Wedding of the waters, p.5
Wedding of the Waters, page 5
When the Europeans arrived in the Mohawk valley, they were impressed with the political and military accomplishments of the Iroquois, but they were most interested in the shell beads the Indians were exchanging among themselves in elaborate ceremonies. The Indians called these beads “wampum.” The wampum beads came in many shapes and sizes but with one notable feature in common: extraordinary hardness and durability. It was curious to find seashells in circulation so far into the interior, but over the centuries many items moved in the process of trade. Prehistoric Indians in Ohio had burial mounds containing items that could have come only from the Pacific Northwest.15
The Europeans immediately saw an opportunity to open a whole new world for wampum: money. The durability, uniform sizes and shapes, and broad acceptance of the shells made them an ideal vehicle as a means of exchange and store of value. The Indians’ delight with gifts of wampum soon paved the way for more exciting purposes, such as swapping it for furs and other commodities. A few Indians were even yielding their lands to the Europeans in return for wampum.16
Metal coins were so scarce in the years leading up to the American Revolution that wampum rapidly evolved into a formal currency for transactions among Europeans as well as between Europeans and Indians. Official money is usually a monopoly of the state, but even in the forests of the Mohawk valley in the seventeenth century, supply could rise to meet demand. The Europeans became a kind of central bank, using their slender metal drill bits to produce vast quantities of wampum belt currency on a mass-production basis along the coast of southern New England. Before long, these beads were circulating as money from New York all the way westward to the Great Plains and southward to Virginia.
If the Mohawk were to be the perfect portal to the lands to the west, some kind of route had to be found between the marshy lands at its headwaters and Lake Erie about 230 miles away. This area was about as different from the dramatic gorge at Little Falls as can be imagined, but its curious geography would also prove to be just as important as the Little Falls gorge in the ultimate development of the area.
From the air, the headwaters of the Mohawk look like the random wanderings of a small child’s crayon on a piece of paper. Countless small curves follow one another without any kind of pattern, some so compressed they look like horseshoes as they back around on themselves. In 1730, an unidentified group of people dug out a shortcut across the neck of one of these curves to simplify the navigation, a bit of engineering that can claim to be the first canal to be constructed in the New World; their handiwork is identified on later British maps as “the neck digged through in 1730.”
There was a big payoff in reaching the land around the headwaters of the Mohawk, just west of the town of Rome. From there the route was open to Oneida Lake, a large body of water less than thirty miles from the “neck,” easily crossed by boats and conveniently lying on an east-west axis. Before reaching the lake, however, the traveler had to contend with a meandering waterway known as Wood Creek, which rises on the other side of a small hill less than two miles away and flows in a westerly direction. The Indians called the short stretch of land separating the Mohawk River from Wood Creek De-o-wain-sta, or the Great Carrying Place; Europeans referred to it as the Oneida Carry or the Wood Creek Carry and built a short road between the two points in 1702.
Wood Creek at that point was little more than a twisting brook, so narrow in many places a man could easily jump across it. This was hardly the ideal waterway to transport people and cargo back and forth between east and west. A traveler passing through there in 1791 complained bitterly:
The windings are so sudden and so short, that while the boat was ploughing in the bank on one side, her stern was rubbing hard against the opposite shore…. The boughs and limbs were so closely interwoven, and so low, as to arch the creek completely over, and oblige all hands to lie flat. These obstacles, together with sunken logs and trees, rendered our progress extremely difficult, often almost impracticable.17
Nevertheless, after about twenty miles of this aggravation, Wood Creek empties into Oneida Lake; the lake drains at its western end into a river that flows northward thirty miles into Lake Ontario at a place called Oswego.
Until the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, the Mohawk–Wood Creek–Oneida–Oswego route was the only water route to the western parts of New York “known and open in practice,” to adopt a phrase of Thomas Jefferson’s. “Open” was something of an exaggeration. A voyage from Albany to Lake Ontario included major obstacles at Cohoes Falls and Little Falls, then the Wood Creek Carry, and, finally, swiftly running waters on the thirty miles from Oneida Lake to Lake Ontario. Altogether, the traveler heading west by bateau would need about two weeks to cover the two hundred miles from just above Cohoes Falls to Oswego on Lake Ontario.
Even after reaching Lake Ontario, the best route west to Lake Erie and the territories of Ohio and the Mississippi valley was still open to question. Westward connections from the lake were awkward, as the formidable Niagara Falls at its western side blocked direct access to Lake Erie and necessitated a difficult portage.
