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and civilizing notions from the commercially
and culturally rich eastern
seaboard, and the export of local goods
from the fast-growing territory now
made accessible by this newly created
"obedient river" that went where no
waterway had gone before.
For the unprecedented temerity of
building what Governor DeWitt Clinton
called" an imperishable cement of
connexion and an indissoluble bond
of union" across the wilderness, the
Erie Canal's importance to settlement
and commerce was short-lived. By the
eve of the country's Centennial, it was
the transcontinental railroad and not
the great canal that was celebrated for
linking America's ports and inland industrial
centers and for bonding together
a union that stretched beyond
the Great Lakes to the Pacific. W estward
the course of empire made its
way as the frontier exerted its hold on
the American imagination.
Yet, in its day and in its region, the
canal had singular impact: For it was
in the era of-and in the land touched
by-the Erie Canal that American art
and literature first asserted what would
be an enduring belief in the symbolic
significance of the American landscape
and of the changes wrought upon it by
technological progress.
In 1829 the young landscape painter
Thomas Cole joined the throngs of
travelers who, for curiosity if not for
convenience, traversed upstate New
York on packet boats on their way to
Niagara Falls. It is noteworthy that at
this time Cole was contemplating a
plan for a painting cycle, "a series of
pictures illustrative of the mutation of
earthly things," he wrote in a sketchbook
of the period. Cole'sjournal of
his canal travels extols the wonders of
commerce and industry along the
manmade waterway. It seems unlikely,
however, that the symbolic significance
of the canal-its breach through
the wilderness and the seeming
triumph of man's will over nature'scould
have been lost on one then
ruminating on the "progress of
2
mankind from barbarism-to cultivation
and destruction. "
Few observers connected the canal
with doom, but several of Cole's contemporaries
were sensitive to the
sacrifices yielded by the upstate woodlands
to this instrument of civilization.
J ames Fenimore Cooper for one saw in
THOMAS COLE
Genesee Scenery, ca. 1846-47
Private Collection
the rapidly changing landscape of the
Mohawk Valley the dynamics of life itself,
as applicable to nations as to mankind.
"There is no pleasure ... that is
commensurate with that we enjoy, who
have seen the birth, infancy, and