From there it was extended
to Indiana and Illinois, ending at Vandalia, which at that time was the
capital of Illinois. It was seven hundred miles long, and cost seven
million dollars.
This smooth and solid roadway was eighty feet wide; it was paved with
stone and covered with gravel. Transportation became not only much easier
but also much cheaper. The road filled a long-felt need and a flood of
travel and traffic immediately swept over it.
[Illustration: _From the painting by C.Y. Turner in the DeWitt Clinton
High School, New York._
The Ceremony Called "The Marriage of the Waters."]
Another kind of highway which proved to be of untold value to both the
East and the West, was the canal, or artificial waterway connecting two
bodies of water.
The most important was the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River and
Lake Erie, begun in 1817. This new idea received the same scornful
attention from the unthinking as "Fulton's Folly." By many it was called
"Clinton's Ditch," after Governor DeWitt Clinton, to whose foresight we
are indebted for the building of this much-used waterway. The scoffers
shook their heads and said: "Clinton will bankrupt the State"; "The canal
is a great extravagance"; and so on.
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