As Melish neared Utica, the houses along the road were so thick that it was for a considerable way like a continuous village. Yet here as everywhere on the route, back of the neat white houses with their green blinds and roomy verandas, and the fertile, cultivated plots of ground around them, the land would be covered with stumps from one to three feet high, and the smoke of the clearing fires could often be seen in the distance. The expense of the trip from Buffalo to Utica had been ten dollars and ninety-one cents. Melish had made his journey on horseback, although he met many coaches on the way. In 1819 an Englishwoman describes a trip which she made from Albany to Utica in one of the fifteen coaches that made the trip daily. On her way she met the man who eighteen years previously had carried in his coat pocket the weekly mail between the two towns. She found the journey rough, but her companions good-humored, intelligent, and accommodating. She recommended the stage-coach for the traveller who wished “to see people as well as things,--to hear intelligent remarks upon the country and its inhabitants, and to understand the rapid changes that each year brings forth, and if he be of an easy temper, not incommoded with trifles, not caring to take, nor understanding to give, offence, liking the interchange of little civilities with strangers, and pleased to make an acquaintance, though it should be but one of an hour, with a kind-hearted fellow-creature, and if too he can bear a few jolts,--_not_ a few,--and can suffer to be driven sometimes too quickly over a rough road, and sometimes too slowly over a smooth one,--then let him, by all means, fill a corner in the post-coach or stage-wagon.... But if he be of an unsociable humour, easily put out of his way, or as the phrase is, _a very particular gentleman_--then he will hire or purchase his own dearborn or light wagon and travel _solus cum solo_ with his own horse.” This was turnpike travel in the early nineteenth century, and this was the route over which thousands of families made their way to the lakes. For years the tide of emigration went on until the story of western New York was repeated in every part of the region, and the wilderness of twenty and thirty years before became the seat of thriving towns and cities. CHAPTER XX THE ERIE CANAL