ething was needed to make journeys by land less difficult. To
meet this need, new highways had to be supplied, and this great work of
building public roads was taken up by the United States Government. Many
roads were built, but the most important was the one known as the National
Road.

[Illustration: _From the painting by C.Y. Turner in the DeWitt Clinton
High School, New York._

The Opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.]

It ran from Cumberland, on the Potomac, through Maryland and Pennsylvania
to Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio River. From there it was extended
to Indiana and Illinois, ending at Vandalia, which at that time was the
capital of Illinois. It was seven hundred miles long, and cost seven
million dollars.

This smooth and solid roadway was eighty feet wide; it was paved with
stone and covered with gravel. Transportation became not only much easier
but also much cheaper. The road filled a long-felt need and a flood of
travel and traffic immediately swept over it.

[Illustration: _From the painting by C.Y. Turner in the DeWitt Clinton
High School, New York._

The Ceremony Called "The Marriage of the Waters."]

Another kind of highway which proved to be of untold value to both the
East and the West, was the canal, or artificial waterway connecting two
bodies of water.

The most important was the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River and
Lake Erie, begun in 1817. This new idea received the same scornful
attention from the unthinking as "Fulton's Folly." By many it was called
"Clinton's Ditch," after Governor DeWitt Clinton, to whose foresight we
are indebted for the building of this much-used waterway. The scoffers
shook their heads and said: "Clinton will bankrupt the State"; "The canal
is a great extravagance"; and so on.

But he did not stop because of criticism, and in 1825 the canal was
finished. The undertaking had been pushed through in eight years. It was a
great triumph for Clinton and a proud day for the State.

When the work was completed the news was signalled from Buffalo to New
York in a novel way. As you know, there was neither telephone nor
telegraph then. But at intervals of five miles all along the route cannon
were stationed. When the report from the first cannon was heard, the
second was fired, and thus the news went booming eastward till, in an hour
and a half, it reached New York.

Clinton himself journeyed to New York in the canal-boat Seneca Chief. This
was drawn by f