iftly. Though its western waterway--the roaring Juniata, which entered
the Susquehanna near Harrisburg--had a drop from head to mouth greater
than that of the entire New York canal, and, though the mountains of
the Altoona region loomed straight up nearly three thousand feet,
Pennsylvania overcame the lowlands by main strength and the mountain
peaks by strategy and was sending canal boats from Philadelphia to
Pittsburgh within nine years of the completion of the Erie Canal.

The eastern division of the Pennsylvania Canal, known as the Union
Canal, from Reading on the Schuylkill to Middletown on the Susquehanna,
was completed in 1827. The Juniata section was then driven on up
to Hollidaysburg. Beyond the mountain barrier, the Conemaugh, the
Kiskiminitas, and the Allegheny were followed to Pittsburgh. But the
greatest feat in the whole enterprise was the conquest of the mountain
section, from Hollidaysburg to Johnstown. This was accomplished by the
building of five inclined planes on each slope, each plane averaging
about 2300 feet in length and 200 feet in height. Up or down these
slopes and along the intermediate level sections cars and giant cradles
(built to be lowered into locks where they could take an entire canal
boat as a load) were to be hauled or lowered by horsepower, and later,
by steam. After the plans had been drawn up by Sylvester Welch and
Moncure Robinson, the Pennsylvania Legislature authorized the work in
1831, and traffic over this aerial route was begun in March, 1834. In
autumn of that year, the stanch boat Hit or Miss, from the Lackawanna
country, owned by Jesse Crisman and captained by Major Williams, made
the journey across the whole length of the canal. It rested for a night
on the Alleghany summit "like Noah's Ark on Ararat," wrote Sherman Day,
"descended the next morning into the Valley of the Mississippi, and
sailed for St. Louis."

Well did Robert Stephenson, the famous English engineer, say that, in
boldness of design and difficulty of execution, this Pennsylvania scheme
of mastering the Alleghanies could be compared with no modern triumph
short of the feats performed at the Simplon Pass and Mont Cenis. Before
long this line of communication became a very popular thoroughfare;
even Charles Dickens "heartily enjoyed" it--in retrospect--and left
interesting impressions of his journey over it:

"Even the running up, bare-necked, at five o'clock in the morning from
the tainted cabin to the di