which occupied his eighteenth-century forerunner. The
railway levelled prices and levelled manners. It enabled floods of
settlers {12} to sweep into all the waste places of the earth, clamped
far-flung nations into unity, and bound country to country.

Nowhere was the part played so momentous as in the vast spaces of the
North American continent, and not least in the northern half. The
railway found Canada scarcely a geographical expression, and made it a
nation.

{13}

CHAPTER II

EARLY TRAVEL IN CANADA

Water Transport--Land Trails--Westward in 1800--Progress 1830--1850:
The Day of the Steamboat

British North America before the railway came was a string of scattered
provinces. Lake Huron was the western boundary of effective
settlement: beyond lay the fur trader's preserve. Between Upper and
Lower Canada and the provinces by the Atlantic a wilderness intervened.
With the peninsula of Ontario jutting southwest between Michigan and
New York, and the northeastern states of the Union thrusting their
borders nearly to the St Lawrence, the inland and the maritime
provinces knew less of each other than of the neighbouring states.

Settlement clung close to river, lake, and sea. Till the Eastern
Townships were settled, Lower Canada had been one long-drawn-out
village with houses close set on each side of the river streets. Deep
forest covered all the land save where the lumberman or settler had cut
a narrow clearing or fire had left a {14} blackened waste. To cut
roads through swamp and forest and over river and ravine demanded
capital, surplus time, and strong and efficient governments, all beyond
the possibilities of early days. On the other hand, the waterways
offered easy paths. The St Lawrence and the St John and all their
tributaries and lesser rivals provided inevitably the points of
settlement and the lines of travel.

The development of water transport in Canada furnishes a record of the
interaction of route and cargo, of need and invention, of enterprise
and capital. First came the bark canoe, quick to build, light to carry
round the frequent gaps in navigation, and large enough to hold the few
voyageurs or the rich-in-little peltry that were chief cargo in early
days. It was the bark canoe that carried explorer, trader, soldier,
missionary, and settler to the uttermost north and south and west. For
the far journeys it long held its place. Well on into the nineteenth
century fur tra