Boom! Canon fire echoed across the state of New York on October 26, 1825. Men listened carefully at their posts, firing their canon once they heard the distant sound of another. This relay stretched from Buffalo to Manhattan, where the final canon proclaimed that the Seneca Chief had departed Buffalo and was making its way to the coast. The waterway on which it traveled had not even existed a decade before, but now this boat would sail from the eastern shore of Lake Erie to the Atlantic Ocean. It was the first to travel the entire length of the Erie Canal.
The Impossible Feat
As the 19th century dawned and pioneers journeyed west into the Great Lakes region, some advocated for a safer, faster, more reliable form of transportation from the resource-rich land to the coast. As early as 1800, the founding father Gouverneur Morris advocated for a great canal. He wrote:…