railroad was just beginning to master its mechanical problems when
a new obstacle confronted it in the Potomac Valley. It could not cross
Maryland to the Cumberland mountain gateway unless it could follow the
Potomac. But its rival, the canal, had inherited from the old Potomac
Company the only earthly asset it possessed of any value--the right of
way up the Maryland shore. Five years of quarreling now ensued, and the
contest, though it may not have seriously delayed either enterprise,
aroused much bitterness and involved the usual train of lawsuits and
injunctions.

In 1833 the canal company yielded the railroad a right of way through
the Point of Rocks--the Potomac chasm through the Blue Ridge wall, just
below Harper's Ferry on condition that the railroad should not build
beyond Harper's Ferry until the canal was completed to Cumberland. But
probably nothing but the financial helplessness of the canal company
could have brought a solution satisfactory to all concerned. A
settlement of the long quarrel by compromise was the price paid for
state aid, and, in 1835 Maryland subsidized to a large degree both
canal and railroad by her famous eight million dollar bill. The railroad
received three millions from the State, and the city of Baltimore was
permitted to subscribe an equal amount of stock. With this support and a
free right of way, the railroad pushed on up the Potomac. Though delayed
by the financial disasters of 1837, in 1842 it was at Hancock; in 1851,
at Piedmont; in 1852, at Fairmont; and the next year it reached the Ohio
River at Wheeling.

Spurred by the enterprise shown by these Southerners, Pennsylvania
and New York now took immediate steps to parallel their own canals by
railways. The line of the Union Canal in Pennsylvania was paralleled by
a railroad in 1834, the same year in which the Allegheny Portage
Railway was constructed. New York lines reached Buffalo in 1842. The
Pennsylvania Railroad, which was incorporated in 1846, was completed to
Pittsburgh in 1854.

It is thus obvious that, with the completion of these lines and the
building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway through the "Sapphire
Country" of the Southern Alleghanies, the new railway era pursued its
paths of conquest through the very same mountain passageways that
had been previously used by packhorseman and Conestoga and, in three
instances out of four, by the canal boat. If one motors today in the
Juniata Valley in Pennsylvania, he can