Geographic influences in American history

Front matter

GEOGRAPHIC INFUUiNCES IN AMERICAN HISTORY

A".CErj rOUY B:MotT.\M .

CHAUTAUQUA IJOME- READING SERIES

Preface

In the chapters which follow, an attempt has been made to combine the materials of American history and geography. One must invent a method as he can, for models in this field can scarcely be said to exist. The plan chosen is geographic, as might be expected from a student of earth science. Each division of the book deals with a region which is more or less distinct in its physical development, and which often shows in the end a good measure of historical unity.

Parkman and Fiske have been among the most useful historical authorities ; also McMaster, and the ''Winning of the West," by Theodore Roosevelt, who, as an official and as a private citizen, has shown an unfailing appreciation of the physical features of our country.

Prof. Charles Worthen Spencer of Colgate University has kindly read the manuscript of the volume and has made valuable suggestions. It should be stated that parts of Chapter I have previously appeared in the Geographical Journal of London, and vi PREFACE

a few paragraphs of Chapter VIII were originally prepared for the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society.

Many have generously aided me in securing the illustrations. A considerable number have been drawn from the collections of Mr. William H. Rau, Philadelphia. I am also indebted to Dr. F. J. H. Merrill, State Geologist, Albany ; Rev. A. K. Fuller, Newburg ; Prof. J. T. Draper, Holyoke ; Prof. Arthur M. Miller and Prof. H. Garman, State College of Kentucky; Prof. W. B.' Clarke, Johns Hopkins University; Prof. Edward M. Lehnerts, Winona, Minn.; Prof. Samuel Calvin, State Geologist of Iowa ; Mr. G. K. Gilbert, United States Geological Survey ; President Benjamin Ide Wheeler of the University of California and the United States Bureau of Forestry.

Both the physiographer and the historian may often regret omissions or brevity of treatment, but such limits are imperative when a vast and twofold theme is undertaken in a small volume.

ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM.

Colgate University, May, 1903.

Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Eastern Gateway of the United

States i

Chapter I The Eastern Gateway Of The United States

Columbus did not search for a new continent. He sought a new path to an old world. If he had sailed due west from Palos, he would have touched the eastern shore of North America where the Chesapeake Bay opens upon the Atlantic Ocean. But he turned his prows southward to the Canary Islands, that thence he might run due west along the 28th parallel, to the north end of Japan, which, under the name of Cipango, he found upon a map of his time. This point was twelve thousand miles distant, but reckoning the size of the globe too small, and the extent of Asia too great, he counted only upon a voyage of twenty-five hundred miles. Sailing westward from the Canaries, he found himself wafted by the trade-winds. Hence he daily reported to his officers and sailors a smaller number of miles than were really traversed, that they might not be scared by their fearful progress over the Sea of Darkness.

Thus, unwittingly, the discoverers of America were heading toward the . West Indies. The Spaniard stumbled in at the Mediterranean portal of our continent ; for the great seas which we know as the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico lie between the great lands, and are as truly a Mediterranean as those waters that wash the shores of Europe and Africa. Thus the West Indies, Florida, the mouths of the Mississippi, and the coastal plain about Vera Cruz became forever associated with the Spaniard. His power has gone, but he has sprinkled island and shore with geographic names which live.

As early as 1500, European craft began to visit the cod banks of Newfoundland, starting an industry which has been plied until the present time. Among these fishermen were French navigators, and it was not many years before Cartier entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sailed up the great river, looked upward upon the promontory where Quebec was to stand, and called at an Indian village at the foot of a small but rugged mountain of volcanic origin, which he named Mount Royal. The Indian village has given way to a great city, and Cartier's name has become Montreal. He is the first of those illustrious Frenchmen who made the map of the Great Lakes, and explored the Mississippi River to its mouth. Champlain, La Salle, Joliet, Marquette, Frontenac, — these are the names: Belle Isle, Montreal, Detroit, Prairie du Chien, St. Louis, Baton Rouge, — such are the memorials of French heroism and French occupation. The gateway was the St. Lawrence and the Lakes.

