The Paths of Inland Commerce

Of The

n 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 human

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

re 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

le 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

d. In order to retain her commanding position as the metropolis of Western trade she was compelle

al 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 the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh turnpikes-"Low Bridge! Low Bridge!" Pennsylvania had granted, it has been pointed out, that her Southern neighbors

y 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 New York canal, and, though the mount

hed 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 Moncure Robinson, the Pennsylvania Legislat

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 communi

when every 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 hi

(Gadshill Editi

unique experience of being carried over

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

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 o

p.

with the advance of years, tunnel, planes, and canal were supplanted by what was to become in t

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

w 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 Road by a governmental godmother. So thoroughly and quickly, indeed,

n. 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 god

elves 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 report of the engineers who made the preliminary survey. The estimated cost ran towards a quarter of a billion, four times the capital stock o

se 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 Pot

ngineering science held a means of overcoming the natural disadvantages of their position, they were determined to adopt that means, come what would of hardship, diff

t 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

ternecine 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

of which, surviving every other memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to whose history they belong

the words which Director Morris uttered on the same day near Baltimore an

k the ocean-we are about affording facilities of intercourse between the East and West, which will bind the o

ndently 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 yea

s 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. Fi

he 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 t

s. 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 co

ort 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, stre

as 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

iest access to the West and here, at her back door on the Niagara fronti