As one stands in imagination at the early railheads of the West--on the Ohio River at the end of the Cumberland Road, or at Buffalo, the terminus of the Erie Canal--the vision which Washington caught breaks upon him and the dream of a nation made strong by trans-Alleghany routes of commerce.Link by link the great interior is being connected with the sea.Behind him all lines of transportation lead eastward to the cities of the coast.
Before him lies the giant valley where the Father of Waters throws out his two splendid arms, the Ohio and the Missouri, one reaching to the Alleghanies and the other to the Rockies.
Northward, at the end of the Erie Canal, lies the empire of the Great Lakes, inland seas that wash the shores of a Northland having a coastline longer than that of the Atlantic from Maine to Mexico.
Ships and conditions of navigation were much the same on the lakes as on the ocean.It was therefore possible to imagine the rise of a coasting trade between Illinois and Ohio as profitable as that between Massachusetts and New York.Yet the older colonies on the Atlantic had an outlet for trade, whereas the Great Lakes had none for craft of any size, since their northern shores lay beyond the international boundary.If there had been danger from Spain in the Southwest, what of the danger of Canada's control of the St.Lawrence River and of the trade of the Northwest through the Welland Canal which was to join Lake Ontario to Lake Erie? But in those days the possibility of Canadian rivalry was not treated with great seriousness, and many men failed to see that the West was soon to contain a very large population.The editor of a newspaper at Munroe, New York, commenting in 1827 on a proposed canal to connect Lake Erie with the Mississippi by way of the Ohio, believed that the rate of Western development was such that this waterway could be expected only "some hundred of years hence." Even so gifted a man as Henry Clay spoke of the proposed canal between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior in 1825 as one relating to a region beyond the pale of civilization "if not in the moon." Yet in twenty-five years Michigan, which had numbered one thousand inhabitants in 1812, had gained two hundredfold, and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had their hundreds of thousands who were clamoring for ways and means of sending their surplus products to market.
Early in the century representatives of the Fulton-Livingston monopoly were at the shores of Lake Ontario to prove that their steamboats could master the waves of the inland sea and serve commerce there as well as in tidewater rivers.True, the luckless Ontario, built in 1817 at Sackett's Harbor, proved unseaworthy when the waves lifted the shaft of her paddle wheels off their bearings and caused them to demolish the wooden covering built for their protection; but the Walk-in-the-Water, completed at Black Rock (Buffalo) in August, 1818, plied successfully as far as Mackinac Island until her destruction three years later.Her engines were then inherited by the Superior of stronger build, and with the launching of such boats as the Niagara, the Henry Clay, and the Pioneer, the fleet builders of Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit proved themselves not unworthy fellow-countrymen of the old seafarers of Salem and Philadelphia.
But how were cargoes to reach these vessels from the vast regions beyond the Great Lakes? Those thousands of settlers who poured into the Northwest had cargoes ready to fill every manner of craft in so short a space of time that it seems as if they must have resorted to arts of necromancy.It was not magic, however, but perseverance that had triumphed.The story of the creating of the main lakeward-reaching canals is long and involved.A period of agitation and campaigning preceded every such undertaking; and when construction was once begun, financial woes usually brought disappointing delays.When a canal was completed after many vicissitudes and doubts, traffic overwhelmed every method provided to handle it: locks proved altogether too small; boats were inadequate; wharfs became congested; blockades which occurred at locks entailed long delay.In the end only lines and double lines of steel rails could solve the problem of rapid and adequate transportation, but the story of the railroad builders is told elsewhere.** See "The Railroad Builders," by John Moody (in "The Chronicles of America").
Ohio and Illinois caught the canal fever even before the Erie Canal was completed, and the Ohio Canal and the Illinois-Michigan Canal saw preliminary surveying done in 1822 and 1824respectively.Ohio particularly had cause to seek a northern outlet to Eastern markets by way of Lake Erie.The valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami rivers were producing wheat in large quantities as early as 1802, when Ohio was admitted to the Union.
Flour which brought $3.50 a barrel in Cincinnati was worth $8 in New York.There were difficulties in the way of transportation.
Sometimes ice prevented produce and merchandise from descending the Ohio to Cincinnati.At other times merchants of that city had as many as a hundred thousand barrels awaiting a rise in the river which would make it possible for boats to go over the falls at Louisville.As these conditions involved a delay which often seemed intolerable, the project to build canals to Lake Erie met with generous acclaim.A northward route, though it might be blocked by ice for a few months each winter, had an additional value in the eyes of numerous merchants whose wheat, sent in bulk to New Orleans, had soured either in the long delay at Louisville or in the semi-tropical heat of the Southern port.
