The purpose of Living History is to provide parents a history text in story form (the method used by the Savior in His teachings) from which to teach their children, blending the secular and religious together, and putting God back into history. Students are bored with history if all they learn about are facts and figures. But our faith in God is the main motivating factor why we do much of anything. That is the “why” we study history, and that is what makes it more The Erie Canal should have special meaning to Latter-day Saints. The Canal was finished in 1825, the Church was organized in 1830, and in 1831 the Saints were called to settle the Ohio. They got there by using the Erie Canal. Remember there were no roads over the Appalachian Mountains in 1831 which separated the Eastern Coast of the United States and the Mid-West where the Ohio lay.

For a hundred years before the Erie Canal was built, people had been talking about a canal which would join the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. Even during the dark days of the American Revolution, one of the Founding Fathers who was a strong supporter of the idea of a canal was Gouverneur Morris, a member of the First Continental Congress. Of course, there were many detractors who thought the canal idea was impractical and impossible to build. They felt it would be too expensive and would never raise enough money through tolls to pay for itself. The men who needed political support to get action on the canal turned finally to a man named De Witt Clinton. At that time, 1812, Clinton was forty-three years old, and mayor of New York City. He had served in the state legislature and then in the United States Senate before becoming one of the most active mayors New York City would ever have. When there was a fire he arrived at the scene behind his own galloping team almost as soon as the first fire wagon, and he showed up to help the police when there was any disturbance.

De Witt had never been much interested in the canal, nor had he really given much thought to it, but his chief political opponent, Jonas Platt, who had been lobbying for the canal, knew that the project had little chance without Clinton’s support. Fortunately, Platt realized that the waterway was more important than politics, and he suggested that Clinton take the lead in backing it. Clinton saw that such a move might be politically advantageous, and threw his support behind the project. From that time until his death, no one worked harder for the canal than he did. In fact, the Erie might never have been dug if it had not been for the ceaseless efforts of De Witt Clinton.

At a meeting in 1815, it was decided to petition the New York legislature to build the canal. Clinton wrote the petition, and it won so much support that in 1816 a committee was appointed to study the problems of digging the canal. Clinton, of course, was made one of the seven commissioners, along with Gouveneur Morris. People complained that there was not a chance in the world that a canal 363 miles long, beginning at Albany, New York and going west to Buffalo and Lake Erie, could be dug successfully through all that wilderness. These opponents pointed out the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company which had tried to carry out a much less ambitious program, but had been able to complete only a small part of it before it went broke. Another sad example was the Middlesex Canal which ran twenty-seven miles from Boston to the Merrimack River, the longest canal in the country at that time. The Middlesex Canal was a marvel and a joy to shippers bringing New Hampshire granite and lumber to Boston markets, but it was a nightmare to its owners who had to dig into their own pockets again and again to pay off its debts. If a twenty-seven-mile canal near busy Boston went broke, what chance had a ditch that would run hundreds of miles through the wilds of upper New York state?

The canal became a major issue in the New York elections held in 1817, and in the spring of that year, Clinton was elected Governor of the state. Of course, a vote for Clinton meant a vote for the canal. Those opposed to the canal dubbed the project “Clinton’s Ditch.”

But even then, the battle was not quite over. Under the rules of the New York Legislature, the bill had to be approved by a special group called the Council of Revision. Two of the five members were completely opposed to the idea of a canal; a third, James Kent, chief justice of the New York supreme court, thought the canal might be a fine thing some day – but not for a good many years in the future. The great waterway seemed doomed when Daniel Tompkins, the Vice President of the United States [under James Monroe], walked into the meeting room of the divided council.

Tompkins was a former governor of New York and very much against the canal, which he considered a waste of money. Just to make sure the council would vote against the canal bill, he warned its members that there would be another war with England within two years, and that the state ought to be spending its money on weapons and fortifications, rather than for anything so foolish as the canal.

