A NATION REALIZED 121it was transporting a greater volume of material than
the entire Mississippi River system. This fever of
activity created new towns all along the route,
and expanded existing western settlements at
Buffalo and Detroit.
The Erie Canal ushered in a canal-building boom
throughout the country that lasted until the advent
of railroads in the 1840s. Together with steamboats,
canals shrank distance, fueled migration, and fed
commerce, shifting an economy centered on local
transactions—and often involving barter—to one
centered on cash. Like the digital revolution of our
own day, canals advanced communication, realigned
regional networks, and created entirely new markets.
The effects are even more striking when we recall
a map made by Cadwallader Colden in the 1720s
(page 87). Colden had been sent west to forge an
agreement with the Iroquois Confederacy that would
facilitate the safe travel of other tribes through their
territory. On that map the future path of the Erie
Canal is in a region characterized as “The Country
of the Five Nations,” an indication of Iroquois power
and dominance at that time.
A century later, Colden’s grandson, Cadwallader
David Colden, oversaw the construction of the canal
as the mayor of New York City. To commemorate this
achievement, the younger Colden published a history
of western New York, stressing that not a single white
inhabitant lived in the area as late as the 1780s. In
his history, Colden reprinted his grandfather’s map
to demonstrate just how much had changed over the
course of a century.
While the elder Colden mapped western New York
as Native American land, his grandson presented
the entire state as the arena of white settlement.
Moreover, here Colden celebrates the transportation
improvements and their effect on New York’s
economic future. Along the bottom of the map,
cross-sectional diagrams demonstrate the
engineering achievement not just of the “Grand
Canal,” but an earlier canal constructed from Lake
Champlain to the Hudson River. The canals not only
integrated a geographically expansive state, they
transformed its presence in the larger region. These
projects amplified the power and prosperity of New
York, and profoundly shaped the emerging territories
of the Midwest.