CHAPTER VIII

The Conquest Of The Alleghanies

Thetwo great thoroughfares of American commerce in the first half of the nineteenth century were the Cumberland Road and the Erie Canal. The first generation of the new century witnessed the great burst of population into the West which at once gave Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin a place of national importance which they have never relinquished. So far as pathways of commerce contributed to the creation of this veritable new republic in the Middle West, the Cumberland Road and the Erie Canal, coöperating respectively with Ohio River and Lake Erie steamboats, were of the utmost importance. The national spirit, said to have arisen from the second war with England, had its clearest manifestation in the throwing of a great macadamized roadway across the Alleghanies to the Ohio River and the digging of the ErieCanal through the swamps and wildernesses of New York.

Both of these pathways were essentially the fruition of the doctrine to which Washington gave wide circulation in his letter to Harrison in 1784, wherein he pictured the vision of a vast Republic united by commercial chains. Both were essentially Western enterprises. The highway was built to fulfil the promise which the Government had made in 1802 to use a portion of the money accruing from the sale of public lands in Ohio in order to connect that young State with Atlantic waters. It was proposed to build the canal, according to one early plan, with funds to be obtained by the sale of land in Michigan. So firmly did the promoters believe in the national importance of this project that subscriptions, according to another plan, were to be solicited as far afield as Vermont in the North and Kentucky in the Southwest. All that Washington had hoped for, and all that Aaron Burr is supposed to have been hopeless of, were epitomized in these great works of internal improvement. They bespoke coöperation of the highest existing types of loyalty, optimism, financial skill, and engineering ability.

Yet, on the other hand, the contrasts betweenthese undertakings were great. The two enterprises, one the work of the nation and the other that of a single State, were practically contemporaneous and were therefore constantly inviting comparison. The Cumberland Road was, for its day, a gigantic government undertaking involving problems of finance, civil engineering, eminent domain, state rights, local favoritism, and political machination. Its purpose was noble and its successful construction a credit to the nation; but the paternalism to which it gave rise and the conflicts which it precipitated in Congress over questions of constitutionality were remembered soberly for a century. The Erie Canal, after its projectors had failed to obtain national aid, became the undertaking of one commonwealth conducted, amid countless doubts and jeers, to a conclusion unbelievably successful. As a result many States, foregoing Federal aid, attempted to duplicate the successful feat of New York. In this respect the northern canal resembled the Lancaster Turnpike and tempted scores of States and corporations to expenditures which were unwise in circumstances less favorable than those of the fruitful and strategic Empire State.

In the conception of both the roadway and the canal, it should be noted, the old idea of makinguse of navigable rivers still persisted. The act foreshadowing the Cumberland Road, passed in 1802, called for "making public roads leading from the navigable waters emptying into the Atlantic, to the Ohio, to said State Ohio and through the same"; and Hawley's original plan was to build the Erie Canal from Utica to Buffalo using the Mohawk from Utica to the Hudson.

Historic Cumberland, in Maryland, was chosen by Congress as the eastern terminus of the great highway which should bind Ohio to the Old Thirteen. Commissioners were appointed in 1806 to choose the best route by which the great highway could reach the Ohio River between Steubenville, Ohio and the mouth of Grave Creek; but difficulties of navigation in the neighborhood of the Three Sister Islands near Charlestown, or Wellsburg, West Virginia, led to the choice of Wheeling, farther down, as a temporary western terminus.

The route selected was an excellent compromise between the long standing rival claims of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to the trade of the West. If Baltimore and Alexandria were to be better served than Philadelphia, the advantage was slight; and Pennsylvania gained compensation, ere the State gave the National Governmentpermission to build the road within its limits, by dictating that it should pass through Uniontown and Washington. In this way Pennsylvania obtained, without cost, unrivaled advantages for a portion of the State which might otherwise have been long neglected.

The building of the road, however satisfactory in the main, was not undertaken without arousing many sectional and personal hopes and prejudices and jealousies, of which the echoes still linger in local legends today. Land-owners, mine-owners, factory-owners, innkeepers and countless townsmen and villagers anxiously watched the course of the road and were bitterly disappointed if the new sixty-four-foot thoroughfare did not pass immediately through their property. On the other hand, promoters of toll and turnpike companies, who had promising schemes and long lists of shareholders, were far from eager to have their property taken for a national road. No one believed that, if it proved successful, it would be the only work of its kind, and everywhere men looked for the construction of government highways out of the overflowing wealth of the treasury within the next few years.

