e
Cumberland Road at Wheeling, although the steamboat monopoly threatened
to stifle the natural development of transportation on Western rivers.

The completion of the Erie Canal--coupled with the new appropriation
by Congress for extending the Cumberland Road from the Ohio River to
Missouri and the beginning of the Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake and
Ohio canals, reveal the importance of these concluding days of the
first quarter of the nineteenth century in the annals of American
transportation. Never since that time have men doubted the ability of
Americans to accomplish the physical domination of their continent. With
the conquest of the Alleghanies and of the forests and swamps of the
"Long House" by pick and plough and scraper, and the mastery of the
currents of the Mississippi by the paddle wheel, the vast plains beyond
seemed smaller and the Rockies less formidable. Men now looked
forward confidently, with an optimist of these days, to the time "when
circulation and association between the Atlantic and Pacific and the
Mexican Gulf shall be as free and perfect as they are at this moment in
England" between the extremities of that country. The vision of a nation
closely linked by wellworn paths of commerce was daily becoming clearer.
What further westward progress was soon to be made remains to be seen.

CHAPTER IX. The Dawn Of The Iron Age

Despite the superiority of the new iron age that quickly followed the
widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and a chivalry
in the "good old days" of the stagecoach, the Conestoga, and the lazy
canal boat, which did not to an equal degree pervade the iron age of the
railroad. When machinery takes the place of human brawn and patience,
there is an indefinable eclipse of human interest. Somehow, cogs and
levers and differentials do not have the same appeal as fingers and eyes
and muscles. The old days of coach and canal boat had a picturesqueness
and a comradeship of their own. In the turmoil and confusion and odd
mixing of every kind of humanity along the lines of travel in the days
of the hurtling coach-and-six, a friendliness, a robust sympathy, a
ready interest in the successful and the unfortunate, a knowledge of how
the other half lives, and a familiarity with men as well as with mere
places, was common to all who took the road. As Thackeray so vividly
describes it:

"The land rang yet with the tooting horns and rattling teams
of mail-coaches; a