This was the worst thing he could have said. Judge Kent, who was going to vote against the canal bill, resented Tompkin’s attempts to frighten the committee with talk of war. Rising from his seat, he announced, “If we must have war, or have a canal, I am in favor of the canal.” And so, by the margin of one vote, the Erie Canal was approved. (Ralph K. Andrist, The Erie Canal, page 26)

In the wilderness village of Rome, New York, on July 4, 1817, the great western canal at last got under way with a ceremony to mark the turning of the first shovelfuls of earth. From end to end, Hudson River to Lake Erie, the canal would be 363 miles long. The channel was to be forty feet wide at the surface, and would slope inward to twenty-eight feet at the bottom, and the water in the channel would be four feet deep. Besides these basic requirements, the engineers would have to consider that Lake Erie is 568 feet higher than the Hudson River. There were also places where the canal would step down to cross a broad valley and then rise up again on the other side. Eighty-three locks would have to be built to overcome this difference. There were other problems too. American canalboats had neither sails nor oars and needed to be towed. So, along the length of the canal there would be a towpath ten feet wide for the horses and mules which were needed to draw the canalboats.

The work was slow and everyone was clamoring for the pace to be picked up, and the supply of native American workers was not enough. Recruiters were sent down to New York City to meet the immigrant boats arriving from Ireland. With the promise of roast beef twice a day, regular whiskey rations, and wages of eighty cents per day, it was a tough offer to refuse. By 1825, however, wages would rise to a dollar a day. The Irish made up about a quarter of the workers used on the canal, the remainder of the laborers hired were other European immigrants and native-born Americans.

At one point it looked as though the canal was going to be stopped dead in its tracks. At first the middle section had been selected to work on first, largely because it seemed to be the easiest to dig, but one part of it turned out to be a nightmare. Near the section’s west end, at the outlet of Cayuga Lake, was a low, marshy area across which the line of the canal was to run for four-and-a-half miles. The Montezuma Marshes, named after a small village nearby, was a dismal spot with impenetrable thickets of rushes taller than a man, and oozy black muck underfoot. The first day in the marshes, the men joked about the easy digging, but the next morning their jokes had turned sour because the soft mud they had shoveled out had settled and flowed back into the ditch. There was little sign of the channel dug the day before. So, to keep the sides of the canal firm, they constructed retaining walls of planks held in place by long stakes driven down through the soft mud and into the firm layer of clay beneath. That worked pretty well, except that occasionally a man would pound a stake through the mire into the clay only to watch it sink into bottomless quicksand.

Even the Irishmen, who had shown a knack for working in swampy places, did not like this spot. Their legs swelled from standing in the water for hours, and leeches fastened onto them, but their sense of humor stayed with them and they gave such names to the worst places as “Bottomless Pit,” “Digger’s Misery,” “Backbreak Bog,” and “Mudturles’ Delight.” However, the worst did not come until early summer brought the mosquito season. The insects, enormous clouds of them, fell on the men in such numbers that hands swelled and eyes were puffed almost shut. Little smudge pots were obtained for the men which contained a small glowing fire covered with green leaves to create dense smoke. They were worn around the neck, and the men were soon calling them “Montezuma necklaces.”

One of the pests that was making life so miserable was the anopheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria – although no one yet connected the insect with the disease. By early August, workers by the hundreds were coming down with chills and fevers. Almost every man able to walk left the job and got away because it was believed that bad air caused the sickness. A traveler passing through found a doctor working himself to the bone caring for his hundreds of patients night and day. His first treatments had done little for the men, as they included bleeding, and the administration of feverwort (the bitter root of the yellow gentian family of plants used as a tonic), snakeroot (a number of plants with medicinal qualities used in treating snake bites), green pigweed (any of several course weeds of the amaranth family, with dense, bristly clusters of small green flowers), and Seneca Oil (known as petroleum jelly today). He also tried a new drug from Peru called “Jesuit’s Bark” and found that it seemed to do some good. In fact, the bark contained quinine which later was recognized as the best treatment for malaria. Soon, work in the Montezuma Marshes stopped completely and there was talk of giving up the whole project, but when the autumn came, the sickness disappeared with the mosquitoes, and the work went ahead once again.