In April, 1811, the first contracts were let forbuilding the first ten miles of the road from its eastern terminus and were completed in 1812. More contracts were let in 1812, 1813, and 1815. Even in those days of war when the drain on the national treasury was excessive, over a quarter of a million dollars was appropriated for the construction of the road. Onward it crawled, through the beautiful Cumberland gateway of the Potomac, to Big Savage and Little Savage Mountains, to Little Pine Run (the first "Western" water), to Red Hill (later called "Shades of Death" because of the gloomy forest growth), to high-flung Negro Mountain at an elevation of 2325 feet, and thence on to the Youghiogheny, historic Great Meadows, Braddock's Grave, Laurel Hill, Uniontown, and Brownsville, where it crossed the Monongahela. Thence, on almost a straight line, it sped by way of Washington to Wheeling. Its average cost was upwards of thirteen thousand dollars a mile from the Potomac to the Ohio. The road was used in 1817, and in another year the mail coaches of the United States were running from Washington to Wheeling, West Virginia. Within five years one of the five commission houses doing business at Wheeling is said to have handled over a thousand wagons carrying freight of nearly two tons each.

The Cumberland Road at once leaped into a position of leadership, both in volume of commerce and in popularity, and held its own for two famous decades. The pulse of the nation beat to the steady throb of trade along its highway. Maryland at once stretched out her eager arms, along stone roads, through Frederick and Hagerstown to Cumberland, and thus formed a single route from the Ohio to Baltimore. Great stagecoach and freight lines were soon established, each patronizing its own stage house or wagon stand in the thriving towns along the road. The primitive box stage gave way to the oval or football type with curved top and bottom, and this was displaced in turn by the more practical Concord coach of national fame. The names of the important stagecoach companies were quite as well known, a century ago, as those of our great railways today. Chief among them were theNational, Good Intent, June Bug,andPioneerlines. The coaches, drawn by four and sometimes six horses, were usually painted in brilliant colors and were named after eminent statesmen. The drivers of these gay chariots were characters quite as famous locally as the personages whose names were borne by the coaches. Westover and his record of forty-fiveminutes for the twenty miles between Uniontown and Brownsville, and "Red" Bunting, with his drive of a hundred and thirty-one miles in twelve hours with the declaration of war against Mexico, will be long famous on the curving stretches of the Cumberland Road.

Although the freight and express traffic of those days lacked the picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced at "unprecedented" speed across hill and vale. Searight, the local historian of the road, describes these large, broad-wheeled wagons covered with white canvas as

visible all the day long, at every point, making the highway look more like a leading avenue of a great city than a road through rural districts.… I have staid over night with William Cheets on Nigger [Negro] Mountain when there were about thirty six-horse teams in the wagon yard, a hundred Kentucky mules in an adjoining lot, a thousand hogs in their enclosures, and as many fat cattle in adjoining fields. The music made by this large number of hogs eating corn on a frosty night I shall never forget. After supper and attention to the teams, the wagoners would gather in the bar-room and listen to the music on the violin furnished by one of their fellows, have a Virginiahoe-down, sing songs, tell anecdotes, and hear the experiences of drivers and drovers from all points of the road, and, when it was all over, unroll their beds, lay them down on the floor before the bar-room fire side by side, and sleep with their feet near the blaze as soundly as under the parental roof.

Meanwhile New York, the other great rival for Western trade, was intent on its own darling project, the Erie Canal. In 1808, three years before the building of the Cumberland Road, Joshua Forman offered a bill in favor of the canal in the Legislature of New York. In plain but dignified language this document stated that New York possessed "the best route of communication between the Atlantic and western waters," and that it held "the first commercial rank in the United States." The bill also noted that, while "several of our sister States" were seeking to secure "the trade of that wide extended country," their natural advantages were "vastly inferior." Six hundred dollars was the amount appropriated for a brief survey, and Congress was asked to vote aid for the construction of the "Buffalo-Utica Canal." The matter was widely talked about but action was delayed. Doubt as to the best route to be pursued caused some discussion. If the western terminus were tobe located on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Oswego, as some advocated, would produce not make its way to Montreal instead of to New York? In 1810 a new committee was appointed and, though their report favored the paralleling of the course of the Mohawk and Oswego rivers, their engineer, James Geddes, gave strength to the party which believed a direct canal would best serve the interests of the State. It is worth noting that Livingston and Fulton were added to the committee in 1811.

