Westward Expansion AMERICA'S PUSH TO THE PACIFIC THE ERIE CANAL JEANNE NAGLE Britannica Educational Publishing IN ASSOCIATION WITH ROSEN EDUCATIONAL SERVICES
INTRODUCTION The American frontier was an escape and a place of hope for those willing and able to take their futures into their own hands Celebrated then and ever since in poetry short stories novels drama films music and paintings the epic westward movement movement in the United States has never failed to excite the imaginations of people everywhere In the United States the frontier moved in stages beginning with the eastern settlements the original thirteen colonies After the American Revolution the pioneers gradually crossed the Appalachian Mountains and went into the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys Some settlers arrived with eyes open and were happy with what they found Many did not expect the real frontier which was a hard place to live in Most of the normal expectations of life were missing One made do with what was available and normally that was very little Grinding poverty was the living standard standard at least until the frontier began to give way to civilization 4
INTRODUCTION As the country expanded westward settlers in western western New York Pennsylvania and Ohio were faced with the problem of transporting goods The places to sell their farm products were the large eastern cities such as New York City In turn the settlers needed the supplies supplies and manufactured goods that were sold in these cities Wagon freight was too expensive it cost a hundred hundred dollars to send one ton of freight from Buffalo to New York City and the trip took twenty days The new flat bottomed river steamships offered cheap transportation transportation but there were no through water routes between the large population centers of the East and the farmlands farmlands of the developing West Canals built to link natural waterways were the solution solution The Erie Canal was the first canal in the United States to connect the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean Lake Ontario Oswego Oswego Canal Oneida Lake Rome Erie Sacandaga Reservoir Niagara Falls Lockport Rochester Cayuga Seneca m Canals Syracuse Utica Little Falls Buffalo Lakes Canal Canandaigua Lake Lake Canal Champlain Cohoes Hudson R Troy Albany Erie Cayuga Keuka Lake NEW YORK Seneca Lake 0 25 40 25 50 m 50 min 80 km Ina 2008 Encyclopædia Britannica Inc 0 Map of the Erie Canal
