Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 | Page 8

no sound Save its own dashings.
The water-courses of a country are not less valuable to it than the little
Pactolus was to the ancient city of Sardis, through whose streets it ran
freighted with gold. But these natural highways of human intercourse,
like most of Nature's provisions, are capable of indefinite artificial
extension and multiplication. Our finest modern canals are scarcely
smaller, and certainly capable of more uninterrupted, safe and heavy
navigation, than many of the rivers which have figured in history, and
which Pascal so graphically described as "moving roads that carry us
whither we wish to go."
Such considerations as these have a profound bearing on many of the
great economic problems of the age, but on none more than upon the
grand problem which is now agitating the national mind in the United

States: How to connect its seaboard and central regions by water. A
glance at the map of the Union shows that its vast interior lies
ensconced between the two mountain-walls of the Rocky chain on its
western side and the Appalachian chain on its eastern side. Hemmed in
by these barriers is the immense expanse of the most prolific, populous
and prosperous section on the continent, which, taking its name from
"the Father of Waters," is geographically designated as the Mississippi
Valley, estimated by Professor J. W. Foster of the Chicago University
to contain an area of two million four hundred and fifty-five thousand
square miles, equal to that of all Europe excepting Russia, Norway and
Sweden. Unlike the inland basin of Asia, in which the vast,
mountain-girt Desert of Gobi stretches out its seas of sand, stony,
sterile and desolate, the inland basin of America is its garden-spot and
granary. Swept by the vapor-bearing winds and rain-distilling clouds
from the Gulf of Mexico, and blessed with an excellent climate, it
contains all the physical elements of an empire within itself. Its position
makes it the national strong-hold, so that with military men it has
grown into an adage, "Whoever is master of the Mississippi is lord of
the continent." It is yet but half developed, but no far-seeing mind can
form any estimate of its future growth and opulence. "With a varied
and splendid entourage--an imperial cordon of States--nothing," says
Dr. John W. Draper of New York, "can prevent the Mississippi Valley
from becoming in less than three centuries the centre of human power."
The only wall of partition that shuts it off from the great marts of the
world is formed by the chain of the Alleghanies, which stretch along
the Atlantic seaboard, from south-west to north-east, for twelve
hundred miles. This natural barrier, with a mean altitude of two
thousand feet, is destitute of a central axis, and consists, as the two
Rogerses, who have most fully explored its ridges, showed, of a series
of convex and concave flexures, "giving them the appearance of so
many colossal entrenchments." With a broad artificial channel cut
through its sunken defiles and picturesque gorges, there would at once
be opened a gateway for the flow and reflow of the heavy commerce of
the Western World.
In 1781 the practical and philosophic eye of Thomas Jefferson
perceived the national necessity for a great trans-Alleghany water-line,

and early in the year 1786, though still tossed on the wave of the
Revolution, and not yet recovered from the shock of British invasion,
the State which gave birth to the author of the "Declaration of
Independence" declared for the enterprise. With all the means and
energy at its command it pushed forward the work from year to year,
and directed it, as Mr. Jefferson had proposed, so as to connect the
head-waters of the James River, flowing from the Alleghany summits
to the ocean, with the mountain-river known as the Great Kanawha,
which rises near the fountains of the upper James and descends into the
broad bosom of the Ohio. Although this undertaking was prosecuted
slowly at first, it was permanently recognized as one that must go on; in
1832 and 1835 it received new impulses; and in 1840 it had reached the
piedmont districts. In 1847 a powerful impetus was given to the work,
and it was thenceforth, till 1856, forced rapidly westward up the eastern
slopes of the Alleghanies, as a complete and working structure, above a
point three hundred miles from the Atlantic capes, and two hundred
miles from Richmond, leaving an unfinished gap to the upper or
navigable part of Kanawha River of a little over one hundred and fifty
miles. This enormous work was more than half finished at an outlay of
$10,436,869--a sum which, during the economic period of its
expenditure, went as far as nearly twice that amount would go now.
By recent legislation the State of Virginia proposes to turn over