The hopes of outside aid from Congress and adjacent States met with disappointment. In vain did the advocates of the canal in 1812 plead that its construction would promote "a free and general intercourse between different parts of the United States, tend to the aggrandizement and prosperity of the country, and consolidate and strengthen the Union." The plan to have the Government subsidize the canal by vesting in the State of New York four million acres of Michigan land brought out a protest from the West which is notable not so much because it records the opposition of this section as because it illustrates the shortsightedness of most of the arguments raised against the New York enterprise. The purpose of the canal, thedetractors asserted, was to build up New York City to the detriment of Montreal, and the navigation of Lake Ontario, whose beauty they touchingly described, was to be abandoned for a "narrow, winding obstructed canal … for an expense which arithmetic dares not approach." It was, in their minds, unquestionably a selfish object, and they believed that "both correct science, and the dictates of patriotism and philanthropy [should] lead to the adoption of more liberal principles." It was a shortsighted object, "predicated on the eternal adhesion of the Canadas to England." It would never give satisfaction since trade would always ignore artificial and seek natural routes. The attempting of such comparatively useless projects would discourage worthy schemes, relax the bonds of Union, and depress the national character. But though these Westerners thus misjudged the possibilities of the Erie Canal, we must doff our hats to them for their foresight in suggesting that, instead of aiding the Erie Canal, the nation ought to build canals at Niagara Falls and Panama!

The War of 1812 suspended all talk of the canal, but the subject was again brought up by Judge Platt in the autumn of 1816. With alacrity strong men came to the aid of the measure. De WittClinton'sMemorialof 1816 addressed to the State Legislature may well rank with Washington's letter to Harrison in the documentary history of American commercial development. It sums up the geographical position of New York with reference to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, her relationship to the West and to Canada, the feasibility of the proposed route from an engineering standpoint, the timeliness of the moment for such a work of improvement, the value that the canal would give to the state lands of the interior, and the trade that it would bring to the towns along its pathway.

The Erie Canal was born in the Act of April 14, 1817, but the decision of the Council of Revision, which held the power of veto, was in doubt. An anecdote related by Judge Platt tends to prove that fear of another war with England was the straw that broke the camel's back of opposition. Acting-Governor Taylor, Chief Justice Thompson, Chancellor Kent, Judge Yates, and Judge Platt composed the Council. The two first named were open opponents of the measure; Kent, Yates, and Platt were warm advocates of the project, but one of them doubted if the time was ripe to undertake it.

Taylor opposed the canal on the ground that the late treaty with England was a mere truce and that the resources of the State should be husbanded against renewed war.

"Do you think so, Sir?" Chancellor Kent is said to have asked the Governor.

"Yes, Sir," was the reported reply. "England will never forgive us for our victories, and, my word for it, we shall have another war with her within two years."

The Chancellor rose to his feet with determination and sealed the fate of the great enterprise in a word.

"If we must have war," he exclaimed, "I am in favor of the canal and I cast my vote for this bill."

On July 4, 1817, work was formally inaugurated at Rome with simple ceremonies. Thus the year 1817 was marked by three great undertakings: the navigation of the Mississippi River upstream and down by steamboats, the opening of the national road across the Alleghany Mountains, and the beginning of the Erie Canal. No single year in the early history of the United States witnessed three such important events in the material progress of the country.

What days the ancient "Long House of the Iroquois" now saw! The engineers of the Cumberland Road, now nearing the Ohio River, had enjoyed the advantage of many precedents and examples; but the Commissioners of the Erie Canal had been able to study only such crude examples of canal-building as America then afforded. 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 hoistgreen 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 lineran to Lockport, where a series of locks placed the canal on the Lake Erie level, 365 miles 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 theWalk-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 ofthese 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 well-worn paths of commerce was daily becoming clearer. What further westward progress was soon to be made remains to be seen.

