The canal company clung doggedly to the idle belief that their
enterprise was still of continental proportions, since it would connect
at Cumberland with the Cumberland Road. This exaggerated estimate of
the importance of the undertaking shines out in the pompous words of
President Mercer, at the time when construction was begun:

"There are moments in the progress of time, which are counters of whole
ages. There are events, the monuments of which, surviving every other
memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to whose history they
belong, after all other vestiges of its glory have disappeared from the
globe. At such a moment have we now arrived."

This oracular language lacks the simple but winning straightforwardness
of the words which Director Morris uttered on the same day near
Baltimore and which prove how distinctly Western the new railway project
was held to be:

"We are about opening a channel through which the commerce of the mighty
country beyond the Allegheny must seek the ocean--we are about affording
facilities of intercourse between the East and West, which will bind
the one more closely to the other, beyond the power of an increased
population or sectional differences to disunite."

The difficulties which faced the Baltimore enthusiasts in their task of
keeping their city "on the map" would have daunted men of less heroic
mold. Every conceivable trial and test which nature and machinery
could seemingly devise was a part of their day's work for twelve years
struggles with grades, locomotives, rails, cars. As Rumsey, Fitch, and
Fulton in their experiments with boats had floundered despondently with
endless chains, oars, paddles, duck's feet, so now Thomas and Brown
in their efforts to make the railroad effective wandered in a maze
of difficulties testing out such absurd and impossible ideas as cars
propelled by sails and cars operated by horse treadmills. By May, 1830,
however, cars on rails, running by "brigades" and drawn by horses,
were in operation in America. It was only in this year that in England
locomotives were used with any marked success on the Liverpool and
Manchester Railroad; yet in August of this year Peter Cooper's engine,
Tom Thumb, built in Baltimore in 1829, traversed the twelve miles
between that city and Ellicott's Mills in seventy-two minutes. Steel
springs came in 1832, together with car wheels of cylindrical and
conical section which made it easier to turn curves.

The