In October of 1819, a little more than two years after the first groundbreaking ceremony at Rome, another crowd gathered there to celebrate the opening of the first stretch of canal. It was not much of a channel, extending only fifteen miles between Rome and Utica, but the commissioners had decided that something was needed to call attention to the progress that had been made. People wanted a canal, but when it was not dug overnight they became impatient. Clinton, who had been put into office overwhelmingly two years before, had become very unpopular by 1819. A piece of finished canal might convince the people that the Erie was coming right along, and that Clinton and the other commissioners had been doing their job. A new boat called the Chief Engineer of Rome, became the first to float on Erie water. It was towed by horses from Rome to Utica in one day, and back the next. The event was celebrated with the usual speechmaking, firing of cannon, and cheers. Enemies of the governor and the canal sneered that at the rate of fifteen miles every two years, it would take forever to built the Erie, however, considerably more than that had been done, it just wasn’t finished yet. Just about all of the ninety-four miles of the middle section had been cleared.

That first fifteen-mile stretch immediately began to play an important part in the great westward migration, but for the people living beside it, it became a new and fascinating plaything. Almost every canalside dweller built himself a boat to float on the Erie. As often as not they sank to the bottom where the owner let them rest. Farmers found the channel very convenient for floating logs from one part of their farms to another, but they had the bad habit of leaving the logs in the channel for several days until they got around to hauling them out. The canal also developed into a fine place for fishing. The towpath was used for a road, and some of the more sports minded farmers even used it as a race track during the evenings. At times the path was so cluttered with straying farm animals that a team towing a canalboat on honest business had a hard time getting through. Finally a fence was built to keep the wandering animals off the towpath. The commissioners did set up a system of fines – five dollars for throwing rubbish into the channel, ten dollars for leaving a sunken boat, etc., – but it was not strictly enforced. The commissioners did not want to make enemies of the countryfolk at a time when the canal needed every possible friend.

The same canalboat captains who demanded strict controls as far as the country people were concerned, sang another tune when tolls were put into effect. Some of them muffled the feet of their horses by wrapping them in cloths and tried to sneak by the toll stations at night without paying, but the toll collector at Rome made a network of iron chains that he could lower into the water with a winch when night fell. After he caught a few boats trying to slip by his station, the practice of toll-dodging on the first small length of the Eire Canal came to an end.

The next year, 1820, water was admitted from the reserve basins into one part after another of the Erie. On the fourth of July, seventy-three new canalboats left Syracuse in a parade with speechmaking and fireworks to mark the completion of nearly all the middle section. The celebration had barely ended before the same boats were at work hauling produce, merchandise, and travelers along the newly opened canal route. However, with this success, Clinton was forced to announce that he could not meet his campaign promise to have the canal finished by 1823, but he promised that it definitely would be ready for business by 1825. Once again there was an uproar from his enemies who said that the Ditch would not be finished in 1825 or any other year.

The criticism, however, did not stop the governor. He was much too busy pushing his crews even to consider failure. Except for the crossing of the Montezuma Marshes, the middle section had presented no other major engineering problems, but the builders found themselves facing one tough problem after another as they went to work on the eastern and western sections. Much of the land was rough and hilly, with deep valleys crossing the canal route. There was much rock to be blasted out, and almost all of the canal’s eighty-three locks still had to be built to compensate for the long rise from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Streams that lay in the way were usually in deep valleys much lower than the canal. The only way to get the waterway across was to put it on an aqueduct, as water-carrying bridges were called.

