252 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
jected her Wabash Canal/ and opened it from Toledo to Logaus- 
port in 1843. Illinois, under the same stimulus, completed her 
canal from Chicago to LaSalle in 1848. * 1 For none of these 
canals was the period of ascendancy long. The Wabash Canal 
was paralleled by a railway in 1856. In six years after the 
Illinois Canal was opened competing railroads had been run 
from Chicago to both Alton and Bock Island, on the Missis¬ 
sippi. While in the year of the Illinois Canal, 1848, the pio¬ 
neer period of railroad construction came to an end in the com¬ 
pletion of a line across Ohio which destroyed all hopes for an 
important future for the Ohio canals. 
The canal systems, the earliest efforts of the Northwest to 
improve upon the routes of nature, failed to receive fair trial. 
It had been promised for them that they would force the com¬ 
merce of the Mississippi to run up hill, 2 but they ceased to com¬ 
mand the interest of the West before they were completed. 
The railroad not only overtook, but passed and left themi far 
behind. In the autumn of 1848, when troops for Oregon serv¬ 
ice were being moved from New York to Jefferson Barracks in 
St. Louis, Niles’ Register commented upon the new record of 
eight days which they made. By steamboat, canal, and lake 
steamer they were taken to Sandusky; thence, by the new rail¬ 
road to Urbana, where a march of only fourteen miles enabled 
them to reach the northern end of the Little Miami Bailroad, 
which speedily carried them to Cincinnati and the river boat 
upon which they completed their journey to St. Louis. 3 Before 
the end of the year the gap which separated the ends of these 
roads was closed, and through service by rail was inaugurated 
3 Benton, E. J., Wabash Trade Route, In Johns Hopkins Univ. Stud¬ 
ies, XXI. Details of the opening with the oration of Gen. Cass, are in 
Niles’ Register, LXIV, 276, 343, 345, 378-381. 
1 Putnam, J. W„, E'con. Hist, of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, in 
Journal of Political Economy, XVII; Greene, E. B., and Thompson, 
C. M., Governors’ Letterbooks, 1840-1853, in Ill. State Hist. Lib. Coll., 
VII. 
2 Cf. De Bow’s Review, X, 442: “The Wabash and Erie Canal is 
stretching its line down the banks of the Wabash, and, as fast as it 
extends itself, it sweeps the whole products of the valley up the river, 
against its natural current, to the Eastern markets, by way of the 
Lakes.” 
s Niles Register, LXXIV, 191, Sept. 20, 1848. 
