Only one work connecting the two valleys is as yet completed, this
is the Ohio canal, which traverses that State from North to South,
extending from Portsmouth, on the Ohio, to the little city of
Cleveland, which has sprung up on the shore of the lake since the canal
was made. It is 334 miles in length, and cost nearly 4,500,000 dollars,
or about 13,500 dollars per mile. This is low, yet the locks are all
of hewn stone; the ground, however, was very favorable. The work was
executed at the expense of the State, and was undertaken at the same
time at Pennsylvania and Baltimore, on the traces of New York, started
in the course of internal improvements. This young State, with a
population of farmers, not having a single engineer within her limits,
and none of whose citizens had ever seen any other canal than those of
New York, has thus, with the aid of some second rate engineers borrowed
from that State, constructed a canal longer than any in France, with
more skill and intelligence than was displayed by Pennsylvania, in
spite of the scientific lights of Philadelphia. This farming population
of Ohio, almost wholly of New England origin, has a business instinct,
a practical shrewdness, and a readiness to exercise all trades without
having learned them, that would be sought in vain in the Anglo-German
population of Pennsylvania. The legislators, under whose direction the
public works were executed in both States, were, as is usual in the
United States, a perfect copy of the mass of their constituents, with
all its good and bad qualities. The Ohio canal commissioners added to a
noble disinterestedness an admirable good sense, and to them is due the
greater part of the glory of having planned and executed it. They were
farmers and lawyers, who set themselves about making canals, naturally,
easily, and without even a suspicion that in Europe no one dares to
undertake such a work without long preparation and scientific studies.
Now it is no longer an art in that State to plan and construct canals,
but a mere trade; the science of canalling is there become quite an
affair of the common people. The first-comer in a bar-room will
explain to you, over his glass of whiskey, how to feed the summit level
and how to construct a lock. All our mysteries in civil engineering are
here fallen into the hands of the public, very much as the methods of
descriptive geometry are to be found in the workshops, where they had
been handed down by tradition, ages before Monge gave them the sanction
of theory.
I have before said that Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois form a great
triangle, wholly comprised within the Mississippi valley, with the
exception of a narrow strip along the lakes, belonging, of course, to
the St. Lawrence basin. The general slope of the surface is from north
to south; the streams run mostly in that direction; this is especially
true of the great tributaries of the Ohio. This arrangement of the
secondary valleys is no less favourable to the construction of canals
between the lakes, on the one side, and the Ohio and Mississippi on the
other, than the configuration and humidity of the dividing table-land.