But the Clermont was only the beginning of steam-driven craft on the rivers and lakes of our country. Four years afterward (1811), the first steamboat west of the Alleghany Mountains began its route from Pittsburg down the Ohio, and a few years later similar craft were in use on the Great Lakes. THE NATIONAL ROAD AND THE ERIE CANAL But while steamboats made the rivers and lakes easy routes for travel and traffic, something was needed to make journeys by land less difficult. To meet this need, new highways had to be supplied, and this great work of building public roads was taken up by the United States Government. Many roads were built, but the most important was the one known as the National Road. [Illustration: _From the painting by C.Y. Turner in the DeWitt Clinton High School, New York._ The Opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.] It ran from Cumberland, on the Potomac, through Maryland and Pennsylvania to Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio River. From there it was extended to Indiana and Illinois, ending at Vandalia, which at that time was the capital of Illinois. It was seven hundred miles long, and cost seven million dollars. This smooth and solid roadway was eighty feet wide; it was paved with stone and covered with gravel. Transportation became not only much easier but also much cheaper. The road filled a long-felt need and a flood of travel and traffic immediately swept over it. [Illustration: _From the painting by C.Y. Turner in the DeWitt Clinton High School, New York._ The Ceremony Called "The Marriage of the Waters."] Another kind of highway which proved to be of untold value to both the East and the West, was the canal, or artificial waterway connecting two bodies of water. The most important was the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie, begun in 1817. This new idea received the same scornful attention from the unthinking as "Fulton's Folly." By many it was called "Clinton's Ditch," after Governor DeWitt Clinton, to whose foresight we are indebted for the building of this much-used waterway. The scoffers shook their heads and said: "Clinton will bankrupt the State"; "The canal is a great extravagance"; and so on. But he did not stop because of criticism, and in 1825 the canal was finished. The undertaking had been pushed through in eight years. It was a great triumph for Clinton and a proud day for the State. When the work was completed the news was signalled from Buffalo to New York in a novel way. As you know, there was neither telephone nor telegraph then. But at intervals of five miles all along the route cannon were stationed. When the report from the first cannon was heard, the second was fired, and thus the news went booming eastward till, in an hour and a half, it reached New York.