While the busy crews built world-famous aqueducts without the benefit of power machinery, they also put up about 300 small bridges. A few were for country roads that the canal cut across, but most were for farmers whose lands had been split by the waterway. The state of New York had promised that it would build “occupation bridges” (so called because they allowed the owners to continue their occupation of farming) whereever their land was cut. To save money, the bridges were made low – only seven-and-a-half feet above water. In the meantime, De Witt Clinton might have been getting things done on the construction of the canal, but he was still having his troubles elsewhere. In 1822 the anti-canal forces combined against him were so strong that he did not receive the nomination for governor. However, he was still a canal commissioner and continued to push the project that had become the one absorbing interest of his life.

Opposition was coming not only from politicians and other opponents, but many of the taxpayers as well. The costs of the canal were mounting. Several million dollars had been spent and some people were convinced that when the canal was finished, it would never pay for itself. Surely it would be better to drop it now than to go on eternally paying its debts. Clinton, knowing that time was growing short, worked tirelessly. By midsummer of 1822 the Erie was carrying water all along the 280 miles of its projected route. Then in April of 1824, Clinton’s political enemies felt that they were strong enough to move against him, and managed to have him removed from his position as a canal commissioner, an office he had held since 1810. However, just then the first financial reports on the toll collection coming in showed that travelers were eagerly using what there was of the Erie, even though they had to haul their goods by wagon around the unopened sections. Some 1,822 boats were operating on one stretch only forty-five miles long, out beyond the growing wilderness village of Rochester. On this section alone almost $21,000 in tolls had been collected in six months. By the end of the summer, the total collected by all operating sections of the canal was almost $300,000. Those who had opposed Clinton at one time now honestly felt that he had been treated unfairly, and threw their support behind him. So once again De Witt Clinton was back in favor, and when the November elections came around he was nominated for the governorship and elected back into office.

At Lockport, north of Buffalo, there was a sharp change in the level of the rocky land which became almost a cliff. Nathan Roberts, another of the Erie’s self-made engineers, had pondered long about how he was going to get the canal up that rock face. With no one to help him, and no guidance except a few books, he designed a double set of five locks – one set for eastbound and another for westbound travel. This was the only place on the Erie where there were two sets of locks. They were needed to avoid hopeless bottlenecks. Otherwise, a boat going one way would have had to pass through all five locks before a boat coming the other way could start through. Each lock had a lift of twelve feet instead of the usual eight feet four inches, and were cut out of solid rock – even the towpath. At one point on their shelflike path, horses and driver were sixty feet above the lock. The western end of the Erie Canal was the last section to be finished. It was now October 26, 1825 and a great celebration got under way to hail the new canal and honor the man who had made it possible.

The festivities started in Buffalo. A parade, led by a brass band, escorted Governor Clinton and other dignitaries from the courthouse through the town to the canal. There they boarded the Seneca Chief, whose bright decorations included a huge oil painting of Clinton depicted as Hercules resting from his labors. On the deck were two colorfully painted kegs. Both held water from Lake Erie. Later, in New York, they were to be poured into the ocean with a mixture of waters from the Mississippi, Columbia, Thames, La Plata, Seine, Rhine, Orinoco, Amazon, Nile, Gambia, Indus, and Ganges rivers in a “Wedding of the Waters.” Four other canalboats followed the Seneca Chief in the official flotilla. One, Noah’s Ark, carried two Indian boys, a bear, two young deer, a beaver, two eagles, various other birds, and even a tank of fish. Its purpose was to symbolize the West before the coming of the white man.

The five boats left Buffalo at 10 a.m. At that moment, a cannon was fired. A few moments later another cannoneer, a number of miles farther down the canal, heard the sound and fired his gun. In this way the message was relayed all the way from Buffalo to New York City, 500 miles away. The last signal, which was fired at 11:20 a.m., then triggered a tremendous artillery salute from New York. Then the line of gunners sent the same signal booming back, to let Buffalo know that New York had received the message. The boats, each towed by a team of horses, had a quiet trip between towns because most of the country through which the canal ran was still wilderness. But at every town and hamlet there was food and speechmaking. Many communities sent boats to join the official flotilla which soon stretched far along the canal.

