Only an artificial canal could overcome the natural obstacles to water transportation, and this the leading men of New York were urging with all their power. Since 1792 the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company had been seeking systematically to improve the existing water route by building canals around the worst obstructions to navigation, the various falls and rapids of the Mohawk River. From the success of these small ventures and the no less convincing evidence of the ability of the canal to solve the whole problem, came in the minds of Gouverneur Morris, Jesse Hawley, and others the plan to connect the Atlantic with the lakes by an artificial waterway. To Governor De Witt Clinton and his associates belongs the credit of working out this stupendous undertaking. The story of its progress and achievement is too long a tale to be summarized here, but must be reserved for another chapter. In 1825 the Erie Canal of three hundred and sixty-three miles was completed and opened with appropriate ceremonies. The turnpike had followed the line of the old Iroquois trail. The canal had followed it in certain sections but had swerved off and gone northward along a minor Indian trail which passed over a natural highway formed by a wide ridge from four to six miles inland from the shores of Lake Ontario. This was what was called by the pioneers the Ridge Road from Lewiston to Rochester. One more kind of road was destined to cross the state, supplanting the lumbering stage-wagon and the slow canal-boat for the purposes of travel, and even as time went on for the carrying of freight. The first piece of railroad to be built in New York State, and one of the oldest in the United States, was the Mohawk and Hudson. It was chartered in 1826, the year after the completion of the Erie Canal, and work was begun upon it in 1830. Seventeen miles of this road, connecting Albany and Schenectady, were opened in 1831; the remaining part from Schenectady to Utica five years later. Horses were used when the road was put into operation, so that it was in reality little more than a tramway, but locomotives were soon substituted. The third engine built in the United States was sent from the West Point Foundry Works to this little piece of road. It was called the De Witt Clinton, and was built in 1831. It weighed three and a half tons where now two hundred tons is not considered especially heavy for an engine, and was fed by anthracite coal. Mr. William H. Brown, who was one of the passengers on the first trip, was so impressed by the appearance of this “singular-looking affair and its equally singular-looking appendages,” that he sketched on the back of a letter a drawing of the engine and the passenger-cars, with correct likenesses, which he afterwards enlarged to a picture six feet long which was cut out of black paper in silhouette fashion and is in possession of the Connecticut Historical Society. Reproductions