and far-reaching influence upon the expansion of population and commerce and upon the rise of new industries.
Thus all the rivals in the great contest for the trade of the West speedily reached their goal, New York with the Erie and the New York Central, and Pennsylvania and Maryland with the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio.But what of this West for whose commerce the great struggle was being waged? When the railheads of these eager Atlantic promoters were laid down at Buffalo on Lake Erie and at Pittsburgh on the Ohio they looked out on a new world.The centaurs of the Western rivers were no less things of the far past than the tinkling bells borne by the ancient ponies of the pack-horse trade.The sons of this new West had their eyes riveted on the commerce of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley.With road, canal, steamboat, and railway, they were renewing the struggle of their fathers but for prizes greater than their fathers ever knew.
New York again proved the favored State.Her Mohawk pathway gave her easiest access to the West and here, at her back door on the Niagara frontier, lay her path by way of the Great Lakes to the North and the Northwest.
