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 above ground in those ancient woods was not less easily penetrated than was the straggling mass of root and fiber that was found for many feet below the surface. No work in America before its time began to compare in magnitude with grubbing that sixty-foot aisle from Lake Erie to the Hudson and the digging of a forty-foot canal in its center. Since necessity is the mother of invention, it is not strange that here in the New York woods should have been perfected some strange machinery--great tugging monsters which should bodily haul down immense trees with a crash and pluck out green stumps with single groan. It may be these engines of forestry were imported from Europe; we know from the correspondence of that indefatigable promoter, Washington, that great engines for clearing trees from forest land were known in Europe and were probably imported to America not long after the Revolutionary War.[37] "Machinery has hitherto been used," recorded the commissioners of the Erie Canal, "with most success, in the heavy business of grubbing and clearing. By means of an endless screw, connected with a cable, a wheel and a crank, one man is able to bring down a tree of the largest size, without any cutting about its roots. For this purpose these means are all, except the cable, combined in a small but very strong frame of wood and iron.--This frame is immovably fastened on the ground, at a distance of perhaps one hundred feet from the foot of the tree, around the trunk of which fifty or sixty feet up, one end of the cable is secured, the other being connected with the roller. When this is done, the man turns the crank, which successively moves the screw, the wheel and the roller, on which, as the cable winds up, the tree must gradually yield, until, at length, it is precipitated by the weight of its top. The force which may be exerted in this way, upon a tree, is