Heaven's Ditch Read online

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  The Erie Canal rubbed Aladdin’s lamp. America awoke, catching for the first time the wondrous vision of its own dimensions and power.

  —Francis Kimball

  Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention.

  —Alexis de Tocqueville

  List of Illustrations

  Elevation profile of the Erie Canal

  Canal route

  How a canal lock works

  Mormon Missouri and Illinois

  by Joy Taylor

  Prologue

  Jesse Hawley paced the office of a Seneca Falls miller. The room trembled as rushing water drove the mill’s cogwork. Amid the musty smell of grain, the curly-haired broker spread a map of New York State on a table and sat “ruminating over it, for—I cannot tell how long.” His eyes lit on Niagara Falls. An image burst into his head. He saw the green water of the Great Lakes gushing in a mist-clad roar over that famous precipice. He imagined a great work of man diverting the flow into an artificial river, a canal running across the entire state. He saw a long parade of boats, each stacked with barrels of flour, floating down this channel toward eastern markets. To Hawley, a middleman in the western New York grain trade, it was a vision of wealth.

  He had just been complaining to the mill owner about the state’s miserable transportation system. Farming in the Genesee country was productive, yes, but no one could make a profit manhandling heavy barrels along mud-clogged roads or transporting them down the unreliable, rapids-filled Mohawk River to reach the nation’s population centers. A canal was the answer.

  Five years earlier, at the dawn of a new century, Hawley had joined the trickle of hopeful, daring Yankees who were heading west from New England, traveling beyond the wall of the Appalachian Mountains. Like most of them, Hawley was young, only twenty-seven then. Like many, he came in search of a fortune. Now, in 1805, he was facing bankruptcy.

  Water was indispensable for carrying heavy loads. Teams of horses straining to pull wooden wagons could not compete with boats gliding along streams or lakes. Every major city in the nation had access to a river, a coast, or both. A horse that could move two tons along a smooth road could haul fifty tons down a canal.

  Yet Hawley’s idea was laughable. Three hundred sixty miles of tangled forests and dank swampland, of hills and valleys, separated Lake Erie from the Hudson River. Hawley needed only to consider the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts, twenty-seven miles end to end. Then the longest canal in America, it had taken nine years to build. At the same rate of construction, a canal across New York State would not be completed until the unimaginable year 1925, when everyone now living would be dead.

  To Hawley, geography represented both an obstacle and an intriguing promise. The Great Lakes, all but Lake Ontario, stretched halfway across the continent at the same elevation. The Hudson crept inland entirely at sea level. Link the two and you would join the distant west with the coast. The long downhill run from Lake Erie, dropping a foot every mile across the state to Albany, could carry a placid waterway navigable in both directions.

  Visions are cheap; flashes of clarity come to us all. Translating a vision into reality is always the challenge. Hawley had little formal education and no training in canal design or construction. No one in North America knew much about the subject. Even the English “expert” who designed the Middlesex Canal was often at a loss when calculating levels or constructing locks.

  Soon after the canal vision came to him, Hawley watched his business go bust. He fled the state to avoid debtors’ prison. Hiding out near Pittsburgh, he concluded, “All my private prospects in life were blighted.” To pass the time, he wrote two essays for a local newspaper on the subject of his dreamed-of canal. Determined to avoid ridicule and to hide his status as a deadbeat, he adopted the identity “Hercules.” “I will presume to suggest,” he began, “the connecting of the waters of Lake Erie and those of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers by means of a canal.”

  The fugitive’s conscience soon got the better of him. He returned to the Finger Lakes settlement of Canandaigua to face the music: twenty months in debtors’ prison. Broken and destitute, he became convinced that “hitherto I have lived with no useful purpose.” To restore his sense of self-worth, he decided to “publish to the world my favorite, fanciful project of an overland canal.”

  Hawley’s “prison” was a Canandaigua hotel room. Confinement did not prevent his imagination from roaming freely. He managed to get hold of books and maps and to bone up on canal technology. “Hercules” wrote a series of fourteen essays published in the Genesee Messenger beginning in 1807. His choice of a route for the canal and his estimate of its cost were both remarkably prescient.

  While he was writing, he learned of another transportation breakthrough. In August 1807, inventor Robert Fulton sailed the first commercial steamboat up the Hudson River, covering the distance from New York City to Albany in thirty-two hours instead of the four days needed by wind-driven schooners. Fulton became an instant celebrity and would soon sign on as an important canal backer.

  All eyes were on the future. Hawley said it would be “a burlesque on civilization” to continue navigating farm brooks in bark canoes. Instead, he envisioned settlers rushing along canals to populate the newly accessible interior. He foresaw barges hauling flour, lumber and other produce from the Great Lakes down to the Hudson. Of New York City, he accurately predicted that “in a century its island would be covered with the buildings and population of its city.” Besotted with canals, he discussed waterways branching from his main “Genesee Canal,” and similar projects in other states. He even dreamed of a “marine canal” that would slice “across the Isthmus of Darien,” anticipating by a century the Panama Canal.

