THE

see.

Although those regions were then virtually an unbroken wilderness, the far-seeing Clinton-statesman that he was as well as soldier-recognized at once not only the importance of those valleys to the future development of New York, but the great influence they were destined to exert in hastening the inevitable advance of civilization westward; and among the very ruins of Indian homes and villages, whose charred and smoking line between the Sus quehanna and the Genesee marked the end of aboriginal supremacy in all that fair domain and in the State, he foresaw the beneficent changes that would come to those valleys within a few succeeding years, and took into his mind the great idea that dominated it all his after life. That idea was the connecting of the seaboard with the great lakes by a thoroughfare that should pass through the counties bordering on the State of Pennsylvania, and which was to be but the beginning of a national avenue leading to what was then the far West.

When the war was ended, the Federal Constitution adopted, and the national government organized, one of the first matters of importance that Congress was called to act upon was the petition of General Clinton and General Sullivan, who had become as enthusiastic as was Clinton in this stupendous project, for authority and an appropriation to construct a road, to be called the "Appian Way," from the Hudson River, and through the valleys of the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Alleghany, to Lake Erie, the great route to be planned and carried to completion by General Sullivan. Congress had no constitutional authority to make an appropriation for such an undertaking, and it came to naught. But until his death General Clinton never ceased to advocate the practicability and wisdom of his idea, and its great importance to the destinies of the country, emphasizing its palpable truth by pointed reference to the fact that the tide of emigration, which had set in steadily toward the " Lake Country" and the West, was being unduly retarded and held in check because of this very absence of thoroughfare in the intervening wilderness, with the result of incalculable detriment to the national welfare and to private interests.

But agitation of the subject was not interrupted by the death of General Clinton. His illustrious

son, DeWitt Clinton, was firm in the belief of his father, and his faith in its ultimate triumph was abiding. But when DeWitt Clinton came to the control of the political and economic affairs of New York, times had changed. The War of 1812 had been fought and won, and the counties bordering on Lake Ontario, and those of the central and eastern portions of the State, were its centres of political and commercial preponderance. Public and private interests demanded a better means of communication between tidewater and the lakes. The Southern Tier had its great rivers-capricious and uncertain though they were-as channels to transport its products to market, while its northern neighbors had for their dependence only tedious, slow, and incomplete post roads. In 1817, recognizing the justice of this demand, DeWitt Clinton, as Governor, called to the attention of the Legislature that great and long-cherished project, the construction of a canal to unite Lake Erie with the Hudson River.

It is one of the remarkable facts connected with the history of internal improvements in this country that five years before Governor Clinton had submitted his message advocating the construction of such a canal, but whose ideas on that subject were widely known, Col. John Stevens of New Jersey, then an old man, but still a wonderful one, wrote that he would undertake to build a line of railway, on which traffic in freight and passengers could be by means of steam locomotive power transported much more effectively and cheaply than it could be carried on the proposed canal. In company with the greater part of the world, DeWitt Clinton ridiculed the old engineer's ideas, and feared that age had unseated his great mind; but Stevens was simply a generation ahead of his time.

Governor Clinton's message to the New York State Legislature on the subject of the Erie Canal greatly alarmed the people of the Southern Tier and Delaware River counties. The construction of a canal from the lakes to the Hudson River, over the proposed route, they insisted would divert the course. of emigration from their valleys, turn elsewhere the profitable trade of a wide region then tributary to them, and forever be a bar to a public thoroughfare for them between the East and the West, and to the

securing of markets other than the hazardous ones of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. The members of the Legislature from all these counties were instructed to oppose the canal project in every way.

DeWitt Clinton, however, had not abandoned the interests of those portions of the State, the enhancing of which his father had in view in his project of a highway between the East and the West, and he allayed the fears of the people, and won their support for the Erie Canal, by a pledge-to which the canal party assented-to secure the co-operation of the representatives of the canal counties with those. of the opposing counties in the construction through the latter of an avenue best adapted to the topography of those localities, at the expense, or with the substantial aid, of the State. But for the giving of that pledge there would have been no Erie Canal for years to come.

