The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  Probably few children today—even Americans—would even try to answer the question. But the Hudson-Mohawk Gap is a thing of undeniable importance: It is a geographic feature, as plain as the nose on your face, composed of a pair of joined valleys that scythe through the hills of the Eastern United States. It offered an obvious route between the Atlantic Ocean and the lakes and rivers of the American Midwest.

  At one end of the gap lies the city of New York. At the time that this saga begins, in the early nineteenth century, it is only a modest-size port, bustling but in no sense a metropolis of world-class power. At the gap’s other end are the twin cataracts of Niagara Falls, together with the long westward chain of the Great Lakes and, south of their southern shorelines, the endless rural sprawl of the American interior.

  If there was any natural feature in the American East that might link these two, this gap, along the valleys of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, was it. It might fairly be claimed that New York City owes its very existence as a world-class city to the presence and human exploitation of the Hudson-Mohawk Gap.

  For it is all so obvious. Spearing due northward from the sea and the glacial moraine that is Long Island, the Hudson, a broad river of formidable power, flows deep and serene more than 140 tidal miles down from Troy and Albany to the sea. After reaching Troy, an upriver traveler on the Hudson sees it shrink suddenly and visibly, turning into a narrow and much faster-flowing stream that tumbles ice-cold out of a tiny lake called the Tear of the Clouds, high in the Adirondacks. The important local reach of the upper Hudson is not its source, however, but the place where its sudden shrinkage occurs. For this marks the point on the river not only where the Atlantic tides cease to have any effect, but also where another enormous stream joins the Hudson, as a tributary, on the river’s west bank.

  This is the Mohawk River, not quite as wide as the Hudson but large nonetheless. There is a change in direction here, too. For while the Hudson flows north to south, the Mohawk runs almost precisely west to east, passing through a wide valley that separates two massifs, the Adirondack Mountains to the north and the Catskills to the south. This valley extends some 150 miles toward (but never quite reaching) Lake Erie. Its basin is huge and topographically prominent; thanks to ancient glaciers, it extends a long way beyond the source of today’s river, in essence reaching all the way along the southern shore of Lake Erie to the escarpment that causes Niagara Falls.

  Joined together, these two river valleys—the north-south valley of the lower Hudson from the ocean to Albany and the east-west valley of the Mohawk up to its source near Constableville, New York—make up the famous gap.

  The Mohawk River was first seen by European explorers in the sixteenth century. It had been a popular route west, beautiful to look at but so isolated as to be somewhat feared. At the time of the first declared interest in building a canal, it was still sparsely settled. Its valleys were dark with thick forests; there were huge waterfalls and a thousand tributary streams. Along the banks, a few intrepid settlers had set down tiny log cabins and cleared an acre or so of land. There were a few isolated outposts of perpetually frightened soldiers, and fleeting in and out of the shadows behind them were Indians in their thousands, who had been known to collect scalps from white men who were too insolent or aggressive in their settlement and acquisition of land. Even as late as the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville famously passed by, nature here was still, in his words, “vigorous and savage.”

  The Mohawk Valley may have been something of a mean-spirited notch through the mountains, but with the Hudson it was the only major gap cutting through the Appalachians. And since it headed relentlessly westward, perhaps it could be adapted and protected for human use.

  It was here that the dream was born. To the new settlers and builders of early-nineteenth-century America, suddenly the logic became inescapable: it could be commercially prudent and politically useful, perhaps in time even profitable, to build a canal along the valley, a large shipping canal that would bring and take goods and people all the way west to Lake Erie. The Hudson would thereby be linked to the Great Lakes. New York City would thereby have a ready-made route directly to America’s heartland.

  The eventual Erie Canal, named for its up-country destination, was a creature with many parents. Most of the names of those who had the earliest visions are lost to all but the keenest of local historians. There was, for example, the marvelously alliterative Irish-born duo of Cadwallader Colden (a surveyor) and Christopher Colles (a sewage-pipe inventor), who, though unknown to each other, wrote early on of their conviction that one day the Mohawk would provide the necessary link.