Meantime, in 1587, Drake had sailed into the harbor of Cadiz, and " singed the king of Spain's beard." In 1588 the sea-dogs of England joined with wind and storm and sunk the Spanish Armada, strewing the shores of the North Sea and of the Atlantic with the wrecks of Castilian greatness. Drake and Hawkins scoured the sea for Spanish treasure. Their hands were harsh, but in no other way could English shipping keep afloat, or English settlements survive in any land. The breaking of Spanish power opened the way to English colonies in America.

Where would the Englishman come upon American shores ? The Spaniard held the islands and seas of the south ; the French occupied the St. Lawrence ; from the St. Lawrence almost to the Gulf stretches a system of mountains ; they are not lofty, but they are continuous ; they stand back a little from the sea. In the north the hills of southeastern New England lie between the mountains and the Atlantic. From central New Jersey to Georgia we find a flat or gently rolling coastal plain. Behind, everywhere, is the barrier, a low wall, rugged, however, and broad, — the Appalachian Mountains.

The narrow strip of lowland between the mountains and the sea was left to the Englishman. He made his home about Massachusetts Bay, on the Delaware, the Chesapeake, by the rivers of Virginia, and on the low coasts of the Carolinas to the Savannah. He forged the colonies into a chain, and began to push over the mountain barrier and through its passes until he had occupied Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio, and driven out the French. Then he swept across the prairies, adopted the Western mountains as his own, and planted great cities by the harbors of the Pacific.

Conquering the Dutch, who had anticipated him in possessing the best Atlantic harbor of North America, he found a narrow but open and easy road, through the Appalachian wall, between the seaboard and the prairies of the Mississippi. I The Eastern Gateway of the United States is the valley of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers.

The history of the Empire State gathers about this gateway. When the voyager from the Old World approaches the chief city of the New, he sees the southern shore of Long Island, and the line of Atlantic Highlands converging toward the Lower Bay. Then he passes the Narrows and enters New York Harbor. Leaving the East River on his right and continuing northward, he enters the lower waters of the Hudson. He may follow its valley for a hundred and fifty miles, and at every point the rise and fall of the tide will remind him of the ocean which he has left behind.

Eastern New York is occupied by a narrow belt of low mountains. In some places these mountains rise to moderate heights, and in others they are worn to their roots and form a region of hills and rocky ledges. These mountain ridges run north-northeast by south-southwest and are a part of the great Appalachian system. The Hudson cuts across them in a long diagonal, in its southward course from Albany to New York. This is most plainly seen in the Highlands. This range, built of hard and ancient crystalline rocks, enters New York from the northeast and leaves the state to the southwest, where it becomes the Highlands of New Jersey. Through it is cut the gorge of the Highlands, barely wide enough to carry the river, with steep slopes rising to the summits of Storm King, Crow's Nest, and Anthony's Nose.

If Hendrik Hudson had an eye for landscape, he did not lack for variety after he sailed the Half Moon through the Narrows. The forested flats and low hills of Manhattan on the east lay in contrast to the precipitous wall of the Palisades that followed him on his left for nearly forty miles. He doubtless did not recognize in their huge columns the outcropping of massive beds of ancient lava. When he reached Haverstraw Bay and saw the river broaden to three miles, we may safely think that his spirits quickened with the hope that the passage to Cathay had been found. But he was doomed to doubt as he began to thread the Highland gorge. When he emerged on the north the river was wide again, and its valley more spacious than he had seen it before. Going northward, the Catskills would fill his vision as he looked westward over a few miles of low country to the strong profile that ruled the horizon far along his course. Eastward he would see rough and rising land, but he could not see that here are the foothills of the mountains of New England. As the voyager passed the hundred-mile limit from the sea, he would find shoal water and many islands, and begin to suspect, what a few more miles of journeying would prove, that he was following a river toward its source, and that he must turn back and seek in regions yet unknown a passage to the far East.

It remained for others to learn what lay beyond the site of Albany. Succeeding explorers climbed the slopes on which Albany is built, and thence for nearly twenty miles traversed a region of half-sterile sands to the Mohawk River bottoms, where Schenectady now stands. Looking westward, there appears a deep V-shaped gap in the uplands. Through this gap the river pours from the west. By this channel, in the closing times of the Ice Age, flowed the waters of the Great Lakes, depositing in the Hudson Valley the great body of sands that lies west of Albany.

