The first surveyors drove along the route of the canal five lines of stakes. The two outer rows were sixty feet apart, indicating the space to be cleared. Between these were two other rows forty feet apart, which indicated the exact width of the canal, and in the middle a single line of stakes marked the centre of the waterway. It was eight years and four months since the surveyors had driven these stakes, amid the mocking laughter of the inhabitants, who thought these dreamers crazy to plant their bits of wood in swamps and forests, on rocky ledges and in watercourses. In spite of swamp fever, which had at one time laid low a thousand men, and in spite of rough tools and almost insuperable obstacles, the three hundred and sixty-three miles were at length completed. By eighty-three locks and eighteen aqueducts, covering a descent of 568 feet from Lake Erie to the Hudson, navigation was made open. Sections of the canal had been in use since 1819, and now, on October 26, 1825, Governor Clinton had started on the first trip along the entire length of the waterway which had long been familiarly known as “Clinton’s Big Ditch.” The city of Buffalo was particularly rejoiced over this occasion because the western terminus of the canal had long been in doubt and had only very recently been settled in favor of that town over her rival, the present suburb of Black Rock. Buffalo was located on the shore of Lake Erie at the mouth of the Niagara River. Black Rock was three miles down the river, and had a good open harbor, in which its citizens had recently built a two-mile pier to protect vessels from the waves of the lake and river. Buffalo Creek had a troublesome sand-bar which injured its harbor, and the Black Rock settlers had built their pier in the hope of stopping the canal at their town instead of having it run on to Buffalo. When the canal commissioners came to decide on the terminus, they were of the opinion that the current of the river was too swift at Black Rock, and that the danger from ice and sunken rocks was too great. They would bring the canal to Buffalo if that harbor could be improved. When the public-spirited men of that place heard that, they agreed together that if the canal was brought to their town, they would remove the sand-bar. They clubbed together and on their own personal notes borrowed from the state twelve thousand dollars, a large sum in those days, with which they removed the sand-bar and made a safe harbor.