The Holland Land Co., and Canal Construction, in Western New York (Volume 14); Buffalo-Black Rock Harbor Papers, Journals and Documents (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ERIE CANAL AND THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST By LOIS KIMBALL MATHEWS, Ph.d., Instructor in History at Vassar College. Copyright, 1910, by L. K. Mathiws. All rittIs reserved. THE ERIE CANAL THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST1 By LOIS KIMBALL MATHEWS, Ph.d., Instructor in History at Vassar College. The story of the advance of the frontier in this country has but just begun to be told. So many factors, so mc.ny different peoples, so many routes are involved, that the necessity for many separate studies is obvious. At last some master will combine them all, and give us on an immense canvas a picture of the whole movement by which the frontier has been thrust on toward the west and the northwest until now it has disappeared. The buildinj of the Erie canal was only one of the several factors operative between 1825 and 1840 in peopling the territory betweerr? the Hudson river and the Mississippi.2 Moreover, it affected only insignificantly, if at all, the movement of population below a line cutting across the middle of Pennsylvania west of the Alleghany mountains, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. For our present purposes, then, the tract most vitally affected by the opening of this waterway lies west 1. Paper read at the Conference on Western History, meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City, December 30, 1909. 2. Sec "History of the Canal System of the State of New York," edited by Noble E. Whitford, 1, 213, quoting a report of a committee of the New York Assembly, 1854. Too much stress is laid there by local patriotism on the effect of the canal. of the Hudson river, east of the Mississippi, and north of the fortieth parallel. It is the purpose of this paper to show first, contemporary opinion as to the necessity for the canal; second,...