  The reaction to the publication of his cherished idea was blunt. One critic declared that Hawley’s scheme “lies in the province of fancy, and may be treated as a vision.” Another described it as “the effusions of a maniac.” President Thomas Jefferson judged the idea “little short of madness.” The future would render a different verdict.

  Hardship

  God and Mammon—the two words defined the age. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Americans were waking to the possibility of salvation and to the allure of wealth. During the era of the Revolution, scarcely one American in ten had professed religious faith, and riches had been the birthright of privilege. Now the spiritual was returning to fashion and the prospect of universal prosperity bloomed. No matter how sinful, a man could find a path to heaven. No matter how poor, he could get his due if only he would dare to grab. “Go ahead!” became a catchphrase. “I’m not greedy for land,” was the motto of the proverbial New England farmer, “I just want what joins mine.”

  When they married in
1796, Joseph Smith Sr. and his wife Lucy received a small farm from his family and a thousand-dollar dowry from hers. The couple set bright faces toward the future. Frugal Yankees, they put the cash aside and plunged into the demanding work of hardscrabble farming.

  The land in east-central Vermont was rocky and unforgiving. For six years, the Smiths barely scratched out a sustenance. In 1802, now with two young sons, they took a chance. Perhaps the idea was Lucy’s—she was the more enterprising of the two. They rented their homestead and set up a mercantile store in the prosperous town of Randolph, Vermont. Eager for the main chance, they soon spotted an opportunity. Ginseng’s reputation as a tonic and aphrodisiac created an insatiable demand in the Orient. Ginseng grew wild in the Vermont hills. Joe amassed a large quantity of the acrid-tasting root in the course of his trade. He and Lucy boiled it in sugar to preserve it, transported a shipment to New York, and sent it off on consignment, convinced that their fortune was made. Months later, bad news: a venal merchant had hoodwinked the Smiths. The ginseng treasure had yielded only a cask of tea in return. The chance of sudden wealth had changed to a life-altering calamity.

  The Smiths lived in a rat’s nest of credits and debts. They owed urban merchants for the goods they had sold, but were unable to collect the money customers owed them. The ginseng loss caused their store to fail. Determined as a point of honor to fulfill their obligations and avoid debtors’ prison, they drew on Lucy’s dowry. Still short, they sold their farm for eight hundred dollars.

  Self-sufficiency required ownership of land. The Smiths, having stepped from the “embarrassment of debt” to the “embarrassment of poverty,” as Lucy put it, slipped into the precarious life of the landless. They would not soon recover. During the next fourteen years they moved seven times from one rented New England farm to another.

  Joe, who was thirty-one at the time of the ginseng disaster, taught school in winter and farmed in summer. In 1805, Lucy gave birth to Joseph Jr., their fourth child. Six years later, still tenant farmers, they moved to Lebanon, New Hampshire. Lucy, ever an optimist, declared, “There is nothing which we have not a sufficiency of to make us and our children perfectly comfortable.” The three older children were able to attend school, while little Joe Jr. learned his ABCs at home.

  The Smiths’ overriding concern with making ends meet did not mean that they neglected the spiritual. Like many on the New England frontier, they were seekers rather than members of an established church. Lucy’s older brother was a lay preacher and faith healer. The supernatural was palpable to her—her sister Lovisa’s miraculous recovery from illness had deeply impressed her. Her husband had a restless mind and found significance in his dreams. The family regularly prayed and read the Bible together. Like many country people, they made do with a homespun religion heavy on portents and miracles. Their faith would soon be put to the test.

  In 1812, typhoid swept Vermont, killing with abandon. All the Smith children became ill. They survived, but a lingering infection invaded the bone of young Joe’s leg. Twice, a physician laid open his shin from ankle to knee. When the festering returned, a group of doctors suggested drilling into the bone, then chiseling away infected sections. The boy bravely insisted that his mother leave the house so as not to be disturbed by his cries. The white-hot pain gave the six-year-old a vivid taste of hell. His father held him while the doctors removed three fetid chunks of his shin bone. The wound finally healed, but Joe spent the next three years on crutches. The doctors’ bills left the family foundering in debt.

  Joe Sr. hired out as a laborer, Lucy painted and sold the oil cloths that country people used to brighten drab kitchens. In 1814, most of the crops on their rented farm failed. Only day labor in town and the sale of fruits from their orchard allowed them to scrape by. They knew hunger. The next year, the weather was unfavorable and crops again withered. Discouraged and increasingly desperate, the Smiths rolled up their sleeves to try once more in 1816.

  Bond of Union

  Although many scoffed, Jesse Hawley’s “Hercules” essays ignited a sudden firestorm of interest. In February 1808, only a few months after he had begun publishing his vision, the New York state legislature ordered that a survey be carried out “of the most eligible and direct route for a canal . . . between the tide waters of the Hudson river and Lake Erie.” They chose James Geddes, a central New York salt merchant and self-taught surveyor, to examine the lay of the land.

  Water access to Lake Erie, canal proponents argued, would make New York the portal to a western empire. From there, a boat drawing seven feet could sail all the way to “Chaquagy [Chicago] and then up a creek of that name to the Illinois River . . . and so down to the Mississippi.” The link “would be an indissoluble bond of union between the Western and Atlantic states.”

  The idea of union was important in the early republic. “When the United States shall be bound together by canals, by cheap and easy access to markets in all directions,” Robert Fulton said, it would not be possible to “split them into independent separate governments.” Without a transportation network, the country might prove a fragile conglomeration of distant states.

  The notion of an entirely inland canal, as suggested by Hawley, still seemed improbable. In the legislature, it “produced such expressions of surprise and ridicule as are due to a very wild foolish project.” Most legislators favored the simpler option of connecting an improved Mohawk River with Lake Ontario, then digging a thirty-mile canal to bypass Niagara Falls and reach Lake Erie. To study the feasibility of such a route would be Geddes’s first priority. He was to look at other alternatives only as money permitted. It would not permit much—the legislators allotted only six hundred dollars for the entire survey.

  A Pennsylvania farm boy, Geddes had acquired enough book learning to teach school. Later, he traveled the country looking for opportunities. In 1794, toting two iron kettles, he moved to the Onondaga region of central New York, an area still shared with Iroquois tribes. The rich brine of local springs could be boiled down or evaporated to yield the salt so valued for preserving meat and other foods. He settled there, married, studied law, and became one of the influential men of the district. He taught himself surveying and delineated plots around the lake.

  During the summer of 1808, the forty-five-year-old Geddes set out on his consequential mission. He well understood the basic problem. The rugged ridges and mountains of the Appalachian chain had hampered travel to and from the interior since Europeans had first settled the New World. The high ground stretched in an unbroken line from Maine to Georgia. Almost unbroken. The Mohawk River flowed eastward out of central New York and squeezed through a gap in the mountains a few hundred yards wide.

  Geddes had a dim notion that an ice-age glacial dam had once blocked the St. Lawrence River. All the water from the Great Lakes had gushed down the path of the Mohawk, crashing through the Appalachians at this very gap—a place now called Little Falls—and on to the sea along the estuary of the Hudson. When the ice melted, the outflow resumed its natural course and the Mohawk diminished to a relative trickle. As a means of transportation, the river was unreliable. But the Little Falls gap, unique along the eastern seaboard, offered a tantalizing clue about the possibility of a water route to the West.

  Focused on the Lake Ontario route, Geddes walked around Oneida Lake, which lay just past the end of the Mohawk River, and traced the streams that led west. He quickly saw a significant impediment to this route. The elevation of Lake Ontario was more than three hundred feet lower than that of Lake Erie and two hundred feet lower than the navigable headwaters of the Mohawk. Many locks would be needed to bring boats down to Ontario and back up again.

  Geddes nevertheless dutifully traveled to the Niagara region to examine a route that a canal might take to circumvent the falls. Only then, with winter already coming on, did he turn his attention to the inland path. He had depleted his expenses and had to lay out seventy-three dollars
of his own money to keep going.

  The land through which Geddes traveled, on horseback and foot, was still largely a wilderness, into which isolated settlers had hacked primitive farmsteads. When the adventurer Estwick Evans walked the region during the same era, he found pioneers living in log huts with dirt floors and wooden chimneys. The backwoodsman was a magician with an ax, but “some of them are no less rude than the wilds which they inhabit.” Their isolation and contact with raw nature left them superstitious. “In this part of the country,” he noted, “many of the people entertain strange notions respecting supernatural agencies.”

  Geddes knew that building a canal through this landscape, much of it dominated by undulating hills, would present enormous challenges. Leaving the end of Lake Erie at Buffalo—then a collection of sixteen buildings—the waterway would have to travel north, drop down to the plain that skirted Lake Ontario, cross many miles of varied and often swampy land, and finally descend a steep drop to reach the Hudson River at Albany.

  Terrain was one problem; locating sources of water was just as critical. A canal, Geddes understood, was not a stagnant ditch but a dynamic hydraulic system, with water continually flowing in and out. Volumes of water were needed to work the locks. Water was always leaking—canal engineers call it “weeping.” Lake Erie could supply an abundant flow, but Geddes was already convinced that Hawley’s original idea of a long, almost continuous inclined plane across the state would not work. There were too many ups and downs in between. Builders would need to channel water from reliable streams and reservoirs along the way to prevent sections of the canal from going dry.

  Hills and valleys always threatened to block a canal. Streams and rivers were obstacles that had to be bridged. The demand that a canal be perfectly level required builders to fill low lands and cut through high ground. The alternative was to build expensive locks to connect sections on different levels. How could men slice through these snarling forests? How could they bring an artificial waterway across miles of mucky marshland? How could they take it over the temperamental Genesee River, so prone to flooding?