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