The Paths of Inland Commerce

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outes 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

he 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 thi

worthy 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 year

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 eve

ers, by John Moody (in T

mitted 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

creased transportation: the Ohio Canal to connect Portsmouth on the Ohio River with Cleveland on Lake Erie and to traverse the richest parts of the Scioto and Muskingum valleys, and to the west the Miami Canal to pierce the fruitful Miami and Maumee valleys and join Cincinnati with Toledo. De Wit

sand bushels; but in the first year of its operation the Ohio Canal brought to the village of Cleveland over a quarter of a million bushels of wheat, fifty thousand barrels of flour, and over a mi

nd 1832 and connecting Lake Erie with Lake Ontario by a series of twenty-seven locks with a drop of three hundred feet in twenty-six miles. This undertaking prepared the way for the subsequent opening of the St. Lawrence canal syst

d Wisconsin and the Chicago and Illinois rivers had been worn deep by the fur traders of many generations, and with the dawning of the new era enthusiasts of Illinois were pointing out the strategic position of the latter route for a great trade between Lake Michigan and the Gulf of Mexico. Thus the wave of enthusiasm for canal construction that had swept New York and Ohio now reached Indiana and Illinois. Indian ownership of land in the latter State for a mom

struction, opposition of jealous sections not immediately benefited, estimates which had to be reconsidered and augmented, and so on. The land grants pledged to pay the bonds were at first of small value, and their advance in price depended on the success of the canal

chigan Canal made Chicago a city of four thousand people by the panic year of 1837. So absorbed were these Chicago folk in the building of their canal and in wresting from their lake firm foothold for a city (reclaiming four hundred feet of lake bed in two years) that the panic affected their town less than it did many a rival. Although the canal enterprise came to an ominous pause in 1842, after the expenditure of five millions, the pledge of the State stood the enterprise in good stead. Local financiers, together with New York and Boston promoters, advanced about a quarter of a million, while French an

cause of its general effect on the industrial world but also because out of it came the St. Mary's River Ship Canal. Nowhere in the zone of the Great Lakes has any region produced such unexpected changes in American industrial and commercial life as did the region of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota contributory to Lake Superior. If, as the story goes, Benjamin Franklin said, whe

of Ohio territory which she believed to be hers. If Michigan felt that she had lost by this compromise, her state geologist, Douglass Houghton, soon found a splendid jewel in the toad's head of defeat, for the report of his survey of 1840 confirmed the story of the existence of large copper deposits, and the first rush to El Dorado followed. Amid the usual chaos, conflict, and failure incident to such stamp

"What could be done here without my compass." At length the compassman called for us all to "come and see a variation which will beat them all." As we looked at the instrument, to our astonishment, the north end of the needle was

ir to play as equally important a part in the grain industry. Copper and iron no less came out of the blue of this cold northern region than did the mighty crops of Minnesota wheat, corn, and oats. In the decade precedin

ly across the portage between Lake Huron and Lake Superior. The last link of navigation in the Great Lake system, however, was made possible in 1852 by a grant by Congress of 750,000 acres of Michigan land. Although only a mile in length, the work proved to be of unusual difficulty since the pat

ts mission in carrying the thousands of emigrants pouring into the Northwest, a heterogeneous multitude which made the Lake Erie boats seem, to one traveler at least, filled with "men, women and children, beds, cradles, kettles, and frying pans." These craft were built after t

g of such steamers as the Michigan, the Great Western, and the Illinois. These were the first boats with an upper cabin and were looked upon with marked suspicion by those best acquainted with the severe storms upon the Great Lakes. The Michigan, of 475 tons, built by Oliver Newberry at Detroit in 1833, is said to have been the first ship of this type. These boats proved their seaw

d a new era of lighthouses and buoys, breakwaters and piers, and dredged channels. Another handicap to the volume of business which the lake boats handled in the period just previous to the Civil War was the inadequacy of the feeders, the roads, riverways, and canals. The Erie Canal was declared too small almost before the cries of its virulent opponents had died away, and the enlargement of i

efore the Lake Shore was considered at Cleveland or Chicago as important commercially as the neighboring portage paths which by the Ordinance of 1787 had been created "common highways forever free." The idea of joining Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago with the interior-an idea as old as the Indian trails thither-still dominated men's minds even in the early part of the railroad epoch. Chicago desired to be connected with Cairo, the ice-free port on the Mississippi; and Cleveland was eager to be joined to Columbus and Cincinnati. The enthusiastic railway promoters of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois drew splendid plans for uniting all parts of

try on the continental alignment and the imperial situation of Chicago, and later of Omaha, came to be realized. The new view transformed men's conceptions of every port on the Great Lakes in the chain from Buffalo to Chicago. At a dozen southern ports on Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan, commerce now touched the swiftest and most economical means of transcontinental traffic. This development culminated in the miracle we call Chicago.

h a proud and loyal race; from farm and factory regiment on regiment marched forth to fight for unity; from fields without number produce to sustain a nation on trial poured forth in abundance; enormous quantities of iron were