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plenty, and whose stoves and fireplaces were suited to its use, the new fuel seemed unnecessary, and the experiment failed completely. At last, in 1798, a navigation company was organized to clear the Lehigh of obstructions, and, as one hindrance was about to be removed, interest in the mine revived, and the Lehigh company leased its property to several men, who in their turn gave up the enterprise as hopeless till the war with Great Britain and the blockade of the coast made Virginia coal scarce, and turned the attention of a wire-making firm at the Falls of the Schuylkill to the possibility of using the stone coal of Pennsylvania. Then for the third time the attempt was made, and five ark loads were started from Mauch Chunk. Three were wrecked on the way; two reached the city in safety, and were sold at twenty-one dollars a ton to the wire-makers, who then had before them the task of discovering how the coal should be ignited. Failure attended every effort till, at the close of a whole night spent in the attempt to light a fire in the furnace, the workmen shut the door and started for home in disgust. One of them, however, left his coat, and on returning a little later to get it was astonished to find the coal burning brightly and the furnace red hot. The problem of the draught was solved, and the way opened for the development of the coal and iron industries of Pennsylvania. Thenceforth anthracite was brought down in wagons, and in 1819 was advertised for sale in Philadelphia at eight dollars and forty cents a long ton. Meantime the Lehigh Navigation Company was chartered, a new coal company was organized, and in 1820 three hundred and sixty-five tons of anthracite reached Philadelphia. Two new industries—gratemaking and grate-setting-now sprang up, and so increased the use of the new fuel that by 1825 demands were made that householders must be forbidden to throw their coal ashes into streets to be blown into the eyes and mouths of pedestrians by every passing gust.

In New York the prospect of a great consumption of coal seemed so good that the New York Schuylkill Company was formed, and a small quantity offered at eight dollars and a half a ton. At first it went off slowly, as householders were loath to undergo the expense of replacing andirons with grates. The

company thereupon gave grates to such consumers as were willing to be beholden to it, and then, the economy of coal having been proved, the sale was rapid, and the demand so great that at one time four thousand tons were stored in the city, and made, it was boastfully said, the largest coal heap in the United States.

To New Yorkers the new fuel was most welcome, for the price of wood was rising because of the quantity consumed by the steamboats. Thirteen that plied on the Hudson burned sixteen hundred cords a week. The ferry-boats used fourteen hundred more, making a total of three thousand cords per week, or one hundred thousand for the eight months the river was open. Each steamer on the Sound consumed sixty cords a trip, and, though all the immense quantity required for the purposes of transportation on river, bay, and Sound was not furnished by New York city, so much came from it that fuel had grown to be a heavy item in household expenses.

Now that the Supreme Court had destroyed the monopoly so long held by the Fulton-Livingston Company, and had opened the waters around New York to all vessels moved by steam no matter to whom they belonged, a sharp competition had resulted, and a fuel more economical than wood was needed by the steamboat companies. Already the effect of competition was visible. The fare to Providence had fallen to three dollars, and to Albany to a dollar, and on one line to seventyfive cents, provided no meals were furnished. The old Fulton Company met this by placing on their route a "safety barge," which was hailed as one of the remarkable improvements of the day. The Lady Clinton, as the barge was named, was a vessel of two hundred tons, with neither sails nor steam nor any means of propulsion, and was used exclusively for the transportation of passengers. Within was a spacious dining room ninety feet long, a deck cabin for ladies, state-rooms, a reading-room, and over all a promenade deck one hundred feet long shaded by an awning and provided with comfortable settees. As the barge had no means of locomotion, it was towed by the Commerce, one of the regular steamers of the line, and made the trip to Albany twice a week in sixteen hours. Passengers, said the advertisement, on the safety barge

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will not be exposed in the least to any accident which may happen by reason of fire or steam on board the steamboat. The noise of the machinery, the trembling of the vessel, the heat from the boilers, the furnace, and the kitchen-in short, everything which may be considered unpleasant or dangerous on a steamboat are wholly wanting on the barge.* Success attended the venture from the start, and as quickly as possible a companion, the Lady Van Rensselaer, was put on the

route.