CHAPTER IX

The Dawn Of The Iron Age

Despitethe superiority of the new iron age that quickly followed the widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and a chivalry in the "good old days" of the stagecoach, the Conestoga, and the lazy canal boat, which did not to an equal degree pervade the iron age of the railroad. When machinery takes the place of human brawn and patience, there is an indefinable eclipse of human interest. Somehow, cogs and levers and differentials do not have the same appeal as fingers and eyes and muscles. The old days of coach and canal boat had a picturesqueness and a comradeship of their own. In the turmoil and confusion and odd mixing of every kind of humanity along the lines of travel in the days of the hurtling coach-and-six, a friendliness, a robust sympathy, a ready interest in the successful and the unfortunate, a knowledge of how the other half lives, and a familiaritywith men as well as with mere places, was common to all who took the road. As Thackeray so vividly describes it:

The land rang yet with the tooting horns and rattling teams of mail-coaches; a gay sight was the road in those days, before steam-engines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over. To travel in coaches, to know coachmen and guards, to be familiar with inns along the road, to laugh with the jolly hostess in the bar, to chuck the pretty chamber-maid under the chin, were the delight of men who were young not very long ago. The road was an institution, the ring was an institution. Men rallied around them; and, not without a kind of conservatism expatiated on the benefits with which they endowed the country, and the evils which would occur when they should be no more:—decay of British spirit, decay of manly pluck, ruin of the breed of horses, and so forth and so forth. To give and take a black eye was not unusual nor derogatory in a gentleman: to drive a stage-coach the enjoyment, the emulation, of generous youth. Is there any young fellow of the present time, who aspires to take the place of a stoker? One sees occasionally in the country a dismal old drag with a lonely driver. Where are you, charioteers? Where are you, O rattlingQuicksilver, O swiftDefiance? You are passed by racers stronger and swifter than you. Your lamps are out, and the music of your horns has died away.

Behind this change from the older and more picturesque days which is thus lamented there laypotent economic forces and a strong commercial rivalry between different parts of the country. The Atlantic States were all rivals of each other, reaching out by one bold stroke after another across forest, mountain, and river to the gigantic and fruitful West. Step after step the inevitable conquest went on. Foremost in time marched the sturdy pack-horsemen, blazing the way for the heavier forces quietly biding their time in the rear—the Conestogas, the steamboat, the canal boat, and, last and greatest of them all, the locomotive.

Through a long preliminary period the principal center of interest was the Potomac Valley, towards whose strategic head Virginia and Maryland, by river-improvement and road-building, were directing their commercial routes in amiable rivalry for the conquest of the Western trade. Suddenly out from the southern region of the Middle Atlantic States went the Cumberland National Road to the Ohio. New York instantly, in her zone, took up the challenge and thrust her great Erie Canal across to the Great Lakes. In rapid succession, Pennsylvania and Maryland and Virginia, eager not to be outdone in winning the struggle for Western trade, sent their canals into the Alleghanies toward the Ohio.

It soon developed, however, that Baltimore, bothpowerful and ambitious, was seriously handicapped. In order to retain her commanding position as the metropolis of Western trade she was compelled to resort to a new and untried method of transportation which marks an era in American history.

It seems plain that the Southern rivals of New York City—Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Alexandria—had relied for a while on the deterring effect of a host of critics who warned all men that a canal of such proportions as the Erie was not practicable, that no State could bear the financial drain which its construction would involve, that theories which had proved practical on a small scale would fail in so large an undertaking, that the canal would be clogged by floods or frozen up for half of each year, and that commerce would ignore artificial courses and cling to natural channels. But the answer of the Empire State to her rivals was the homely but triumphant cry "Low Bridge!"—the warning to passengers on the decks of canal boats as they approached the numerous bridges which spanned the route. When this cry passed into a byword it afforded positive proof that the Erie Canal traffic was firmly established. The words rang in the counting-houses of Philadelphia and out and along the Lancaster and thePhiladelphia-Pittsburgh turnpikes—"Low Bridge! Low Bridge!" Pennsylvania had granted, it has been pointed out, that her Southern neighbors might have their share of the Ohio Valley trade but maintained that the splendid commerce of the Great Lakes was her own peculiar heritage. Men of Baltimore who had dominated the energetic policy of stone-road building in their State heard this alarming challenge from the North. The echo ran "Low Bridge!" in the poor decaying locks of the Potomac Company where, according to the committee once appointed to examine that enterprise, flood-tides "gave the only navigation that was enjoyed." Were their efforts to keep the Chesapeake metropolis in the lead to be set at naught?