Canal towns had been preparing since midsummer for this event. Most of them had constructed what were called transparencies – boxes that had letters cut into their faces with lanterns inside so their message could be read night or day. They were hung everywhere; small ones on the sides of cabins saying merely CLINTON, or great arch-shaped ones like the huge sign spanning the canal at Montezuma that proclaimed DE WITT CLINTON AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS. Fireworks were shot from the stone-arch aqueduct at Rochester. Tiny Buckville could afford nothing so grand, but did its best by voting to keep every cabin in the village lighted until midnight. (Ibid., pages 67-71)

Some of the towns along the canal, however, gave Clinton an icy reception. Rome, for instance, had grown into a thriving town on the canal built by the Old Western Inland Lock Navigation Company. Yet, the Erie had bypassed it by nearly half a mile, and prosperous businesses found themselves facing the now stagnant ditch built by the Navigation Company. Some of the unhappy citizens held their own “Wedding of the Waters” before Clinton and his fleet arrived. In a funeral-like procession, the townspeople carried a barrel of water from the old canal and dumped it into the Erie. Schenectady was equally cold. The town had become prosperous by hauling people and freight from the Hudson River to Mohawk River boats. The Erie Canal might be good for the country but it had ruined Schenectady’s specialized business, and so the townspeople completely ignored Clinton’s arrival.

On November 2, after a trip of about a week, the Seneca Chief and her large following passed from the Erie Canal into the Hudson River. After a celebration that lasted far into the night, the boats headed down the Hudson toward New York City. There, two steamboats were able to pull the entire fleet of canalboats down the Hudson to the harbor. Governor Clinton was met by cannon salutes from the city’s forts, by city dignitaries, and by swarms of boats with tooting whistles and cheering passengers. The Seneca Chief was towed out to Sandy Hook where New York harbor joins the Atlantic, and the ceremony of the “Wedding of the Waters” was carried out. Clinton poured the two kegs of Lake Erie water into the ocean as a symbol that the Great Lakes and the Atlantic were now united. Then the mixture of river waters was emptied as a sign that commerce from all parts of the world could now be carried to the American West.

Before the brief ceremony had ended, Clinton’s face was full of tears of emotion. He had worked so hard and suffered so much disappointment, and now at last the canal was truly finished.

From the moment the Erie Canal opened, its waters were thronged with lines of vessels moving in opposite directions. The volume of traffic was so great, particularly during the autumn and spring seasons, that boats often had to wait for hours before they could get through the locks. The Eire was too small for the amount of business it carried the very day that it was finished. The nation had never seen anything like it. The major east-west transport of goods and people moved along the Erie, and each year the traffic increased. There was a constant string of emigrants going west to find new homes. Boats from the West carried the produce of farm and forest to the cities of the East Coast. Life was exciting for the people who traveled on Erie water, or worked on the canal, or lived beside it. Canal towns grew as fast as houses, mills, and stores could be built by overworked carpenters and masons.

During the day, packet (the type of boat which floated the Canal) travel often provided pleasure and excitement. There was much to watch as the boat glided past forested areas, small villages, and through growing cities. Passengers could relax on a bench on the roof of the cabin, or when waiting at the locks or if traffic became tiresome, they could always jump ashore and go for a short walk on the towpath. One of the most common ways of getting back aboard a canalboat was to wait on one of the low bridges that crossed the canal and then drop onto the cabin as the boat passed beneath. The canal crews had built more than 300 “occupation bridges” for divided farms and interrupted roads. Even more were being built as the country along the canal became settled. Since it was cheaper, the bridges were built low, but this also made them hazardous for travelers. As a boat moved along, the warning cry came at regular intervals from the steersman, “Low bridge! Everybody down!” Anyone who failed to bend or crouch down near the deck was knocked down or swept overboard, and often seriously injured.