The Mohawk Valley, or that part of it which now interests us, is a trench nearly one hundred miles long, extending from Schenectady westward to Rome, in central New York. Easterly it opens into the Hudson lowlands, westerly it widens into the plains of Iroquois, in other words, the flat bottoms of the greater glacial ancestor of Lake Ontario. Viewed from near the river, the valley appears to be about 500 feet deep, with an average width of flood-plain of a half mile. Seen more truly from the bordering plateau, it is a vast gap, 1500 to 2000 feet deep, its upper slopes several miles apart, lying between the great uplands on either hand. The parting of the waters is at Rome. From that point the streams enter Lake Ontario. Once pass this gateway, and the path is clear across the lake plains and over the prairies and plains to the Rocky Mountains.

South of the Mohawk are the uplands of New York, stretching from the Hudson Valley to Lake

Erie. On the east we know them as the Catskill Mountains. But these are only lofty hills with rollingtops, and descending by a precipitous slope, or escarpment, on the east. Seen from the east, along the Hudson River, this slope, with its crest, appears like a mountain range. It is really the edge, or end, of a plateau. This plateau, which is 3000 feet or more in altitude in parts of the Catskills, falls to an average of 2000 feet in central and western New York. The Mohawk gap lies north of the plateau, or may be said to be cut through the plateau along its northern edge.

North of the Mohawk Valley the land rises, at first moderately, and then more boldly, to the slopes and summits of the Adirondack Mountains. While these mountains, like the Highlands of the Hudson, are ancient and much denuded, they preserve a series of bold northeast by southwest ranges, so that there is no line or avenue, north of the Mohawk, along which a railway could be well constructed. Except for local traffic, the mountains are a perfect barrier to commerce and travel.

The physiographer can look back to an era when no Mohawk Valley existed, when the drainage of the southern Adirondacks crossed the state to the Pennsylvania region, and he can see that there is a Mohawk Valley because a belt of soft and destructible rocks, known as the Utica and Hudson shales, extends from the region of Albany westward, between areas of harder rock on either hand. The valley has a long and intricate physical history which cannot here be told. It must suffice to say that in ancient days there

IO GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES

was no such valley, that its presence is due to a belt of destructible rocks disintegrating for long periods, that the ice sheet entered it and overrode it, that the waters of the Great Lakes poured through it for a time, until they were diverted to their present course, leaving the valley to become in due time the channel of human intercourse.

As the traveler, going up the valley, passes Rome, the bordering slopes recede on either hand and on the north are soon lost to view. On the south, however, he sees bold hills, to Syracuse and beyond. These form the northern slope of the Catskill-Alleghany plateau. The railway traverses a flat country, the bed of Lake Iroquois. This plain, studded between Syracuse and Rochester with elongated glacial hills, continues through western New York, south of Lake Ontario. It is a region of high fertility, and is now one of the garden spots of the United States.

The explorers and settlers of this part of New York found established here several powerful Indian tribes, — the Iroquois. A few generations before the white man came they banded themselves in a close alliance known as the Confederacy of the Five Nations. They called their country the " Long House." The Mohawks were the most easterly of the tribes, calling their fair valley the eastern gateway of the Long House, and they were its keepers. All the tribes, including Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas, were in a comparatively advanced state. They practiced agriculture extensively, lived in neat # and comfortable cabins, possessed considerable industrial skill, were eloquent in public counsel,

THE EASTERN GATEWAY II

and were the objects of widespread fear through their prowess in war. Whatever their progress, they were still savages, delighting in torture and given to occasional cannibalism.

Good camping grounds and natural highways have usually been found out by savage tribes, and often by wild animals, long before civilized man appears. Thus the Iroquois had made their own what Fiske calls the " most commanding military position in eastern North America." How far their power was due to qualities which they had inherited and brought with them, and to what measure it came from their environment and opportunity, is a question which neither the geographer nor the ethnologist is yet ready to answer. Whatever be the answer, the European immigrant met these sturdy aborigines, and found himself in alliance or at war. One avenue of approach to the Long House was by ascent of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. A second was through the Champlain Valley from the St. Lawrence. A third lay along the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. Thus, from the first, the rippling waters and bordering flood-plains of the Mohawk were a frequented path, traversed by French, Dutch, and English in various contact of war and peace with the natives of the land. Of these the French were the first to invade the Mohawk country. Not far away, at Ticonderoga, Champlain, the first white actor on this stage, had aided the Hurons against the Five Nations, and had thus, by the enmity aroused, determined for the English the ultimate control of the region. A later invasion was made by the French along the shore of

