and down by steamboats, the opening of the national road across
the Alleghany Mountains, and the beginning of the Erie Canal. No
single year in the early history of the United States witnessed
three such important events in the material progress of the
country.

What days the ancient "Long House of the Iroquois" now saw! The
engineers of the Cumberland Road, now nearing the Ohio River,
had enjoyed the advantage of many precedents and examples; but
the Commissioners of the Erie Canal had been able to study only
such crude examples of canal-building as America then afforded.
Never on any continent had such an inaccessible region been
pierced by such a highway. The total length of the whole network
of canals in Great Britain did not equal that of the waterway
which the New Yorkers now undertook to build. The lack of roads,
materials, vehicles, methods of drilling and efficient business
systems was overcome by sheer patience and perseverance in
experiment. The frozen winter roads saved the day by making it
possible to accumulate a proper supply of provisions and
materials. As tools of construction, the plough and scraper with
their greater capacity for work soon supplanted the shovel and
the wheelbarrow, which had been the chief implements for such
construction in Europe. Strange new machinery born of Mother
Necessity was now heard groaning in the dark swamps of New York.
These giants, worked by means of a cable, wheel, and endless
screw, were made to hoist green stumps bodily from the ground
and, without the use of axe, to lay trees prostrate, root and
branch. A new plough was fashioned with which a yoke of oxen
could cut roots two inches in thickness well beneath the surface
of the ground.