Of all the waterways in fable and lore, the Erie Canal is famed least for its maritime nature. Lake Superior may have swallowed the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the North Atlantic holed the Titanic, but they sing of the Erie Canal for a mule named Sal. The triumph of the canal was over land, not water. Fully 363 miles long, scaling mountains 500 ft. above sea-level with 83 locks, fording natural rivers on aqueducts or "water bridges," it was a pick and shovel and trowel job of a stupendous scale, so grandiose that some called it madness. Yet the original "Clinton's Ditch" helped write the destiny of North America, so greatly that in return it required expansion and major rebuilding twice, within its first ninety years.
