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,