rs entitle his opinions to great respect,
and are sorry not to concur in them."

Stevens, however, kept up the fight. He published all the
correspondence, hoping to get aid from Congress for his design, and
spread his propaganda far and wide. But the War of 1812 soon absorbed
the attention of the country. Then came the Erie Canal, completed in
1825, and the extension into the Northwest of the great Cumberland Road.
From St. Louis steamboats churned their way up the Missouri, connecting
with the Santa Fe Trail to the Southwest and the Oregon Trail to the far
Northwest. Horses, mules, and oxen carried the overland travelers, and
none yet dreamed of being carried on the land by steam.

Back East, however, and across the sea in England, there were a few
dreamers. Railways of wooden rails, sometimes covered with iron, on
which wagons were drawn by horses, were common in Great Britain; some
were in use very early in America. And on these railways, or tramways,
men were now experimenting with steam, trying to harness it to do
the work of horses. In England, Trevithick, Blenkinsop, Ericsson,
Stephenson, and others; in America, John Stevens, now an old man but
persistent in his plans as ever and with able sons to help him, had
erected a circular railway at Hoboken as early as 1826, on which he ran
a locomotive at the rate of twelve miles an hour. Then in 1828 Horatio
Allen, of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, went over to England
and brought back with him the Stourbridge Lion. This locomotive, though
it was not a success in practice, appears to have been the first to turn
a wheel on a regular railway within the United States. It was a seven
days' wonder in New York when it arrived in May, 1829. Then Allen
shipped it to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, where the Delaware and Hudson
Canal Company had a tramway to bring down coal from the mountains to the
terminal of the canal. On the crude wooden rails of this tramway Allen
placed the Stourbridge Lion and ran it successfully at the rate of ten
miles an hour. But in actual service the Stourbridge Lion failed and was
soon dismantled.

Pass now to Rainhill, England, and witness the birth of the modern
locomotive, after all these years of labor. In the same year of 1829, on
the morning of the 6th of October, a great crowd had assembled to see an
extraordinary race--a race, in fact, without any parallel or precedent
whatsoever. There were four entries but one dropped out, leaving three