Since the beginning of the century there had been more or less talk of a canal to connect the Hudson with Lake Erie, and in 1816 the legislature of New York voted to undertake the building of the Erie Canal. The adoption of this plan and its success were due mainly to De Witt Clinton, who set forth in a carefully reasoned memorial the advantages of the proposed waterway. For years thousands of men had been employed in the work, and many difficulties had been met and solved. Commissioners had been appointed to determine the route which the canal should follow and to oversee its construction. They conducted operations in three sections, intrusting the job of digging and filling to contractors, no contract covering any large amount of territory. The eastern section extended along the line of the Iroquois trail up the Mohawk Valley from Albany to Rome. On this part of the route swift streams had to be crossed, and falls and rapids had to be passed. Where the canal crossed creeks and streams, guard locks were built to keep the water from rushing into the canal and overflowing it. At Little Falls there was such a narrow space between the mountains that rocks had to be blasted to make a bed for the canal, and a wall twenty or thirty feet high, rising from the channel of the Mohawk River, built to support it. Other falls on this section required aqueducts and elaborate series of locks. The middle section followed the line of trail and turnpike as far as Syracuse, and then went northwards to Clyde and Montezuma. It had the greater part of the “Long Level,” a sixty-nine-mile stretch from a point east of Utica to Syracuse, without any locks. At Montezuma, near the beginning of the third section, the builders came to the edge of the Cayuga marshes, and here they erected an embankment, nearly two miles long and so high that boats were often seventy-two feet above the level of the swamps. At Rochester a great aqueduct was built at the Genesee River. Between Rochester and Buffalo the canal ran for a long distance inside the great ridge which rises south of Lake Ontario, but at Lockport it crossed the mountains. Here was performed one of the most difficult engineering feats of the whole construction. An excavation was made through the three-mile ridge at an average depth of twenty feet, and five great locks were built, each twelve feet high, so that vessels were elevated and dropped sixty feet.