For packets running around the clock, fresh teams of horses, stabled along the way in barns, were changed regularly. The speed limit on the canal was four miles an hour, to prevent the wash from swift-moving boats from wearing away the banks. However, packet captains often speeded up their teams to six or seven miles an hour to gain time. Of course, by speeding, the captain was breaking the law and was liable for a fine of ten dollars, but he could earn a great deal more than that by making good time. He would merely jump ashore at the toll collector’s office, throw down his ten dollars, and keep right on going.

At night, the cabin became the sleeping quarters. Narrow bunks were put up along the walls where they were stacked two-and sometimes three-high. The forward part of the cabin was the ladies’ section, and on the more elegant boats, a curtain was drawn across at night to separate it from the men’s section. Otherwise the men remained on deck until the ladies turned in, before descending to their own bunks. The bunks were simply frames with canvas tacked over them, attached to the wall on one side but supported on the outside by chains or leather straps from the ceiling. The supports sometimes gave way and there was much humor in the room as two or even three men were tumbled to the floor. There was absolutely no privacy. A person had to edge into his narrow space with everyone watching. Of course under such conditions, there was little undressing for bed. Most people took off no more than shoes, and perhaps a coat. Once in his bunk, the would-be sleeper found it too narrow and too close to the one above to allow him to turn over during the night. Then the boots of crewmen could be heard clumping overhead on the cabin roof, and the snores and noises of children and the assorted sounds of the busy canalside made the night something to be endured by all but the most hardy. Some of the experiences of this kind of luxury travel were humorous – at least to a person looking back on them. Frederick Gerstaeker, a German traveler, wrote about his night on a packet.

I awoke with a dreadful feeling of suffocation; cold perspiration stood on my forehead and I could hardly draw my breath; there was a weight like lead on my stomach and chest. I attempted to cry out – in vain; I lay almost without consciousness. The weight remained immovable; above me was a noise like distant thunder. It was my companion of the upper story, who lay snoring over my head; and that the weight which pressed on my chest was caused by his body no longer remained a doubtful point. I endeavored to move the Colossus [a giant thing] – impossible. I tried to push, to cry out – in vain. He lay like a rock on my chest and seemed to have no more feeling.

In his plight, Gerstaeker just managed to reach his cravat [a neckerchief, scarf, or necktie] pin and jab sharply right where the weight was heaviest. There was a cry of “What’s that? Murder! Help!” From above. Then the weight was momentarily lifted and Gerstaecker slid out and stood on the floor. In the dim lamplight he discovered that the worn canvas of the bunk above had ripped under the weight of his fat neighbor, and that the man, in effect, had been sitting on Gerstaecker’s chest. The pin thrust had caused the man to jerk upward allowing Gerstaecker to escape. But now the canvas had split even more, so that the unfortunate man was sitting on the bunk below with his head and feet still in his own, crying, half-asleep, “Help! Murder!” (Ibid., page 90)

Packets could carry only the hand luggage of passengers and so were not useful to emigrant families going west to settle. A family with livestock, household goods, and other possessions usually traveled on a lineboat – a freight boat which allowed settlers to set up camp and cookstoves on deck. A lineboat’s deck was a busy place. There were children running all over and around the various piles of belongings, while smoke rose from an assortment of stoves as women prepared meals for their families.

There was little luxury on a lineboat. Sleeping on stacks of possessions was probably as comfortable as the cramped, stuffy quarters of the packets, but the pleasures of being in the fresh air turned sour when an all day rain was falling. A lineboat was considerably slower than a packet and often ran only during daylight. These lineboats were operated by companies, and the quality of the equipment and teams used on them depended on how much money they were making from the business. This meant that, with old horses frequently changed, the lineboat could make little more than fifty to sixty miles in a good day. But a packet boat could cover about eighty miles in twenty-four hours.