There could be but one answer to the challenge, and that was to rival canal with canal. These more southerly States, confronted by the towering ranges of the Alleghanies to the westward, showed a courage which was superb, although, as time proved in the case of Maryland, they might well have taken more counsel of their fears. Pennsylvania acted swiftly. Though its western waterway—the roaring Juniata, which entered the Susquehanna near Harrisburg—had a drop from head to mouth greater than that of the entire NewYork canal, and, though the mountains of the Altoona region loomed straight up nearly three thousand feet, Pennsylvania overcame the lowlands by main strength and the mountain peaks by strategy and was sending canal boats from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh within nine years of the completion of the Erie Canal.

The eastern division of the Pennsylvania Canal, known as the Union Canal, from Reading on the Schuylkill to Middletown on the Susquehanna, was completed in 1827. The Juniata section was then driven on up to Hollidaysburg. Beyond the mountain barrier, the Conemaugh, the Kiskiminitas, and the Allegheny were followed to Pittsburgh. But the greatest feat in the whole enterprise was the conquest of the mountain section, from Hollidaysburg to Johnstown. This was accomplished by the building of five inclined planes on each slope, each plane averaging about 2300 feet in length and 200 feet in height. Up or down these slopes and along the intermediate level sections cars and giant cradles (built to be lowered into locks where they could take an entire canal boat as a load) were to be hauled or lowered by horsepower, and later, by steam. After the plans had been drawn up by Sylvester Welch and MoncureRobinson, the Pennsylvania Legislature authorized the work in 1831, and traffic over this aerial route was begun in March, 1834. In autumn of that year, the stanch boatHit or Miss,from the Lackawanna country, owned by Jesse Crisman and captained by Major Williams, made the journey across the whole length of the canal. It rested for a night on the Alleghany summit "like Noah's Ark on Ararat," wrote Sherman Day, "descended the next morning into the Valley of the Mississippi, and sailed for St. Louis."

Well did Robert Stephenson, the famous English engineer, say that, in boldness of design and difficulty of execution, this Pennsylvania scheme of mastering the Alleghanies could be compared with no modern triumph short of the feats performed at the Simplon Pass and Mont Cenis. Before long this line of communication became a very popular thoroughfare; even Charles Dickens "heartily enjoyed" it—in retrospect—and left interesting impressions of his journey over it:

Even the running up, bare-necked, at five o'clock in the morning from the tainted cabin to the dirty deck; scooping up the icy water, plunging one's head into it, and drawing it out, all fresh and glowing with the cold; was a good thing. The fast, brisk walk upon the towing-path, between that time and breakfast, whenevery vein and artery seemed to tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light came gleaming off from everything; the lazy motion of the boat, when one lay idly on the deck, looking through, rather than at, the deep blue sky; the gliding on, at night, so noiselessly, past frowning hills, sullen with dark trees, and sometimes angry in one red burning spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the shining out of the bright stars, undisturbed by noise of wheels or steam, or any other sound than the liquid rippling of the water as the boat went on; all these were pure delights. ¹

¹American Notes(Gadshill Edition), pp. 180-181.