  On the higher side of the social scale, there was Gouverneur Morris, a blue-blooded politician, high-class dreamer, perpetual optimist, and tireless orator in support of the plan; on the lower side, one Elkanah Watson, an indentured servant turned heroic social climber. Watson persuaded George Washington to bring him tea in bed while he was a guest at Mount Vernon. He made a dangerous trip all the way to the Mohawk headwaters in 1788 and on his return declared without fear of dissent that “a canal communication will be opened, sooner or later, between the Great Lakes and the Hudson.”

  Watson went on to state in no uncertain terms just who he thought should pay for it. The people of “the state of New-York have it within their power, by a grand stroke of policy, to divert the future trade of Lake Ontario and the great lakes above, from Alexandria and Quebec, to Albany and New-York.” In other words: act quickly and decisively, lest Canada and Britain steal from Americans the future that was theirs by right.

  Of all the early backers of the Erie Canal, one of the more intriguing and perhaps even the most influential was a flour merchant named Jesse Hawley, from the beautifully named northern New York town of Canandaigua, formerly the chief settlement of the Seneca, in whose language it meant “chosen spot.” In 1805, Hawley was grumbling out loud about his inability to send his flour cheaply and efficiently from the mills around his hometown down to the bakers in New York City.

  The roads, he complained, were execrable, worse than impossible. In summer these old Indian trails, barely improved, were chokingly dusty or, in the low-lying parts, mosquito-filled swamps. The use of logs laid transversely over marshy patches to keep them open made for a monumentally uncomfortable ride: not for nothing were such trails known as corduroy roads. And if summertime was not purgatory enough, the roads were routinely blocked by deep winter snows or in spring by marooned carts stuck wheel-deep in pits of glutinous black mud.

  The only alternative for a trader like Hawley was the river—except that the tolls then being charged by the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, which had built a small number of bypass locks around unpassable rapids on the Mohawk, were by common agreement outrageous. There was no doubt, Hawley declared to anyone who would listen, that this highly agricultural part of New York State could survive and prosper only if a canal was to be built—a proper, full-scale, cargo-dedicated Middlesex-like canal that would slice down the valley of the Mohawk to the point where it joined the Hudson. Only then could the wheat and barley of upstate New York get to market at reasonable cost and allow the farmers to make a decent living.

  Jesse Hawley, a New York wheat farmer and debtors’ prison inmate, wrote fourteen columns under the pen name “Hercules” in the weekly Genesee Messenger, arguing for the construction of what became the Erie Canal. Once freed he was among the first honored when the man-made waterway was eventually completed.

  In the early years of the nineteenth century in this part of the world, such sentiments were hardly unusual. They could fairly be said to be the talk of the valley. But there was something most unusual about the place from which Jesse Hawley eventually circulated these grumblings in a series of well-remembered essays. From 1807 onward he was in the Canandaigua Debtors’ Prison, serving a two-year sentence for racking up undischarged debts—most of them to the very navigation company to whom he had been paying the allegedly exorbitant fees. He had original
ly skipped town, to Pittsburgh, to try to escape his creditors; but in the end, he manned up and returned to face the music, only to get himself packed off to jail. It was during this long enforced sojourn that Hawley, under the nom de plume Hercules, wrote fourteen essays for his local paper, the Genesee Messenger, all of them urging the construction of a brand-new waterway.

  These essays were by no means the angered ventings of an embittered miscreant. They were all concerned with the future, as he saw it, of the region. They were well considered and elegantly written, and they mixed eloquence and prescience in equal measure. Were a canal to be built, he wrote, “the trade of almost all the lakes in North America would center at New-York for their common mart. This port . . . would shortly after be left without competition in trade except by that of New-Orleans. In a century its island would be covered with the buildings and population of its city.”*

  They were also quite specific, offering in great detail recommendations for the route the canal might follow. He forecast the numbers of locks that would be needed and the rate of ascent of the suggested route. Lake Erie is 565 feet above sea level; the Hudson at the mouth of the Mohawk, just 5. The resulting 560-foot climb, he reckoned, would have to be accomplished with thirty-six locks over the 363-mile route.

