and contractors. Lack of snow during one winter all but
stopped the work by cutting off the source of supplies. Pioneer
ailments, such as fever and ague, reaped great harvests, incapacitated
more than a thousand workmen at one time and for a brief while stopped
work completely.

For the most part, however, work was carried on simultaneously on all
the three great links or sections into which the enterprise was divided.
Local contractors were given preference by the commissioners, and
three-fourths of the work was done by natives of the State. Forward up
the Mohawk by Schenectady and Utica to Rome, thence bending southward to
Syracuse, and from there by way of Clyde, Lyons, and Palmyra, the canal
made its way to the giant viaduct over the Genesee River at Rochester.
Keeping close to the summit level on the dividing ridge between Lake
Ontario streams and the Valley of the Tonawanda, the line ran to
Lockport, where a series of locks placed the canal on the Lake Erie
level, 365 miles from and 564 feet above Albany. By June, 1823, the
canal was completed from Rochester to Schenectady; in October boats
passed into the tidewaters of the Hudson at Albany; and in the autumn of
1825 the canal was formally opened by the passage of a triumphant fleet
from Lake Erie to New York Bay. Here two kegs of lake water were emptied
into the Atlantic, while the Governor of the State of New York spoke
these words:

"This solemnity, at this place, on the first arrival of vessels from
Lake Erie, is intended to indicate and commemorate the navigable
communication, which has been accomplished between our Mediterranean
Seas and the Atlantic Ocean, in about eight years, to the extent of more
than four hundred and twenty-five miles, by the wisdom, public spirit,
and energy of the people of the State of New York; and may the God of
the Heavens and the Earth smile most propitiously on this work, and
render it subservient to the best interests of the human race."

Throughout these last seven years, the West was subconsciously getting
ready to meet the East halfway by improving and extending her steamboat
operations. Steamboats were first run on the Great Lakes by enterprising
Buffalo citizens who, in 1818, secured rights from the Fulton-Livingston
monopoly to build the Walk-in-the-Water, the first of the great fleet
of ships that now whiten the inland seas of the United States. Regular
lines of steamboats were now formed on the Ohio to connect with th