Lake Ontario, but they were defeated and forced to retire. There were peaceful invasions also, for in the valley captive missionaries endured torture and sometimes death. Most heroic and famous of these is Father Jogues, whose fate has recently been commemorated by a shrine of his church, erected where he perished, on the edge of a glacial terrace south of the river. The final failure of the French to dislodge or convert the natives of the valley was fraught with weighty results in the history of the new continent. Had they won this great highway, they might in later years have maintained themselves on the St. Lawrence, and might now hold the keys of the New World. It was the Hudson-Mohawk Valley which early guided the Dutch in their effort to carve a slice from the new continent. Under an English commander, Hendrik Hudson, they sailed up the river which bears his name. At the limit of navigation the Dutch later built Fort Nassau below the site of Albany and concluded a treaty with the Mohawk Indians. Its object was trade, and it went far to prevent French control of the valley. They built Fort Orange in 1622, and thus laid the foundations of Albany. In 1642 Arendt van Curler entered the Mohawk country, reported its lands as " the most beautiful that eye ever saw," and was later authorized to buy the " Great Flats," where Schenectady now stands. The old town and family names of the lower Mohawk still bear proud testimony to this wave of immigration, in the ever present Fondas, Schuylers, Sprakers, Sammonses, Van der Veers, and Yosts of the river country.

The first white settlement in the upper stretches of the valley was made by the Palatines in 1723. Following the devastating wars of Louis XIV, thousands of these stricken people left their homes on the Rhine and took refuge in England. Some of these were sent to America under a compact to reimburse the English government for their passage and for the allotment of lands. After a period of great suffering, first on the Hudson and then on the lower Mohawk, a final removal brought them to the German Flats Patent, between Little Falls and Utica. Here each family received a liberal allowance of the rich alluvium and adjacent uplands of the valley, and their descendants have been powerful in the history of the state and nation.

The next wave of immigration which swept up the valley was English. In 1784 Hugh White passed the Hollanders of Schenectady and the High Dutch settlement of German Flats, and founded Whitestown on the upper river. His coming was the signal for a lively movement from the stony slopes of New England to the inviting fields of the Long House, to which the Mohawk was the only road. Then came the stream of emigrant wagons, bearing the names of Ohio and Indiana, then in the far distant West.

These successive invasions are vividly recorded in the layers of geographic names that are spread over New York. Manhattan, New Amsterdam, New York, — this is a sample of the record. But in this case one of the names is now only a historical relic. The Indian tribal names have attached themselves to river, lake, town, and county. The student of the ice invasion gives the name of the Indian confederacy to the earlier and greater Ontario. Ontario itself is one of many melodious aboriginal names beginning and ending in o : Owasco, Otisco, Otego, Owego, Oswego, and Otsego. Happily these musical primitive names stay with many of our streams : Chittenango, Chenango, Unadilla, Genesee, Chemung, and Susquehanna.

The Dutch invasion has left plentiful memorials: Harlem, Tappan Zee, Kaaterskill, Stuyvesant, Rensselaer, or in the Mohawk Valley, Schenectady, Amsterdam, Fonda, and Schoharie. Palatine, Minden, Manheim, and Herkimer, are memorials of the refugees from the Rhine, settling in the Mohawk country. The Englishman marked his presence by names from the mother country, though this habit is by no means so common as in New England, where the first settlers had come, with fresh memories, direct from the old home. Still, we have such names as New York, Westchester, Albany, and Rochester. Then come the records of the pioneer, or prominent citizen : such are Dobbs Ferry, Wappingers Falls, and, in greater numbers as we go west, Whitestown, Gilberts-* ville, Sangerfield, Smithville, Binghamton, or Cooperstown. Another stratum is composed of names great in our history, as Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Clinton, Steuben, or Fulton. And finally we discover that a curious shower of classical names fell in early days on central New York, the memorials of men who, in a pioneer region, revered the ancient culture. They may be counted by scores : Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Ithaca, Homer, Tully, Virgil, and many more.