  Hawley also predicted with some accuracy what revenues might be expected, and he answered unerringly such questions as where the canal’s water might come from, how much the construction would cost, and how similar the design should be to the great European canals, of which he knew a great deal. Finally, Hercules argued vocally and very well that the state—New York—should finance the project. It was just the kind of grand venture, he declared, that only a government could afford and that good government was bound by duty, moral force, and the pragmatic considerations of commerce to undertake. He concluded with a fine rhetorical flourish:

  By the falls of Niagara [the Creator] has given a head to the waters of Lake Erie sufficient to flow into the Atlantic by the channels of the Mohawk and the Hudson, as well as by the Saint Lawrence. He has only left the finishing stroke to be applied by the hand of art, and it is complete! Who can reasonably complain?

  Many people were reading and listening, none more avidly than DeWitt Clinton, mayor of New York City, who later became one of the most revered and memorialized governors of New York State. Memorialized in name, perhaps—fifteen American cities are named for him, and six counties (two in Illinois, one named DeWitt County to avoid confusion)—but in truth, these days he is all too little remembered. And yet he should be: for as the historian Daniel Walker Howe reminded readers of his Oxford History of the United States, “The infrastructure he worked to create would transform American life, enhancing economic opportunity, political participation, and intellectual awareness.” And the jewel in the crown of that unifying infrastructure was the Erie Canal.

  Clinton persuaded the New York Senate to put up the $7 million seed money for construction. Naturally, with a sum like this taken from the treasury, there would be critics and naysayers: Clinton’s Folly, the project was called. Clinton’s Ditch. But their objections were brushed off: on Independence Day 1817—ten years after Jesse Hawley’s first essays were published—the first sod was cut, in the town of Rome, New York. The place had been chosen well, for it was almost exactly halfway between the lake and the Hudson. The workers who flocked in to build the structure were to move outward, west and east.

  The sunrise ceremony was an impressive spectacle, with high panjandrums gathered from around the state, with marching bands and immense breakfast tables and gaily colored streamers and flags, and with speeches, speeches galore, the tone and tenor of the occasion well matched to the task to which the state had set itself. The day’s excitement related more to the impact of the canal on the world outside than to its effect on the inner workings of the country that stretched away to the west. It was as though everyone already knew and accepted how profoundly the country would be affected: it was time to nudge the world beyond into believing even more. One of the dignitaries forecast that unborn millions would use this “great highway” to “hold a useful and profitable intercourse with all the maritime nations of the earth.”

  After the boom of a starting gun sounding from the roof of the local arsenal, a local judge loosed his team of oxen, and at Canal Commissioner Clinton’s order, he let them pull a symbolic plowshare forward to dig out the first few feet of trench. The construction was properly begun.

  Yet it strains belief that the canal was ever built at all. The participants didn’t seem to know what they were doing. The men who laid out the routes were not surveyors, but judges. One of the principal builders was an arithmetic teacher. Though many of the bosses had read about the building of the Middlesex Canal, almost none in the early Erie had any experience in the field, and few could even imagine knowing how to work a theodolite, pay out a survey chain, or construct a pound lock gate.

  And yet with eight years of heroic endeavor, they did indeed build it. With thousands of red stakes, they marked out the sixty-foot-wide path through virgin forests miles from any other habitation. They then set about clearing a track through the forest, braving clouds of mosquitoes. They decided it was far too time-consuming to fell trees with axes, so they pulled them down with ropes fixed to their topmost branches, bending them over until their trunks broke with great echoing snaps. They removed tree stumps using infernal homemade devices built of chains and gigantic iron wheels, which brutally ripped the roots out of the ground. They then got down to digging the ditch—forty feet wide and just four feet deep (the boats that would use the early canal were to be pulled by mules, with no screw-driven craft that might scour the canal bottom). The earth from the dig was piled up on the north side of the ditch and tamped down to form the towpath, from which the animals would haul the canal narrowboats.

