o 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 mad