Despite all its problems, the Albany-Oswego route gained rapidly in importance. In 1727, only three years after Cadwallader Colden had returned from his trip to the Mississippi, the British took a small piece of his advice and established a trading house to do business with the Iroquois at Oswego. Two years later a large fort was built there to protect the fur traders, the first step in a trading perimeter the British could defend against the French. By 1730, the “Laws of the Colony of New York”—a continuing account of important events—could report, “Trade with the more remote Nations of Indians at the Trading House at Oswego is…Considerabelly [sic] Encreased.”18
For the next fifty years, the Mohawk valley would be the stage for bloody sideshows of the continuing struggles in Europe between the British and the French. On occasion during their own conflicts, the French or the British (and their colonial associates like George Washington) would be at war with the Indians as well.
One day everything changed. On December 5, 1782, King George III went before the House of Lords to declare, “My lords and gentlemen: I lost no time in giving the necessary orders to prohibit the further prosecution of offensive war upon the continent of North America…. I did not hesitate to go to the full length of the powers vested in me, and offered to declare [the colonies] free and independent states.” The American Revolution was officially over and a new nation proclaimed.
Almost two hundred years had passed since the first Europeans ventured into the Mohawk valley. Over all that time, the valley and the great space beyond it stretching to the Great Lakes remained a land of dark forests, roaring waterfalls, and meandering streams, of log cabins, little towns and military posts, of beaver pelts, wampum money, bitter battles at isolated forts, and, on occasion, white men’s scalps hanging from Indian belts. With the single exception of the little neck cut into Wood Creek in 1730, the valley’s natural features remained untouched. The ambitious men and women who settled in the valley were still colonials, denied a vision beyond their hunger for land. It was a place with no sense of the future.
Once there was liberty, the future was boundless. Cadwallader Colden’s prediction of 1724 of “considerable and beneficial trade” would be just the beginning. A vision much greater than Colden’s lay just ahead.
| CHAPTER 3 |
WASHINGTON’S PIVOT
Despite Colden’s enthusiasm for the Mohawk route to the west, the first person to take the risks and seek the rewards of linking east to west was not a New Yorker. A lot of talk would emanate from the New Yorkers in the early years after the victory at Yorktown, but the deeds came elsewhere.
While the New York legislature in Albany would engage in endless debates from 1784 to 1817, taking only tentative steps forward, and authorizing repeated exploratory commissions, a Virginian led the way by cutting a navigable waterway to the lands of the west in the early years after the Revolution. That this particular Virginian was very wealthy, had a keen eye for real estate, was a first-class surveyor, had proved his skills as a master administrator, and enjoyed unbeatable political connections certainly helped. Yet none of those advantages would have mattered without the single-minded conviction that his country’s entire future rested on the successful completion of this project.
George Washington was first in the hearts of his countrymen, but he was also first to recognize the towering importance of a waterway to the west, first to arrange the financing, first to accomplish the necessary surveys, and first to supervise the complex engineering task it involved.
Washington never ceased to worry that the day might come—and sooner rather than later—when the ever larger numbers of people migrating into the vast territories west of the Appalachian Mountains would break away from the thirteen states along the Atlantic and form a separate nation. Most of these individuals had just picked up their belongings and moved out, leaving neither family nor economic bonds behind them.
He had begun an effort as early as 1775, interrupted by the Revolution, to convert the Potomac River into the primary link to the west. In 1785, after completing a trip all the way from Mount Vernon to Pittsburgh and then down the Ohio River, he expressed his urgent concerns to the governor of Virginia:
I need not remark to you, Sir, that the flanks and rear of the United States are possessed by other powers—and formidable ones too: nor need I press the necessity of applying the cement of interest to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds—especially of binding that part of it which lies immediately west of us, to the middle States. For what ties let me ask, should we have upon those people, how entirely unconnected with them shall we be, and what troubles may we not apprehend, if the Spaniards…and Great Britain…should hold out lures for their trade and alliance? What will be the consequence of their having formed close commercial connexions with both or either of those powers?…The western settlers (I speak now from my own observations,) stand, as it were, upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way.1
But even worse than breaking away, the westerners might choose to join up—or be forced to join up—with the Spaniards, the French, or the English Canadians, who still controlled most of North America and who together surrounded the newcomers on the south and the north while intermingling with them in the west. However the rupture occurred, it would leave the United States just a small country clinging to the ocean shores and hemmed in by a much larger western neighbor of dubious reliability.
The manner in which Washington expressed his concerns foreshadows in a remarkable way how De Witt Clinton would argue the case many years later in his long effort to transform the Erie Canal from a dream into a reality. We do not know whether Clinton ever met George Washington in person. He was only fourteen years old when Washington was cheered in the victory parade in New York in 1783, but Clinton’s father, James, a professional soldier and a general in the Revolution with a distinguished record in battle, was on horseback just behind Washington in the independence parade.
