Mediterranean Seas and the Atlantic Ocean, in about eight years,
to the extent of more than four hundred and twenty-five miles, by
the wisdom, public spirit, and energy of the people of the State
of New York; and may the God of the Heavens and the Earth smile
most propitiously on this work, and render it subservient to the
best interests of the human race."

Throughout these last seven years, the West was subconsciously
getting ready to meet the East halfway by improving and extending
her steamboat operations. Steamboats were first run on the Great
Lakes by enterprising Buffalo citizens who, in 1818, secured
rights from the Fulton-Livingston monopoly to build the
Walk-in-the-Water, the first of the great fleet of ships that now
whiten the inland seas of the United States. Regular lines of
steamboats were now formed on the Ohio to connect with the
Cumberland Road at Wheeling, although the steamboat monopoly
threatened to stifle the natural development of transportation on
Western rivers.

The completion of the Erie Canal--coupled with the new
appropriation by Congress for extending the Cumberland Road from
the Ohio River to Missouri and the beginning of the Pennsylvania
and the Chesapeake and Ohio canals, reveal the importance of
these concluding days of the first quarter of the nineteenth
century in the annals of American transportation. Never since
that time have men doubted the ability of Americans to accomplish
the physical domination of their continent. With the conquest of
the Alleghanies and of the forests and swamps of the "Long House"
by pick and plough and scraper, and the mastery of the currents
of the Mississippi by the paddle wheel, the vast plains beyond