ENGINEERING. 293 



lay in concentration of attention on the subject in hand, and he kept out of the 

 way of anything that could distract his attention. 



The era of canal building in England was rather less than seventy years : 

 between 1760 and 1830, 



During the last decade of the last century, several efforts were made to con- 

 nect the detached navigable reaches of some of the rivers in this country, by 

 means of short canals and locks. One of these was undertaken at Richmond 

 under the inspiration of General Washington. Another was at Philadelphia, 

 around the Falls of Schuylkill. But the one of special interest in the history of 

 engineering, was at Little Falls on the Mohawk. 



The great thoroughfares between the City of New York and the west and 

 northwest was up the Hudson and through the valley of the Mohawk. The 

 transportation through that valley was partly by three, five, or seven-horse teams 

 over the Genessee Turnpike, 1 and partly by boats on the river. Those boats 

 were like what on the Delaware we used to call Durham boats, which were eight 

 feet wide and sixty feet long, drawing, when loaded, a foot or two, and carrying 

 from ten to twenty tons. They were pushed up stream by two or four men, with 

 setting-poles held on their course by the captain with a long steering-oar. 



At Little Falls the descent of river is over forty feet, and, of course, the boats 

 could not pass, but their cargo was carried by the portage of two miles, to other 

 boats above or below. To avoid this canal and locks were built. They were 

 finished in 1794. Jedediah Morse (father of S. F. B. Morse of telegraphic fame) 

 published his great standard American Gazetteer a few years later, and in it he 

 quotes the following expression of the public sentiment of the time : "The open- 

 ing of this navigation is a vast acquisition to the commerce of this State." It was 

 conjectured that these locks (which a man could almost jump across), and similar 

 "great works" west of them, might soon make the little town of Albany the 

 capital of a great empire. 



The Mohawk continued to be the principal artery of commerce from New 

 York to the interior, until the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. 



Mr. Weston, "that haughty British engineer," as an old gazetteer calls him, 

 was brought over from England to build the locks at Little Falls and elsewhere. 

 One of his assistants was a land surveyor of Rome, New York, named Benjamin 

 Wright, or Judge Wright, as he was called. When, years afterward, it was de. 

 cided to build the Erie Canal, Judge Wright, though having only the slender ex- 

 perience he had acquired under Weston, was appointed chief engineer. The 

 skill and good judgment which was shown by this father of American engineer- 

 ing, the few errors into which he and his still more inexperienced assistants fell, 

 the great effects produced by them with the means at their command, and the 



1 The migration to the West, (which then meant the Genessee country) was over this turnpike in horse 

 or ox teams; the patriarch of the family and his wife having on their shoulders the same black and white 

 coverlet, and the big brass kettle full of dishes hanging under the hinder axletree of the wagon. Some of their 

 grandchildren now sit in the high places of the Nation. 



VI— 19 



