Other cities also hoped to secure some of the profits of dealing with the rapidly growing West. The tourist on his way down the Potomac to Mount Vernon, the home of Washington, will pass by Alexandria, a quiet old town of about fifteen thousand people. Washington himself thought it possible that Alexandria might get a good share of the trade from Detroit and other places on the Lakes and on the Ohio river. All this seems strange to us, because since the days of our great-grandfathers the traffic has been going largely to New York. The cause of the change was the Erie canal. Yet in 1818, a few months after the canal was begun, an Albany newspaper discussed very earnestly, as one of the chief questions of the day, the danger that Philadelphia would take away the western trade. Flour, salt, and potash had been taken to New York in large quantities, but all these products were carried as far as Schenectady in little ten-ton boats, by way of Wood creek and the Mohawk. As the business grew it was seen to be impossible always to drag the boats up Wood creek with horses, and that the small canal, ten feet wide, which had been cut around the rapids at Little Falls, could not serve the purposes of another generation. Hence for many years there had been talk of a canal to join the Lakes and the Hudson, thus making navigation without a break from the interior of the country to the Atlantic ocean at New York. The credit for first thinking of such a canal has been claimed for several men, but probably it was “in the air,” and many thought of it at about the same time. Gouverneur Morris, one of the famous New York statesmen of the day, proposed that lake Erie should be “tapped” and its waters led to the Hudson. The surface of this lake is five hundred and seventy-three feet above tide water at Albany. It was Morris’s idea to dig a channel, with a gently sloping bottom, which should send the water east in a stream deep enough to float a boat. The water thus turned from its course would go to Albany instead of flowing through the Niagara and the St. Lawrence. There were, however, difficulties about the plan which Morris did not understand, and it was never carried out. [Illustration: FIG. 13. DE WITT CLINTON] The great water way is often known as “Clinton’s Ditch.” This name was doubtless given in ridicule by those who did not think it could be built. There were many who laughed at the surveyors when they saw them looking about, using their levels, and driving their stakes in the woods and swamps. It was even said that to dig such a canal was impossible, that it would cost too much money, that it would take too much time, and that the canal itself could never be made to hold water.