In the West there was much the same improvement. The Mississippi and Ohio swarmed with steamboats, which came up the river from New Orleans to St. Louis in twenty-five days and went down with the current in eight. Little, however, had been done to connect the East with the West. Until the appearance of the steamboat in 1812, the merchants of Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Louisville, and a host of other towns in the interior bought the produce of the Western settlers, and floating it down the Ohio and the Mississippi sold it at New Orleans for cash, and with the money purchased goods at Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, and carried them over the mountains to the West. Some went in sailing vessels up the Hudson from New York to Albany, were wagoned to the Falls of the Mohawk, and then loaded in "Schenectady boats," which were pushed up the Mohawk by poles to Utica, and then by canal and river to Oswego, on Lake Ontario. From Oswego they went in sloops to Lewiston on the Niagara River, whence they were carried in ox wagons to Buffalo, and then in sailing vessels to Westfield, and by Chautauqua Lake and the Allegheny River to Pittsburg. Goods from Philadelphia and Baltimore were hauled in great Conestoga wagons drawn by four and six horses across the mountains to Pittsburg. The carrying trade alone in these ways was immense. More than 12,000 wagons came to Pittsburg in a year, bringing goods on which the freight was $1,500,000. [Illustration: Boats on the Mohawk[1]] [Footnote 1: From an old print.] [Illustration: THOMAS HARPER, AGENT FOR INLAND TRANSPORTATION] With the appearance of the steamboat on the Mississippi and Ohio, this trade was threatened; for the people of the Western States could now float their pork, flour, and lumber to New Orleans as before, and bring back from that city by steamboat the hardware, pottery, dry goods, cotton, sugar, coffee, tea, which till then they had been forced to buy in the East[1]. [Footnote 1: McMaster's _History of the People of the United States_, Vol. IV., pp. 397-410, 419-421.] This new way of trading was so much cheaper than the old, that it was clear to the people of the Eastern States that unless they opened up a still cheaper route to the West, their Western trade was gone. [Illustration: The Erie Canal] %313. The Erie Canal.%--In 1817 the people of New York determined to provide such a route, and in that year they began to cut a canal across the state from the Hudson at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. To us, with our steam shovels and drills, our great derricks, our dynamite, it would be a small matter to dig a ditch 4 feet deep, 40 feet wide, and 363 miles long. But on July 4, 1817, when Governor De Witt Clinton turned the first sod, and so began the work, it was considered a great undertaking, for the men of those days had only picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and gunpowder to do it with.