Buffalo on Lake Erie and at Pittsburgh on the Ohio they looked
out on a new world. The centaurs of the Western rivers were no
less things of the far past than the tinkling bells borne by the
ancient ponies of the pack-horse trade. The sons of this new West
had their eyes riveted on the commerce of the Great Lakes and the
Mississippi Valley. With road, canal, steamboat, and railway,
they were renewing the struggle of their fathers but for prizes
greater than their fathers ever knew.

New York again proved the favored State. Her Mohawk pathway gave
her easiest access to the West and here, at her back door on the
Niagara frontier, lay her path by way of the Great Lakes to the
North and the Northwest.



CHAPTER X. cv
As one stands in imagination at the early railheads of the West--
on the Ohio River at the end of the Cumberland Road, or at
Buffalo, the terminus of the Erie Canal--the vision which
Washington caught breaks upon him and the dream of a nation made
strong by trans-Alleghany routes of commerce. Link by link the
great interior is being connected with the sea. Behind him all
lines of transportation lead eastward to the 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