come directly from earnings. The
Underwood administration has been conservative in paying dividends and
the stockholders grumble. But the Erie is at last coming into its own.
Instead of being a speculative football and a hopelessly bankrupt road,
as it was for nearly forty years, it is now in the forefront of the
great trunk lines of the eastern section of the United States. It is no
longer, what it was called for many years, the "scarlet woman of Wall
Street," but is a respectable member of the American railroad family.

CHAPTER V. CROSSING THE APPALACHIAN RANGE

The story of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad takes us back more than
ninety years. When the scheme for the construction of a railroad from
Baltimore to the waters of the Ohio River first began to take form, the
United States had barely emerged from the Revolutionary period. Many
of the famous men of that great day were still living. John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson had been dead only a year; Madison and Monroe had
recently retired from public life; John Quincy Adams held the office of
President, and the "reign" of Andrew Jackson had not yet begun.

At this time steam navigation on the rivers was only in its beginnings,
but no one could doubt that it would come into general use. Two decades
had passed since the Clermont had been launched on the Hudson by Robert
Fulton, and steamboats were now carrying cargoes successfully against
the swift currents up the Mississippi from New Orleans and were
threatening the extinction of the aggressive flatboat traffic. Great
strides had also been made in the construction of turnpike roads. The
famous National Pike from Cumberland to Vandalia, Illinois, had been in
large part completed and had done much for the opening up of the Western
territory.

Canal building was likewise an extensive development of this period. The
idea of connecting the waters of the Chesapeake with those of the Ohio
had been broached by George Washington before the Revolution, and he
had also prophesied the union of the Hudson and Lake Erie by canal. He
believed that a country of such great geographical extent as the United
States could not be held together except by close commercial bonds.

The opening of the Erie Canal to New York in 1825 stimulated other
cities on the Atlantic seaboard to put themselves into closer commercial
touch with the West. This was especially true of the city of Baltimore.
A canal connecting Chesapeake Bay and the Ohio