Louis in twenty-five days and went down with the current in
eight. Little, however, had been done to connect the East with the West.
Until the appearance of the steamboat in 1812, the merchants of
Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Louisville, and a host of other towns in the
interior bought the produce of the Western settlers, and floating it
down the Ohio and the Mississippi sold it at New Orleans for cash, and
with the money purchased goods at Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York,
and carried them over the mountains to the West. Some went in sailing
vessels up the Hudson from New York to Albany, were wagoned to the Falls
of the Mohawk, and then loaded in "Schenectady boats," which were
pushed up the Mohawk by poles to Utica, and then by canal and river to
Oswego, on Lake Ontario. From Oswego they went in sloops to Lewiston on
the Niagara River, whence they were carried in ox wagons to Buffalo, and
then in sailing vessels to Westfield, and by Chautauqua Lake and the
Allegheny River to Pittsburg. Goods from Philadelphia and Baltimore were
hauled in great Conestoga wagons drawn by four and six horses across the
mountains to Pittsburg. The carrying trade alone in these ways was
immense. More than 12,000 wagons came to Pittsburg in a year, bringing
goods on which the freight was $1,500,000.

[Illustration: Boats on the Mohawk[1]]

[Footnote 1: From an old print.]

[Illustration: THOMAS HARPER, AGENT FOR INLAND TRANSPORTATION]

With the appearance of the steamboat on the Mississippi and Ohio, this
trade was threatened; for the people of the Western States could now
float their pork, flour, and lumber to New Orleans as before, and bring
back from that city by steamboat the hardware, pottery, dry goods,
cotton, sugar, coffee, tea, which till then they had been forced to buy
in the East[1].

[Footnote 1: McMaster's _History of the People of the United States_,
Vol. IV., pp. 397-410, 419-421.]

This new way of trading was so much cheaper than the old, that it was
clear to the people of the Eastern States that unless they opened up a
still cheaper route to the West, their Western trade was gone.

[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 t