In 1816, in a celebrated document that would finally persuade the New York legislature to proceed with building the Erie Canal, Clinton wrote, “However serious the fears which have been entertained of a dismemberment of the Union by collisions between the north and the south…the most imminent danger lies in another direction. [A] line of separation may be eventually drawn between the Atlantic and the western states, unless they are cemented by a common, an ever acting and a powerful interest.” He emphasized how “one channel, supplying the wants [and] increasing the wealth…of each great section of the empire, will form an imperishable cement of connection, and an indissoluble bond of union.”2
Washington receives too little credit, among his many accomplishments, for having a keen head for business. He was in full agreement with how the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, had characterized the Americans in 1785: “These people,” he observed, “have a terrible mania for commerce.”3 In Washington’s search for a way to forestall the ominous possibility of a breakup of the union as a result of the mountain barrier, he had come up with a remarkably modern solution that anticipated Clinton’s view of the matter over thirty years later. He was convinced that trade and commerce—and only trade and commerce—could bind the western territories to the United States forever with a viable sense of community and mutual interdependence. And there was not a moment to be lost.
Economic linkages, however, depend on geographical linkages. In Britain, France, and the Netherlands, the various regions were joined to one another with networks of waterways—rivers, canals, or both—capable of moving large quantities of cargo all around the country and to and from the seaports. The United States would never develop into a great nation as long as most of its citizens clung to the seacoast while the more adventuresome drifted off to the west, separating themselves from the seaboard by the formidable chain of mountains running down the entire country. It was absolutely essential to replace the rutty dirt roads and Indian paths now in use with a system of internal waterways through the mountains and into the west. But where and how?
Washington’s answer to this question had complete support from his friend Thomas Jefferson. Although they approached the matter as prominent Virginians as well as patriots of the new United States, it could hardly have been a coincidence that Washington also happened to be the largest landowner on the Potomac River.
“Nature then has declared in favor of the Potomac,” Jefferson wrote to Washington in early 1784, “and through that channel offers to pour into our lap the whole commerce of the Western world. But unfortunately [the route] by the Hudson is already open and known in practice; ours is still to be opened.”4 To which Washington responded, “With you I am satisfied that not a moment ought to be lost in recommencing this business [of opening the Potomac], as I know the Yorkers will lose no time to remove every obstacle in the way of the other communication.”5
Now a squire liberated from military and, for the moment, political obligations, Washington could turn his attention to the future of his own fortune as well as the future of his country. As the exchange with Jefferson suggested, he recognized the attractions of building a water route through the Mohawk valley and beyond—and the huge impact such a development would have on property values. Only a few months earlier, he had traveled across New York State as far west as Lake Erie in the company of the state’s first governor, George Clinton, perhaps to seek new lands to add to his already extensive properties in Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Washington was deeply impressed with the potential of the area. “Prompted by these observations,” he wrote, “I could not help taking a more contemplative and extensive view of the vast inland navigation of the United States, and could not but be struck by the immense diffusion and importance of it…and with the goodness of that Providence which has dealt his favors to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wisdom to improve them. I shall not rest contented until I have explored the western country, and traversed those lines…which have given bounds to a new empire.”6 At about the same time, with remarkable foresight, Washington referred to New York as “the seat of empire.”7
Binding the westerners to the Atlantic communities was a goal that would consume Washington for the rest of his life. As late as 1796, in the course of his Farewell Address, he was still warning against the dangers facing the separate parts of his country unless they could forge an indissoluble community of interest as one nation: “Any other tenure…whether derived from its own separate strength, or from an apostate and unnatural connexion with any foreign power, must be intrinsically precarious.”
In September 1784, six months after the correspondence with Jefferson on these matters, Washington set out on horseback to look over his vast landholdings for the first time since the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775. As he wrote in his diary before leaving, a not incidental objective of the trip was to plan, “as much as in me lay, the inland navigation of the Potomac.”8
At a time when the accumulation of financial assets as a form of wealth was virtually unknown, Washington had a passion for real estate. During the years leading up to the American Revolution, starting as early as the age of eighteen, he had accumulated 5000 acres in Virginia, comprising eleven large properties scattered all the way from his family home at Mount Vernon to the northwestern reaches of the Potomac River valley. Mount Vernon itself comprised another 8000 acres. He also owned six even larger properties in the Ohio River valley in Pennsylvania, adding up to 33,000 acres, which he had received in 1770 as a reward from a grateful British government for his outstanding service as a lieutenant colonel in the French and Indian Wars. When the British let Washington select the lands to be given to his men as well as his own, he described his grants as “the cream of the Country in which they are; that they were the first choice of it; and that the whole is on the margin of the Rivers and bounded thereby for 58 miles.”9 He advertised these properties for lease after the Revolution, promising that “a great deal of it may be converted into the finest mowing ground imaginable, with little or no labour.”10
