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HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA

VOLUME 14




  [Illustration: VIEW OF OLD ERIE CANAL BASIN AT BUFFALO]




  HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
  VOLUME 14

  The Great American Canals

  BY
  ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT

  _With Maps and Illustrations_

  Volume II
  The Erie Canal

  [Illustration]

  THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
  CLEVELAND, OHIO
  1904




  COPYRIGHT, 1904
  BY
  THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




CONTENTS


                                            PAGE
  PREFACE                                     11
    I. THE MOHAWK AND ITS IMPROVEMENT         15
   II. EARLY PROMOTERS AND THEIR DREAMS       43
  III. CLINTON'S MEMORIAL                     62
   IV. PLANNING, BUILDING, AND OPENING       104
    V. LOCAL INFLUENCES OF THE CANAL         152
   VI. THE CANAL FUND AND ENLARGEMENTS       178
  APPENDIXES                                 211




ILLUSTRATIONS


    I. VIEW OF OLD ERIE CANAL BASIN AT BUFFALO          _Frontispiece_

   II. MAP AND PROFILE OF THE ERIE CANAL (from Poussin's
        "Travaux d'ameliorations interieures... des
        Etats-Unis d'Amerique de 1824 a 1831"--Paris, 1834)        107

  III. A CANAL LOCK AT ROME, NEW YORK, TOUCHING THE SITE
        OF FORT STANWIX                                            117

   IV. VIEW OF CANAL AT LITTLE FALLS, NEW YORK, SHOWING
        LOCK 37 IN THE DISTANCE                                    133

    V. MAP OF ERIE CANAL, SHOWING IMPROVEMENTS PROPOSED (from
        report of February 12, 1901)                               205




PREFACE


This second monograph on the great American canals which played the part
of important highways westward, is devoted to an outline of the Erie
Canal. In the comparatively short space at our disposal for so great a
theme, it has been possible only to sketch some of the leading features
of our subject, namely, the early history of the Mohawk Valley route,
the origin of the canal idea, its building, the celebration of its
completion, a catalogue of its finances and enlargements, and its
effect.

Our sources have been the state _Reports_, Sweet's _Documentary
History_, Hawley's _Origin of the Erie Canal_, and the various state and
local histories which treat of the subject. A monograph, in the form of
a thesis, by Julius Winden, has been of great advantage, as will be
indicated, in presenting the influence of the Erie Canal upon the
population along its course.

The author is under a debt of gratitude to Hon. A. R. Spofford of the
Congressional Library, Hon. John S. Billings of the New York Public
Library, and T. M. Ripley of Marietta, Ohio, for advice and assistance.

                                                              A. B. H.

MARIETTA, OHIO, March 4, 1904.




The Great American Canals


Volume II

The Erie Canal




CHAPTER I

THE MOHAWK AND ITS IMPROVEMENT


The "great western" route through New York State to the Lakes has come
under consideration in our study of highways in three places: as an
Indian trail, as a portage path, and as a pioneer road. The old Iroquois
Trail, as we have called it, ran up the Mohawk, which it crossed at
Nun-da-da-sis, "around the hill," (Utica); thence it made for the
Genesee River and the Niagara frontier; an important tributary pathway
led down the Genesee to Swa-geh (Oswego) on Lake Ontario. This was the
landward route from the Hudson to the Great Lakes. As a thoroughfare in
its entirety, it meant much to the Indians, but very little to the white
men before the nineteenth century. Though the lower Mohawk Valley was
sparsely settled early in the eighteenth century, white men did not
build their cabins along the Iroquois Trail to the westward until
nearly a century later, when the old Genesee Road was opened. Until then
the country through which the Iroquois Trail ran had been a _terra
incognita_ where only Indian runners knew the way through the Long House
of the Iroquois. Yet it was a pleasant country for all the forest
shades; from Nun-da-da-sis the trail ran on, leaving the Mohawk River
and Ole-hisk, "the place of nettles"--the famed battlefield of
Oriskany--to the north, passing Ka-ne-go-dick (Wood Creek) and
Ga-no-a-lo-hole (Lake Oneida), the "Lake of the Head on a Pole."[1] To
the southward, the path bore away toward Na-ta-dunk (Syracuse), the
place of the "broken pine-tree," and Ga-do-quat (Fort Brewerton). There
were the silver lakes strung like white gems on wreaths of heaviest
green. The low lands of the Genesee country, soon to see the great
advances heralded by the famous purchases of land speculators,
intervened; and straight beyond, far away across the pine-tree tops,
gleamed the Great Lakes and the plunging river between them; the deep
growl of Niagara seemed to warn voyageurs away to the forest trails on
either side. Those falls were the only interruption in a water highway
which in many aspects is, today, the most stupendous in the world.