Dickens also thus graphically depicts the unique experience of being carried over the mountain peaks on the aerial railway:

There are ten inclined planes; five ascending and five descending; the carriages are dragged up the former, and let slowly down the latter, by means of stationary engines; the comparatively level spaces between being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes by engine power, as the case demands. Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveler gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountain depths below. The journey is very carefully made, however; only two carriages traveling together; and while proper precautions are taken, is not to be dreaded for its dangers.It was very pretty traveling thus, at a rapid pacealong the heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses, through the tree-tops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow's work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirl-wind. It was amusing, too, when we had dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other motive power than the weight of the carriages themselves, to see the engine released, long after us, come buzzing down alone, like a great insect, its back of green and gold so shining in the sun, that if it had spread a pair of wings and soared away, no one would have had occasion, as I fancied, for the least surprise. But it stopped short of us in a very business-like manner when we reached the canal; and, before we left the wharf, went panting up this hill again, with the passengers who had waited our arrival for the means of traversing the road by which we had come. ¹

It was very pretty traveling thus, at a rapid pacealong the heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses, through the tree-tops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow's work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirl-wind. It was amusing, too, when we had dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other motive power than the weight of the carriages themselves, to see the engine released, long after us, come buzzing down alone, like a great insect, its back of green and gold so shining in the sun, that if it had spread a pair of wings and soared away, no one would have had occasion, as I fancied, for the least surprise. But it stopped short of us in a very business-like manner when we reached the canal; and, before we left the wharf, went panting up this hill again, with the passengers who had waited our arrival for the means of traversing the road by which we had come. ¹

¹Op. cit.

This Pennsylvania route was likewise famous because it included the first tunnel in America; but with the advance of years, tunnel, planes, and canal were supplanted by what was to become in time the Pennsylvania Railroad, the pride of the State and one of the great highways of the nation.

In the year before Pennsylvania investigated her western water route, a joint bill was introduced into the legislatures of the Potomac Valley States, proposing a Potomac Canal Company which should construct a Chesapeake and Ohio canal at the expense of Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The plan was of vital moment to Alexandria and Georgetown on the Potomac, but unless a lateral canal could be built to Baltimore, that city—which paid a third of Maryland's taxes—would be called on to supply a great sum to benefit only her chief rivals. The bitter struggle which now developed is one of the most significant in commercial history because of its sequel.

The conditions underlying this rivalry must not be lost sight of. Baltimore had done more than any other Eastern city to ally herself with the West and to obtain its trade. She had instinctively responded to every move made by her rivals in the great game. If Pennsylvania promoted a Lancaster Turnpike, Baltimore threw out her superb Baltimore-Reisterstown boulevard, though her northern road to Philadelphia remained the slough that Brissot and Baily had found it. If New York projected an Erie Canal, Baltimore successfully championed the building of a Cumberland Roadby a governmental godmother. So thoroughly and quickly, indeed, did she link her system of stone roads to that great artery, that even today many well-informed writers seem to be under the impression that the Cumberland Road ran from the Ohio to Washington and Baltimore. Now, with canals building to the north of her and canals to the south of her, what of her prestige and future?

For the moment Baltimore compromised by agreeing to a Chesapeake and Ohio canal which, by a lateral branch, should still lead to her market square. Her scheme embraced a vision of conquest regal in its sweep, beyond that of any rival, and comprehending two ideas worthy of the most farseeing strategist and the most astute politician. It called not only for the building of a transmontane canal to the Ohio but also for a connecting canal from the Ohio to the Great Lakes. Not only would the trade of the Northwest be secured by this means—for this southerly route would not be affected by winter frosts as would those of Pennsylvania and New York—but the good godmother at Washington would be almost certain to champion it and help to build it since the proposed route was so thoroughly interstate in character. With the backing of Maryland, Virginia, WesternPennsylvania, Ohio, and probably several States bordering the Inland Lakes, government aid in the undertaking seemed feasible and proper.

Theoretically the daring scheme captured the admiration of all who were to be benefited by it. At a great banquet at Washington, late in 1823, the project was launched. Adams, Clay, and Calhoun took the opportunity to ally themselves with it by robustly declaring themselves in favor of widespread internal improvements. Even the godmother smiled upon it for, following Monroe's recommendation, Congress without hesitation voted thirty thousand dollars for the preliminary survey from Washington to Pittsburgh. Quickly the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company and the connecting Maryland Canal Company were formed, and steps were taken to have Ohio promote an Ohio and Lake Erie Company.