The

In 1825 the Erie Canal was completed and opened. The year before that, DeWitt Clinton brought the subject of a Southern Tier avenue before the Legislature, and recommended that some provision be made for a survey for a State road from the Hudson to Lake Erie through that part of the State. survey was made, and with it began that persistent policy of chicanery and duplicity with which politics, selfishness, and ingratitude made fruitless for many a year the efforts of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and Alleghany valleys to escape from the bondage of commercial isolation.

The route surveyed for this State road extended almost in a straight line, via Bath, to Ithaca, and from that place southerly through the interiors of Delaware, Sullivan, Orange, and Rockland counties to Nyack, on the Hudson, with a branch to Kingston, Ulster County. It avoided all the valleys, and passed through only high, unbroken, and uncultivated lands the entire distance. The building of a road over that route would have been a task greater than that which confronted Napoleon at the base of the frowning Alps, for this one was utterly impracticable. The survey was made under the influence of the politicians of the canal counties, and in spite of the palpable absurdity of the survey and the transparency of the scheme that prompted it, and

$600,000. In the course of a few years the canal stock was paying 25 per cent. on the investment. Almost in a moment Ohio's credit was established, and the building of the canal assured. The Legislature of that State passed a vote of thanks to Eleazar Lord, Governor Clinton, and others, and they were invited to be present as guests of the State on the occasion of the breaking of ground for the canal, and their journey from Cleveland to the Ohio River was made amid the glad plaudits of the people, who assembled everywhere along the route to do them honor. But with that demonstration But with that demonstration of popular homage, and the greater fame it brought him, it was fated that DeWitt Clinton should rest content. The goal of his high ambition was never reached.

During that memorable journey DeWitt Clinton discussed earnestly the question of the public highway from the Hudson to the Lakes through the southern part of New York State, and declared to Eleazar Lord his unfaltering belief in its necessity, and denounced the people of the canal counties for breaking faith with the border counties, as they had done in procuring by their influence the preposterous survey for a road through the latter counties. He urged Mr. Lord to become personally interested in the matter, and to use his influence in bringing the project to a successful issue, and the New York capitalist was so deeply impressed with the importance and great future of such an undertaking that he readily consented to Clinton's proposition. On his return to New York Mr. Lord advocated with such enthusiasm the subject of a Southern Tier State road, that other influential men of the day were led to his way of thinking, and the result was the calling of a convention of people along the line of the proposed road to protest against the action of the Legislature, and to adopt measures calling for a reparation of the injury done them. The convention met at Newburgh, N. Y., October 19, 1826, and was in session two days. A report of its proceedings was sent to the Governor, who placed it before the Legislature at the session of 1827, but that body took no action upon it. Before further steps could be taken by the friends of the project, DeWitt Clinton died, and agitation of the subject ceased.

Soon afterward, the feasibility of a canal through the Southern Tier between the Hudson River and Lake Erie was suggested by leading men in the Western counties, and the subject was being widely discussed and favorably received, when Benjamin Wright, the engineer of the Erie Canal, and one of the greatest civil engineers of that day, made public his views. They changed the entire aspect of the situation, and brought forward a problem in domestic economy the solution of which taxed for a generation the energies, the genius, and the resources of public-minded citizens, and demonstrated the capacity and willingness of men to subordinate the general weal to political and personal ends. Engineer Wright, in a letter published when the Southern Tier canal discussion was at its height, revealed the fact that, at the request of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, which had then almost completed the great canal from Honesdale, in Northern Pennsylvania, to tidewater on the Hudson at Rondout, he had made a survey from the canal at Lackawaxen, Pa., up the Delaware Valley to Deposit, N. Y., to ascertain the practicability of a branch canal westward to Lake Erie; had examined the Susquehanna and Chemung valleys, and made exhaustive inquiries relative to the topography of the country west from Hornellsville, Steuben County, N. Y. He declared that the obstacles between that point and the lake were too great to be overcome by a canal, but hinted that a railroad might not be impracticable.

The attention of the public was first really drawn to this route as one over which a railroad might be built, by a pamphlet issued by William C. Redfield of New York, in 1829, who had given the matter much study. The pamphlet was entitled a “Sketch of the Geographical Route of a Great Railway, by which it is proposed to connect the canals and navigable waters of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and the adjacent States and Territories, opening thereby a free communication at all seasons of the year between the Atlantic States and the great valleys of the Mississippi," and proceeded as follows: