Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

The lake once formed a twenty-mile link in the Erie Canal, and just east of Oneida, excavation for the waterway began on the Fourth of July, 1817. I stopped near the spot at an abandoned section of canal and walked down the old towpath, now a snowmobile trail. The canal, only four feet deep in its early years, had become a rank, bosky, froggy trough. But it was that forty-eight inches of water that did so much to open western New York and the Midwest to settlement and commerce. “Clinton’s Folly,” the popular name for the canal as it was being built, followed the Mohawk Valley, the only natural break at this latitude in the Appalachians. From Lake Erie to the Hudson River (363 miles, 83 stone locks, 13 aqueducts) the canal moved people and things between the middle of the nation and the ocean; it was this watercourse, as much as anything else, that made New York City the leading Atlantic port. Travelers who had some money could take a packet boat with windows and berths, while poorer immigrants heading into the Midlands rode cheaper and drearier line boats. Ten years after Clinton’s Folly opened, the populations of Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo increased three hundred percent; the canal, having paid for itself in that decade, had changed the northwest quarter of America. No paltry accomplishment for a scheme that even the visionary Thomas Jefferson saw as a little short of madness.