he cities of the coast. Before him lies the giant
valley where the Father of Waters throws out his two splendid arms, the
Ohio and the Missouri, one reaching to the Alleghanies and the other to
the Rockies. Northward, at the end of the Erie Canal, lies the empire of
the Great Lakes, inland seas that wash the shores of a Northland having
a coastline longer than that of the Atlantic from Maine to Mexico.

Ships and conditions of navigation were much the same on the lakes as on
the ocean. It was therefore possible to imagine the rise of a
coasting trade between Illinois and Ohio as profitable as that between
Massachusetts and New York. Yet the older colonies on the Atlantic had
an outlet for trade, whereas the Great Lakes had none for craft of any
size, since their northern shores lay beyond the international boundary.
If there had been danger from Spain in the Southwest, what of the danger
of Canada's control of the St. Lawrence River and of the trade of the
Northwest through the Welland Canal which was to join Lake Ontario to
Lake Erie? But in those days the possibility of Canadian rivalry was not
treated with great seriousness, and many men failed to see that the West
was soon to contain a very large population. The editor of a newspaper
at Munroe, New York, commenting in 1827 on a proposed canal to connect
Lake Erie with the Mississippi by way of the Ohio, believed that
the rate of Western development was such that this waterway could be
expected only "some hundred of years hence." Even so gifted a man as
Henry Clay spoke of the proposed canal between Lake Michigan and
Lake Superior in 1825 as one relating to a region beyond the pale of
civilization "if not in the moon." Yet in twenty-five years Michigan,
which had numbered one thousand inhabitants in 1812, had gained two
hundredfold, and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had their hundreds of
thousands who were clamoring for ways and means of sending their surplus
products to market.

Early in the century representatives of the Fulton-Livingston monopoly
were at the shores of Lake Ontario to prove that their steamboats could
master the waves of the inland sea and serve commerce there as well
as in tidewater rivers. True, the luckless Ontario, built in 1817 at
Sackett's Harbor, proved unseaworthy when the waves lifted the shaft
of her paddle wheels off their bearings and caused them to demolish the
wooden covering built for their protection; but the Walk-in-the-Water,
compl