The life of the captain of a lineboat was not an easy one. He needed vigilance to beat out competitors for freight; he needed stamina; and he often needed a clever pair of fists to help him settle disputes with other captains. The boats were the only homes many captains knew. Their wives cooked and kept house in the tiny cabins. They hung out washing on lines on deck which were set low to prevent disasters at low bridges. Children were raised on board, and even the tow horses were part of the family. When the horses were not working they were brought on board and kept in stalls. (Ibid., page 94)

Before the Erie was even finished canals were being dug or plans drawn up for canals in half a dozen other states. The success of the Erie had made everyone canal-crazy. Those men who had said that the Eire would never pay its own way were now predicting success for every half-baked plan to build a canal that came their way. No one stopped to consider that the Eire was prosperous because it was the only passage through the Appalachian Mountains, and no other canal could possibly have such a clear advantage. To give the reader an idea of the extent of the canal system built in the United States before the railroad took over in importance, the following list of just some of the canals that were finished by 1850 is given below.

1. Maine – Cumberland & Oxford (between Portland and Sebago Lake)

2. Massachusetts – Middlesex (between Boston and Lowell)

3. Massachusetts & Connecticut – Hampshire & Hampden (between Northampton, Mass., and New Haven Conn.)

4. Massachusetts & Rhode Island – Blackstone (between Worcester, Mass., and Providence, R.I.)

5. New York – Black River (between Rome [joining the Erie Canal] and Carthage)

6. New York – Genesee Valley (between Rochester [Lake Ontario] and Olean)

7. New York – Chenango (between Corning and Utica)

8. Ohio & Pennsylvania – Pennsylvania & Ohio (between Akron, Ohio & Johnstown Pennsylvania)

9. Pennsylvania – Pennsylvania Union (between Hollidaysburg and Philadelphia)

10. New Jersey – Delaware & Raritan (between New Brunswick and Bordentown)

11. Delaware – Chesapeake and Delaware (between Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay)

12. Virginia – James River & Kanawha (between Richmond and Buchanan)

13. Ohio – Ohio & Erie (between Cleveland [Lake Erie] and Portsmouth)

15. Ohio – Miami (between Toledo [Lake Erie] and Cincinnati)

16. Ohio & Indiana – Wabash & Erie (between Toledo, Ohio [Lake Erie] and Evansville, Indiana)

17. Illinois – Illinois & Michigan (between Chicago [Lake Michigan] and La Salle)

(Ralph K. Andrist, The Erie Canal, pages 110-111)

The canal era began with the Erie, and lasted until mid-century. Some of the channels continued in use after that time, but none of them achieved the success of the Erie Canal. These canals created their own world, and developed their own breed of men. As a matter of fact, they were not even called canals. Everyone who worked or lived on them pronounced the word “canawls.” Credit goes the Irish and the Dutch who were the first to start pronouncing the word that way.

It took a great many people to run a canal. It is estimated that in 1845 there were 4,000 boats on the Erie with 25,000 men, boys, and women working on them. Then there was a large force of locktenders, towpath walkers who constantly patrolled the canal to watch for the first signs of a leak or break, and repair and maintenance crews. There was a tremendous number of people who did not work directly on the canal but whose canalside shops and services took care of those who traveled or worked on it. Finally, there was a very mixed assortment of those who were there because the canal offered such a profitable area for their operations: gamblers, thieves, exhibitors of dancing bears, fortune tellers, and the like. A canal was a busy and exciting place to be.

The crew of a canalboat, not counting the captain, numbered anywhere from two to six men. A company owned packet running day and night might have two steersmen, a cook, a deck hand, and a driver who was changed with his team every fifteen or twenty miles. The man, or boy, who drove the two horse team was called a hoggee, an old Scottish word for a laborer. He had two or three horses or mules hitched together, one ahead of the other, and generally rode on the rear horse. A hoggee usually worked two six-hour shifts a day on the towpath, regardless of cold, rain, or sleet. In his off hours he had to feed and water his team, rub them down, treat chafed places and sores from rubbing collars, and repair harnesses.