  It was grueling, backbreaking, miserable work. But it was work—and the fact that New York State provided the early funds (President Jefferson had turned down flat a request for federal funding)* meant that workers were kept in full employment, despite the various financial crises that were roiling the country and the region at the time. Thousands of Irishmen came across the ocean to take the jobs, open to anyone who was willing and able. Canal laborers were paid “fifty cents a day and found,” meaning that free food, drink, and crude quarters were provided in addition to the wages, from which they generally cleared about $12 a month.

  They learned to build by building, and efficiency gradually improved. The first section, to Utica, was finished by 1819—though the fact that it took two years for a paltry fifteen miles suggested that it might take three decades to complete the whole thing. But it didn’t. Matters accelerated rapidly as more and more men arrived—though fully a thousand died from various fevers, malaria most probably, as the route edged westward across the Montezuma Marshes, close to where Syracuse now stands.

  The city of Syracuse played a vital role in the building of the canal. There had for some years been a prosperous local salt-extraction industry, and the Syracuse salt barons, together with the flour merchants of Genesee and Canandaigua, had long argued for the building of the canal. They got their way early in the process, for Syracuse was linked to the waterway no more than two years after Utica. But there was a sting: as soon as boats laden with the sacks of salt crystals began passing along the waterway, a canny New York revenue authority saw to it that a tax, at the rate of twelve and a half cents per bushel, was levied on it.

  So an elaborate, classically styled weigh station was built at Syracuse village; it lifted the barges bodily from the water, and as they hung briefly in the air, dripping, the revenue men calculated the tonnage of salt aboard. Though it never happened elsewhere, the tax seems never once to have been resented—it was seen as a necessary means of raising money for the construction of something that would ultimately be of benefit to all. But today people in Syracuse, now a giant city of half a million, sometimes remind visitors that, in their view at least
, the Erie was “the canal that salt built.”

  Work was completed in 1825 with the final flights of locks built over the Niagara escarpment, hoisting the waterway up the last eighty feet of limestone, beyond which Lake Erie’s waters brimmed. This was particularly trying work, most of it performed by hand, with picks, shovels, and muscles. It was decades too early for the “mountain howitzers,” the great steam-powered excavators that would be later used at Panama. Instead there was much employment of highly unstable black powder explosive, with consequent loss of life and limb, as the last few miles were completed to the terminal point.

  The citizens of Buffalo, then a smallish lakeside town, embarked on a brief campaign, led by a local judge named Wilkeson, to clear their own eponymous riverway and so tempt the canal engineers to route the Erie Canal to a terminus nearby. Energetic lobbying, together with the clearance of the creek, evidently worked, for the engineers did eventually end their labors there, and the fact that more than a million people now still brave one of the country’s cruelest climates (with roof-topping lake-effect snowfalls drowning the city each winter) to live in and around Buffalo is testimony to the wisdom of Judge Wilkeson and the city fathers of 1825 in doing all the persuading, as well as dredging and prettifying the banks of Buffalo Creek.

  The completion celebrations, a nonstop bacchanal the like of which had perhaps never before been seen in America, then occupied the better part of twelve crisp autumn days, as well as involving every single one of the 363 miles of the canal. The party began on October 26, 1825, just after breakfast.

  There was a convoy of narrowboats drawn up in Buffalo; it was allowed to begin its lap of honor along the waterway only after a long line of artillery pieces, arranged in sequence within earshot of one another all the way down to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, had each fired a pair of near-deafening shots in a salvo that rippled the length of the canal to the open sea, which was followed by a second that rippled all the way back again. The entire gun-after-gun-after-gun process took two full hours to play out, and the narrowboats waited patiently in Buffalo all the while.