In all the romantic story of the building of this great work nothing is so picturesque as the forest scenes; the digging and scraping, the hauling and cementing, is all commonplace beside throwing the canal across the tremendous forests which were now, in 1818, to be met in that smiling country of which Utica, Syracuse and Rochester are the jewels of today. Nothing like this had been attempted in America before the Erie Canal; true the Cumberland Road was crawling away across the Alleghenies and was now in calling distance of Wheeling on the Ohio; yet this road was built largely on the route of older thoroughfares, and much of its new bed ran through open lands which pioneer fires had partially cleared. Moreover it was built on the surface of the ground. The Erie Canal forged straight on where no foot but the silent hunter's had stepped; its course was marked in forests so dark that the surveyor's stakes could hardly be distinguished in the gloom—where not even the smoke of a pioneer's fire had ever penetrated; it was not built on the ground, but dug through the ground, and the vast network