A hoggee’s hours on the towpath also involved more than just keeping the team pulling. On the busy canal, boats were constantly passing and overtaking each other. A daydreaming hoggee could get towlines tangled so quickly that his team might be dragged into the canal. When two boats traveling in opposite directions had to pass each other, the steersmen of the outside boat moved to the far side of the canal [or away from the towpath]. The hoggee then had to draw his horses to the outside of the towpath and stop them. This allowed his line to go slack so that it lay on the bottom of the towpath and the canal. And then the inside boat, with its horses pulling and its line taut, would cross over the other towline and both boats would continue on their way.

In spite of all the skill and responsibility involved in a driver’s work, most of the hoggees were boys barely into their teens. Boys were popular with captains because they were cheaper [twelve dollars a month for men drivers and ten dollars for a boy was the common wage], and they were easier to bully and cheat. Some captains deliberately mistreated their young drivers toward the end of the season to try to make the boys run away in desperation without collecting their season’s wages. (Ibid., page 124)

Another important member of the canal force was the towpath walker, or pathmaster. His job was to patrol a ten-mile section of towpath and its shoulder with the canal. He carried with him a sack full of manure and hay. If he found a small leak, he stuffed the mixture inside it and sealed it by stamping it down. If the leak was beyond such simple repair measures, he called for help. Muskrat burrows in the banks were a common cause of leaks and the animals were thoroughly hated by canawlers. A small leak could grow so quickly that whole sections of bank would suddenly crumble away. Then the water would drain out of the canal leaving boats stranded on the bottom of the canal. Slim and speedy repair boats pulled by fast horses were stationed at intervals along the canal, ready to respond to any emergency call. They moved at the pace of ten miles an hour, and were appropriately called hurry-up boats.

The heyday of the canals lasted no more than thirty years. Even while the canals were booming, the railroads were busy laying a few miles of track here, and a few miles there. The little locomotives were getting better, and they were less likely to break down or blow up. They were able to haul more freight and passengers even though they still had to stop every six miles to take on wood and water to fuel the engine. Very soon the railroads began to catch the fancy of America. A great debate went on between those who wanted the speed of the railroads, and those who supported the dependability of the canals. It was against God’s law, said the canal people, for men to go roaring across the land at fifteen or even twenty miles an hour. Then, there were the doctors who doubted that the human body could stand such speeds without suffering serious mental and physical ailments, including possible boiling of the blood. Most Americans, because of the size of the country, were always in a hurry to get places, and rather liked the idea of all that speed.

The great Erie Canal continued to make money while all the others were going into debt. For a very long time the railroads could offer no serious competition because the Erie still lay in the most convenient passage through the mountains. In the early part of 1825, half a year before it was completely opened, the canal commissioners reported that the Erie was already too small. They suggested that the locks be doubled, and even that a parallel canal should be built in the eastern section. The work crews got busy again in 1836 enlarging the canal. In some places two sets of locks were built – all were extended from ninety to one hundred and eighteen feet. The channel, which had generally been forty feet wide and four feet deep, was made seventy feet by seven feet. Many sections of the channel were straightened and relocated, reducing the Albany- Buffalo distance by thirteen miles. Many of the locks were made higher, eliminating several of the original eighty-three.

The first enlargement was completed in 1862. By then the canal era was well past, and many waterways in other states had already been overrun by the wilderness, but the Erie showed no sign of fading. After its enlargement, it could carry boats of up to 250 tons, yet it was still too small. Even into the 1880's, it was said that a person standing on a bridge could often see two long lines of boats in either direction as far as the eye could see, and at night the string of headlamps looked like a torchlight parade. By 1860 the railroads had grown so strong that they campaigned for the draining of the Erie so that railroad tracks could be laid on its bed. By 1882 all tolls were abolished, for by that time the Erie had paid its original cost of $7,143,789 many times over. Between 1825, when the canal was opened, and 1882, when toll charges were abolished, the state had collected $121,461,891. (Erie Canal, World Book Encyclopedia, 1990)

United States History, an LDS Perspective, volume 2, pages 291-302.