As high as were the hopes awakened by this movement, just so deep was the dejection and chagrin into which its advocates were thrown upon receiving the report of the engineers who made the preliminary survey. The estimated cost ran towards a quarter of a billion, four times the capital stock of the company; and there were not lacking those who pointed out that the Erie Canal had costmore than double the original appropriation made for it.

The situation was aggravated for Baltimore by the fact that Maryland and Virginia were willing to take half a loaf if they could not get a whole one: in other words, they were willing to build the canal up the Potomac to Cumberland and stop there. Baltimore, even if linked to this partial scheme, would lose her water connection with the West, the one prized asset which the project had held out, and her Potomac Valley rivals would, on this contracted plan, be in a particularly advantageous position to surpass her. But the last blow was yet to come. Engineers reported that a lateral canal connecting the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay was not feasible. It was consequently of little moment whether the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal could be built across the Alleghanies or not, for, even if it could have been carried through the Great Plains or to the Pacific, Baltimore was, for topographical reasons, out of the running.

The men of Baltimore now gave one of the most striking illustrations of spirit and pluck ever exhibited by the people of any city. They refused to accept defeat. If engineering science held a means of overcoming the natural disadvantages oftheir position, they were determined to adopt that means, come what would of hardship, difficulty, and expenditure. If roads and canals would not serve the city on the Chesapeake, what of the railroad on which so many experiments were being made in England?

The idea of controlling the trade of the West by railroads was not new. As early as February, 1825, certain astute Pennsylvanians had advocated building a railroad to Pittsburgh instead of a canal, and in a memorial to the Legislature they had set forth the theory that a railroad could be built in one-third of the time and could be operated with one-third of the number of employees required by a canal, that it would never be frozen, and that its cost of construction would be less. But these arguments did not influence the majority, who felt that to follow the line of least resistance and to do as others had done would involve the least hazard. But Baltimore, with her back against the wall, did not have the alternative of a canal. It was a leap into the unknown for her or commercial stagnation.

It is regrettable that, as Baltimore began to break this fresh track, she should have had political as well as physical and mechanical obstacles to overcome. The conquest of the naturaldifficulties alone required superhuman effort and endurance. But Baltimore had also to fight a miserable internecine warfare in her own State, for Maryland immediately subscribed half a million to the canal as well as to the newly formed Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In rival pageants, both companies broke ground on July 4, 1828, and the race to the Ohio was on. The canal company clung doggedly to the idle belief that their enterprise was still of continental proportions, since it would connect at Cumberland with the Cumberland Road. This exaggerated estimate of the importance of the undertaking shines out in the pompous words of President Mercer, at the time when construction was begun:

There are moments in the progress of time, which are counters of whole ages. There are events, the monuments of which, surviving every other memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to whose history they belong, after all other vestiges of its glory have disappeared from the globe. At such a moment have we now arrived.

This oracular language lacks the simple but winning straightforwardness of the words which Director Morris uttered on the same day near Baltimoreand which prove how distinctly Western the new railway project was held to be:

We are about opening a channel through which the commerce of the mighty country beyond the Allegheny must seek the ocean—we are about affording facilities of intercourse between the East and West, which will bind the one more closely to the other, beyond the power of an increased population or sectional differences to disunite.

The difficulties which faced the Baltimore enthusiasts in their task of keeping their city "on the map" would have daunted men of less heroic mold. Every conceivable trial and test which nature and machinery could seemingly devise was a part of their day's work for twelve years—struggles with grades, locomotives, rails, cars. As Rumsey, Fitch, and Fulton in their experiments with boats had floundered despondently with endless chains, oars, paddles, duck's feet, so now Thomas and Brown in their efforts to make the railroad effective wandered in a maze of difficulties testing out such absurd and impossible ideas as cars propelled by sails and cars operated by horse treadmills. By May, 1830, however, cars on rails, running by "brigades" and drawn by horses, were in operation in America. It was only in this yearthat in England locomotives were used with any marked success on the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad; yet in August of this year Peter Cooper's engine,Tom Thumb,built in Baltimore in 1829, traversed the twelve miles between that city and Ellicott's Mills in seventy-two minutes. Steel springs came in 1832, together with car wheels of cylindrical and conical section which made it easier to turn curves.

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 therailroad 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 pack-horseman 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 transportationand 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.

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