The stream of travel has never ceased to flow, but has rather become thousand fold in the century which has passed. Before considering the Mohawk and Hudson valleys as a modern highway, however, it will be well to observe that they were the theatre of important military events in colonial times. English forts had been erected on the upper Hudson by the year 1709, and before the year 171 2 the chain had been extended up the Mohawk to Fort Hunter, forty miles from Albany. In 1720, through the influence of William Burnet, son of Bishop Burnet and governor of New York, forts were built at Oswego and farther west at Irondequoit Bay. About the time of the French War, a number were built near the present city of Rome, or in the vicinity of the Oneida carrying-place. " These, and similar efforts on the part of the English, served to divert from the French into English channels a large Indian trade, and to make the route via Mohawk River and Oneida Lake, the shorter one between Albany and Canada, the one most generally travelled." The Mohawk and Champlain became thus the great highways trodden by hostile forces in the French and Indian Wars, until the French rule came to its end in Canada in 1760. Local histories are filled with exciting records of midnight attack, weary marches in captivity, and all the terrors of border warfare. Here, too, was fought one of the less-known but most pivotal battles in the struggle between the colonies and the mother country, the battle of Oriskany. On the south slope of the valley, a few miles west of Utica, the Dutch farmers rallied under Nicholas Herkimer, and defeated the

English and the Indians, who would otherwise have gone down the valley and supported Burgoyne in his campaign on the Hudson. The contestants on each side numbered but a few hundred, but the result is thought by many to have been decisive of the main issue of the war.

The control of the Hudson was far more vital to both Americans and British than the holding of the Mohawk. By its connection with the Champlain Valley it became the focus of strategy in the Revolution. While the colonial forces were still about Boston, Arnold had advised Dr. Warren that Ticonderoga and Crown Point be seized, both because they contained military stores and because they stood in the gateway of the north. Before the British army evacuated Boston, it was suspected that New York would be the point of attack, and General Lee, on his urgent request from Washington, was permitted to prepare for the defence of the city and the Hudson. No one can know what might have happened, if Clinton, hovering in the harbor, had not found that Lee was in New York, ready to defend it. To have gained the Hudson at that early day would have cut off New England from the Southern colonies and put to risk the independence of all. Plans for fortification went on after Clinton disappeared. The East River near Hell Gate, the Brooklyn Heights, and the Highlands to the north were included in the scheme.

When the British forces under Howe did make their appearance, in June, 1776, they were not to find the lower Hudson an easy conquest. They could drive Washington out of Long Island, and they could

Fig. 3. The Hudson Valley and the Catskills shown in Relief.

sail past Putnam's obstructions of the North River and win at Fort Washington and Fort Lee, but they could not get possession of the upper Highlands. When Sir Henry Clinton, in 1777, failed to subjugate the Hudson and make connection with Burgoyne, coming from the north, the most promising device of British strategy fell to the ground. American victory at Oriskany and Bemis Heights, and British failure on the Hudson, left the great highways of New York in the possession of the colonies. It was four years later, at Dobbs Ferry, on the lower Hudson, that Washington planned the Yorktown campaign. In the same old house, occupied as his headquarters, Washington and Carleton, in 1783, arranged for the departure of the British from American soil. Here the French allies had been received in 1 78 1, and here in 1783, two days after the conference with Carleton, a British warship fired seventeen guns in honor of the American commander. These facts are now inscribed on this old mansion, and typify the importance of the Hudson Highlands throughout the long struggle.

In the pioneer days the Mohawk was considered a navigable stream, and immigrants and freight were conveyed over its waters in boats propelled by poles. Several breaks were, however, necessary ; a first beyond Albany, because of the abrupt fall of seventy feet at Cohoes, a second at Little Falls, on account of impassable rapids over the barrier of hard rocks which the stream there encounters, and a third of two miles at the Oneida carrying-place, where the Mohawk is left to the east, and the winding course of Wood Creek is followed to Oneida Lake. Early legislative authority was given for improving navigation at these points, and soon after 1791 a canal, three miles long, with five locks, was constructed at Little Falls, and a further canal conducted boats across the Oneida carrying-place. We read that the enlarged boats, with five men, could transport, between the terminal points of navigation on the river, twelve tons in twelve days. Long lines of wagons and stages also traversed the bottom-lands, making the valley a busy highway between the East and the expanding West.

