[Illustration:  The Erie Canal]

%313.  The Erie Canal.%—­In 1817 the people of New York determined to provide such a route, and in that year they began to cut a canal across the state from the Hudson at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo.  To us, with our steam shovels and drills, our great derricks, our dynamite, it would be a small matter to dig a ditch 4 feet deep, 40 feet wide, and 363 miles long.  But on July 4, 1817, when Governor De Witt Clinton turned the first sod, and so began the work, it was considered a great undertaking, for the men of those days had only picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and gunpowder to do it with.

Opposition to the canal was strong.  Some declared that it would swallow up millions of dollars and yield no return, and nicknamed it “Clinton’s Big Ditch.”  But Clinton was not the kind of man that is afraid of ridicule.  He and his friends went right on with the work, and after eight years spent in cutting down forests, in blasting rocks, in building embankments to carry the canal across swamps, and high aqueducts to carry it over the rivers, and locks of solid masonry to enable the boats to go up and down the sides of hills, the canal was finished.[1]

[Footnote 1:  McMaster’s History, Vol.  IV., pp. 415-418.]

[Illustration:  Model of a canal packet boat]

Then, one day in the autumn of 1825, a fleet of boats set off from Buffalo, passed through the canal to Albany, where Governor De Witt Clinton boarded one of them, and went down the Hudson to New York.  A keg of water from Lake Erie was brought along, and this, when the fleet reached New York Harbor, Clinton poured with great ceremony into the bay, to commemorate, as he said, “the navigable communication opened between our Mediterranean seas [the Great Lakes] and the Atlantic Ocean.”

%314.  Effect of the Erie Canal%.—­The building of the canal changed the business conditions of about half of our country.  Before the canal was finished, goods, wares, merchandise, going west from New York, were carried from Albany to Buffalo at a cost of $120 a ton.  After the canal was opened, it cost but $14 a ton to carry freight from Albany to Buffalo.  This was most important.  In the first place, it enabled the people in New York, in Ohio, in Indiana, in Illinois, and all over the West, to buy plows and hoes and axes and clothing and food and medicine for a much lower price than they had formerly paid for such things.  Life in the West became more comfortable and easy than ever before.

In the next place, the Eastern merchant could greatly extend his business.  How far west he could send his goods depended on the expense of carrying them.  When the cost was high, they could go but a little way without becoming so expensive that only a few people could buy them.  After 1825, when the Erie Canal made transportation cheap, goods from New York city could be sold in Michigan and Missouri at a much lower price than they had before been sold in Pittsburg or Buffalo.