THE RAGING CANAL.
The world has certainly grown. Putting the period just in time, the
statement is a safe one--"has certainly grown." When De Witt Clinton
developed the Dutch idea in America, and made a line of poetry from
tide-water to Lake Erie, which people vilified and christened
"Clinton's Ditch," the world was not quite ready for it, and the
Governor went ahead in a canal-boat! Fancy that world distanced by a
three-horse-power tandem team at six miles an hour to-day.
But it was a stately affair then. There was a barrel of salt water
standing at the bow of the packet-boat. There was the proud and
portly Governor erect behind the barrel like Virgil's ears of
attention--_arrectis auribus_. There were the horses rosetted and
bespangled. There were the high and mighty dignitaries on deck,
clustered like young bees on a hive's front door-step at swarming
time. There were the enthusiastic crowds along the way. Arrived at
Buffalo, amid surges of music and rattle of cannon, the Chief
Executive poured that brackish Atlantic water into the fine indigo
blue of Lake Erie. It was not quite so grand as the old ceremonial
when the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic, but it _meant_ a
great deal more. It meant Bishop Berkely, who said something about a
Westward-going star, of which some mention has been made once or
twice. It meant Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, in that far future which
is our instant present. It meant EMPIRE! You can count the acts that
have meant more, within a hundred years, upon four fingers and a
thumb--more than ladling out that barrel of sea-water in a strange
place. Well, the boats began to slide along the thoroughfare of water,
and go up stairs and down stairs in a strange way; and they multiplied
like the sluggard's schoolma'am,--who was his _aunt_, also,--till
there are boats in sight in summer days everywhere between Buffalo and
tide-water; and they grow larger, till there are a thousand craft on
the Erie Canal of greater tonnage than the vessel from whose deck
Lawrence sent up the dying charge that made him as deathless as the
Pleiades.
The cargoes of those boats, when they began to creep, was something
wonderful: men, women and children, plows, axes and Bibles; teachers,
preachers and Ramage presses, along with bedsteads that corded up and
creaked like gates in high winds; big wheels, little wheels and reels,
looms with timber enough in them for saw-mills and a log or two left to
begin upon. So you see, when they went West in those days they packed
up their homes and took them along. You were sure of their finding
anchor-ground somewhere, for how could a man go adrift with a wife,
five children, a brass kettle and a feather-bed tied to him? You were
sure, too, that the world would not be wronged out of a home--perhaps a
better and a happier one than the man set afloat on Clinton's Ditch for
a place nearer sundown.
Thus it was that the grand westward drift of things received its
first impulse. Churches with steeples to them, school-houses full of
children, newspapers, farms, Christian homes, not one of which
appeared on the bills of lading, were all tumbled aboard the canal-boat
amidships or somewhere, though nobody seemed to know it. The mighty
fleet of white-decked "liners," looking like Brobdignagian--that word
won't hurt you if you don't go near it!--ants' eggs with windows in
them, has had more to do with the march of civilization than all the
aquatic armaments that ever thundered. Sometimes, scurrying along in
the cars at thirty miles an hour, you catch glimpses of nests of these
eggs adrift in the green fields, floating by the white villages, and
advancing, by contrast, so wonderfully slow that they go backward.
Now and then a chit of a girl, with a little market-basket of garden
vegetables upside down on the top of her head, or a young fellow who
parts his hair in the middle, and has nothing else to part with worth
mentioning, catches a glimpse of the eggs, too, and tosses a sniff of
contempt at them out of the window, never dreaming that he looks upon a
letter or two of the alphabet of progress.
I never see one of those boats without a sigh of regret, not because I
want to be captain or cook or anything, but because I took my first
foreign voyage on one of them, and the boat was a "liner" at that! We
"took ship" at Oneida, took water along the way, took soundings when we
ran aground, took steamer at Buffalo. It was a taking trip. Of the
passengers, one turned into Doctor of Divinity, another into Professor
of Latin in the University of Michigan, a third into President of a
Southern College, a fourth into the pastor of a Michigan church, two
bright and pleasant young ladies into dust long ago, and the seventh
and youngest into the writer of this sketch.
It was a merry, care-free party. Not one of the survivors can say
that for himself to-day. We were clustered in the little forward cabin.
We ran over the deck to the after-cabin for meals. We sat upon our
baggage, and took something more than a bird's-eye view of the country.
We told stories and sang songs and dreamed dreams. We went into cool
locks where the water splashed and tumbled about the bows, and were
glad. We suffocated ourselves with blankets when we crossed the
Montezuma mosquitoes. Why not? Verily, there is but one Marsh there,
but of mosquitoes there are several. I have heard of Montezuma's death.
It was some time ago, but it would have been no wonder had he died
young, not because of the love of the Gods, but of the mosquitoes. We
sat on the deck and watched the steersman's intonations. When he cried,
"Low _bridge_!" we merely ducked our heads; but when he said, "_Low_
bridge!" down we went flat upon the floor like a parcel of undiscovered
idolaters. The Palinurus slued the stern of the boat around, and we
leaped off upon the "heel-path" and took a stroll. He drove bows on
upon the opposite shore, and we took a walk on the "tow-path" with the
"drive," who looked like a bundle of old clothes, was as smart as a
whip, and profane as "our army in Flanders." He sang songs through the
night and the rain as happy as a frog, and when, covered with mud and
water, he came aboard to eat, he looked like a bewildered muskrat, and
his tracks like a muskrat's also.
We used to hear one genuine word of old English in those seafaring
days. Perhaps some other ambitious "liner" was pulling out ahead of us.
You confer with the "drive" as to the chance of passing it. You offer
him a shilling to try, and his under jaw drops like the lower half of a
bellows. But promise him a "scale"--scale, skilling, shilling--and he
gets all the tough pull out of his tandem that there is in it, and
goes by if he can. Websterian "probabilities" says that is not the
derivation of "scale" at all, but no matter. So you see, we went to sea
without leaving shore. Now and then a cigar-shaped packet, fuller of
windows on the sides than ever a German flute was of finger-holes,
would pass us with a swash and the blast of a bugle to "open lock," and
the three horses at a swinging trot, the deck crowded with passengers,
and the cook in the kitchen stewing and frying and roasting himself and
the dinner in the same kettles.
It was the aristocrat of canal craft, the packet was, the captain was
_somebody_, and wore gloves, and when on my voyage I saw one coming, I
went down into the cabin, red as to my ears, for something I had
forgotten, and that I never found in time to come out of the egg till
the packet had gone by. It has since occurred to me that possibly the
redness of ears at that time might not have been a quality so
remarkable as their length. How you would like the snuggery of the
cabin now, and the shelf of a berth that you couldn't turn over in if a
heavy fellow happened to be sagging on the shelf above you, and the
canal-banks even with the top of your head when you sit down, and the
sun about as hot upon the roof as if he had actually taken a deck
passage and come bodily aboard, is not a matter of doubt. But the
memory of that voyage is pleasant, after all--after all _what_? all
these years; like the music of Caryl, "pleasant but mournful to the
soul." And should this short story of a long voyage bring back to any
reader some such journey that _he_ took in the years that are gone,
some cheerful hours he spent, some cherished friends he made, some
faces he learned to love, that for him shall never be changed nor sent
away, then these paragraphs are not vain.