A continuous waterway, from the tidal waters of the Hudson to the blue expanse of the Laurentian lakes, became now the subject of serious discussion. Enough of the geography was known to suggest the possibility of such communication, but the following order, issued to a commander on Lake Ontario, in 1 8 14, shows also the extent of the ignorance that prevailed. " Take the Lady of the Lake and proceed to Onondaga, and take in at Nicholas Mickle's furnace a load of ball and shot, and proceed at once to Buffalo." "That means," said the perplexed officer, " that I am to go over Oswego Falls and up the river to Onondaga Lake, thence ten miles into the country by land to the furnace, and returning to Oswego, proceed to the Niagara, and up and over Niagara Falls to Buffalo ! "

The demand for a water-route was strengthened by the danger that the growing commerce of the Genesee country would be diverted, either down the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec, or by the Susquehanna to Philadelphia. It is difficult to assign credit for the suggestion of an Erie Canal. Probably the idea was conceived independently in several thoughtful minds. Such a prediction is said to have been made by Captain Joseph Carver in 1776. Elkanah Watson, describing a westward journey in 1788, voiced his " strong presentiment that a canal communication will be opened sooner or later from the Great Lakes to the Hudson." Gouverneur Morris is reported to have said, in 1803, " Lake Erie must be tapped and the waters carried across the country to the Hudson." He thought there should be a uniform declivity between the two, not taking account of locks and summit supplies of water. The legislature took up the matter in 1808, a survey was made, and in 18 10 a commission was appointed. The project then fell into abeyance until revived by De Witt Clinton in 18 17. Navigation was finally opened between Lake Erie and the Hudson on October 26, 1825. The price of transportation from Albany to Buffalo, about three hundred miles, gradually declined during the twentysix years after the opening of the canal, from $88 to $5.98 per ton. Later, railway competition became effective, and transportation from Buffalo to New York, in 1885, was but $1.57 per ton. Of the vicinity of Rochester it was said, upon completion of the canal, that her timber found market and floated away. Wheat quadrupled in price. The mud dried up, the mosquitoes, the ague and fever, and the bears left the country, and prosperity came in on every hand. In like manner the salt, gypsum, lime, and grain of Onondaga, where is now the great city of Syracuse, found ready market. But it is not enough to cite these comparatively local results. The meaning of the Mohawk Valley is that the entire region of the Great Lakes and the vast prairie and mountain regions of the West became tributary to the rising metropolis on Manhattan Island.

A similar story has now to be told of railway communication through this valley. There was no railroad in America prior to 1826. In that year a horse railway, four miles long, was built at Quincy, Mass., for the transportation of granite from the quarries. In the same year the legislature of the state of New York granted a charter to the Mohawk and Hudson River Railway Company to build a road from Albany on the Hudson to Schenectady on the Mohawk, a distance of eighteen miles. This was the first chartered railroad in America. It was completed October 31, 1826, and at once carried four hundred passengers daily. This, it will be remembered, was soon after through traffic began on the Erie Canal. In 1833 a charter was granted for a road to extend from Schenectady up the river to Utica, a distance of nearly eighty miles. This division was in running order in 1836. A further link in the westward series, between Syracuse and Auburn, was finished in 1837, and from Utica to Syracuse in 1839. A curious argument was urged for a break in the chain of roads at Utica ; namely, that otherwise it would become a mere way-station on a great line and its business would fail to develop. The discussion shows that the consolidation of the future was forecast at an early time. Gradually the line was completed from New York to Buffalo, 450 miles, and became known as the New York Central and Hudson River Railway, or more commonly as the New York Central, one of the greatest railways of the world. Four tracks lie side by side from Albany to Buffalo, two being used for passenger traffic and two for the conveyance of freight. Owing to the abrupt descent of the valley slopes to the river, but two tracks lead from Albany down to New York. A great number of minor railways pour their tribute into this artery of transportation, and it is hardly true to call Buffalo a terminal point, since many solid trains each day push on without change both south of the lakes and across Niagara, through Canada, five hundred miles farther, to Chicago. Except at West Albany there is not a difficult grade or an embankment or trestle of any importance between New York and Buffalo, and with slight exception this holds good from Buffalo to the Rocky Mountains. Two thousand miles of splendid country are thus made tributary to the harbor of New York through the river gateway which we have described.