A journey northward by daylight on such a vessel was indeed a pleasure, for along no other river in all the land could be found scenery so magnificent and places of such historic interest. These as the Commerce, pouring forth great clouds of smoke and cinders from its tall stack, crept northward at a speed which would now be thought insufferably slow, with the Lady Clinton tugging at the long hawser in the sternsome self-appointed cicerone was sure to point out to the traveller. Now it was the spot on the west bank, where Hamilton fell in the ever-memorable duel with Burr; now Harlem Heights; now Fort Lee, on the summit of the Palisades, or Fort Washington, on the east bank, places famous as the scenes of gallant fights in the war for independence; now the beauty of the Palisades, rising hundreds of feet above the river and stretching away northward for twenty miles a solid wall of rock to Tappan Bay, where near the little village of Tappan had once been the grave of Major André. As the boats sped on across Tappan Bay and Haverstraw Bay to Stony Point and West Point, the story of Arnold and André and the great conspiracy was retold in all its detail. At Catskill village a landing was always made for the accommodation in summer of passengers bound for Pine Orchard, a resort of fashion" on the mountain side, where the Catskill Mountain Association had built a fine hotel overlooking the valley of the Hudson for sixty miles around. Long before Catskill village was reached night had come on, and the first streaks of dawn were visible when the Lady Clinton made fast to the dock at Albany, where the travellers scattered, and took passage on

VOL. V.

* Albany Argus, August 9, 1825.

some of the thirteen stage lines which ran out of the city in as many directions.

Albany was now a city of sixteen thousand inhabitants, and in commercial and industrial importance was second to no other in the State save New York. Her streets were crowded with emigrants gathered from every part of the East and bound for the growing towns of the West. Now that the Erie Canal was open and in use, the canal boats, steamboats, sloops, and schooners that clustered around her wharves made an array of water craft which in number and tonnage could not be equalled by any seaport in the Union. No event in the history of the State surpassed in lasting importance the completion of the canal. After eight years of persistent labor, "the big ditch," so constantly the subject of ridicule, was finished, and in June the gates at Black Rock were opened and the waters of Lake Erie for the first time were admitted into the western division. Later in the month the capstone of that splendid chain of locks at Lockport was laid with masonic ceremonies, but it was not till October that the canal from end to end was thrown open to the public.

The celebration of the opening began at Buffalo, where, on the twenty-sixth of the month, a procession of citizens and militia escorted the orator and the invited guests to a gayly decorated fleet lying in wait on the canal. On the Seneca Chief, which headed the line, were two painted kegs full of water from Lake Erie. Behind it were the Superior, the Commodore Perry, the Buffalo, and the Lion of the West, a veritable Noah's ark, containing a bear, two eagles, two fawns, two Indian boys, birds, and fish-all typical of the products of the West before the advent of the white man. When the address had been made the signal was given, and the Seneca Chief, drawn by four gray horses, started eastward on a most memorable journey. As the fleet moved slowly along the canal, saluted by music, musketry, and the cheers of the crowd on the bank, the news was carried to the metropolis by the reports of a continuous line of cannon placed along the canal to Albany and down the Hudson to New York. When the last gun was fired at the Battery, the forts in the harbor returned the salute, and the news that New York had heard

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the tidings was sent back to Buffalo by a second cannonade. The progress of the little fleet was one continuous ovation, as town after town along the route vied with each other in manifestations of delight. From Albany an escort of gayly dressed steamboats accompanied the fleet down the river to New York, where the entire population, increased by thirty thousand strangers, turned out to receive it, and whence thousands, boarding every kind of craft, went down the bay to Sandy Hook. There Governor Clinton, lifting the kegs from the deck of the Seneca Chief, poured their contents into the sea, saying as he did so: "This solemnity at this place, on the first arrival of vessels from Lake Erie, is intended to indicate and commemorate the navigable communication which has been accomplished between our Mediterranean Seas and the Atlantic Ocean, in about eight years, to the extent of more than four hundred and twenty-five miles by the public spirit and energy of the people of the State of New York, and may the God of the heavens and the earth smile propitiously on this work and render it subservient to the best interests of the human race."

This ceremony over and a grand salute fired, the boats returned to the city, where a fine industrial parade, to which each trade society furnished a float with artisans at work, closed the day. At night there were balls, parties, dinners, and illuminations.

The canal thus opened to the world, which was, in truth, little more than a large ditch, for it was but four feet deep and forty feet wide, was connected with the Hudson by a basin made by inclosing a part of the river between the shore and a pier forty-three hundred feet long. From this basin the canal passes along the west bank of the Hudson nearly to the mouth of the Mohawk, which it follows to Schenectady. This part was used solely by freight boats. No canal packet, as the passenger boats were termed, ever came east of Schenectady, because of the many locks between it and the Hudson. Travellers bound west by water were carried by stage from Albany to Givens's Hotel, which stood a few rods from the canal in Schenectady. Shortly before eight in the morning and seven in the evening two blasts on a horn would give notice that the Buffalo packet was about to start, whereupon the west-bound