Had this winding trail been the only means of communication between the
rapidly filling Hudson River valley and the chain of lakes to the
northwest, it is very probable that a Braddock or a Forbes would have
built a military road even through that bloody Long House; but the
Mohawk River, and the Oswego, offered a waterway which, though difficult
and uncertain, was the white man's route from the Hudson to the
Lakes--the western war route of which the portage at Rome was the key. A
clear picture of the old Mohawk would be a precious possession. The
records, however, are so few and so general in character that one would
be at a loss to supply an artist with his material. It is only in the
staid reports of old navigation companies that we get any definite
description of our old-time rivers. We know of the main obstructions to
continuous navigation in the Mohawk; first there was the Ga-ha-oose
Falls, or Cohoes Falls as we know them today. These were impassable for
any craft, and made Schenectady the metropolis of the lower Mohawk
Valley because it was the Mohawk terminus of the difficult portage to
Albany through the pine barrens. Thus the old-time river traffic began
at Schenectady. Proceeding northward by Te-hon-de-lo-ga, the famous
lower castle of the Mohawks, and Ga-no-jo-hi-e, the middle castle, the
traveler passed the present Fonda, which was Ga-na-wa-da, "over the
rapids," and came to the rocky confines of Ta-la-que-ga, the "place of
small bushes"--the present Little Falls. Here the roaring rapids
interrupted all navigation, empty boats not even being able to pass over
them. The early portage of one mile here in sleds over the swampy ground
has been described as it was in 1756, when enterprising Teutons residing
here transferred all boats in sleds over marshy ground which would
"admit of no wheel carriage." In all of the military operations in the
Mohawk Valley in the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars this
portage played a part. As early as 1768, Governor Sir Henry Moore
suggested the improvement of the Mohawk at the Falls of Canajoharie. A
route for a canal around Niagara Falls was surveyed in 1784. Travelers
to Niagara with heavy baggage invariably went by way of the Mohawk
batteaus. We have seen that in 1793 two of the commissioners to the
western Indians, traveling light, went overland by horse to the Genesee,
while General Lincoln went with the heavy baggage by way of the
Mohawk.[2] From Schenectady to the Oneida Portage at Rome, Little Falls
offered the only insurmountable obstruction; later on, about 1790, we
find that the Germans' sleds were out of use and that boats were
transferred on wheeled vehicles appropriately fashioned to carry them
without damage to their hulls. No great boats could be transferred by
such means; this fact had a tendency to limit the carrying capacity of
Mohawk batteaus to about one and a half tons. These boats were operated
by three men, and a journey from Rome to Schenectady and return--one
hundred and twelve miles--required, at the least estimate, nine days.
Such was the high rate of freight that, if no return freight was
secured, the cost of sending a ton to Schenectady equaled one man's
wages for eighteen days, about fourteen dollars.

The improvement of the Mohawk before 1792 was, without doubt, of no real
consequence. Ascending boatmen and forwarding companies here and there
of necessity made the river passable, otherwise there could have been no
traffic at all. As one of our maps shows, as early as 1730 a neck of
land, in one instance, was cut through.[3] The batteaus which carried
provisions and ammunition northward to Fort Stanwix or Fort Schuyler
probably often broke a new way through the dams of forest driftwood
which the flood tides left; and at high tide there was, we know, good
downward navigation. Elkanah Watson must be remembered as one of the
pioneers in the improvement of the central New York waterway. In 1788
he made a western journey by way of the Mohawk, and his journal is full
of observations which show him to have been a far-sighted man with
correct ideas of the logical advance of commerce and the revolutions it
would make.[4] Returning from his journey October, 1791, he prepared all
the facts in favor of improving New York's western waterway, in the form
of a pamphlet which he presented to General Schuyler, then a member of
the state senate. He also contributed an anonymous article to one of the
papers in January, 1792, urging publicly the improvement of the Mohawk
and Oswego Rivers.[5]

Public interest being awakened, in one way or another, as to the value
of the river route westward, and the route up the Hudson and across to
Lake George and Lake Champlain, a bill was presented to the New York
legislature authorizing the formation of two companies to undertake the
work of improving these strategic passageways between the country east
of the state and the country west. Accordingly, on the thirtieth day of
March, 1792, the following act was passed by the legislature: _An Act
for establishing and opening Lock Navigation within this State_.[6] The
legal name of the company which was to operate on the Mohawk was the
"president, directors, and company of the western inland lock navigation
in the state of New-York." The word "northern" was inserted in the legal
name of the Hudson-Lake Champlain company, which was otherwise the same.
The two companies were chartered by one and the same act, on exactly the
same basis; we will consider, however, only the one under discussion.

The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, to operate between the
Hudson, and Lake Seneca and Lake Ontario, was to be capitalized at
$25,000; one thousand shares of twenty-five dollars each, no stock