The Erie Canal and The Chicago River were two of the most impressive engineering feats in history.
For the 200th Anniversary of the opening of the Erie Canal we look at the opening celebration, along with a fun musical diversion or two.
And how can you talk about moving water without talking about the efforts to change sanitation in Chicago? This included reversing the flow of the river that runs through the city!
The Erie Canal – by Mick Sullivan
On Oct 26, 1825 a cannon blast rang out through the fall air of western New York. Canon blasts tend to be loud and powerful, so hopefully the surrounding crowd was covering their ears. A few seconds after the sound of the blast faded from their ears it was met with the sound of another cannon blast – an answer, somewhere off in the distance. A few moments later, another blast sounded even further into the land. Then another, further away, then another. The booms reached across the countryside like a row of dominos, one triggering the next. No telling how long the people around the first canon could hear each one that followed, but canon blasts continued across the entire state of New York for over 3 hours that day. One after another after another.
These cannons were not fired in conflict. They were blasts of celebration. And of communication – meant to tell anyone within earshot that the Erie Canal was open. It might not seem like much, but this 363 mile long canal changed the world and helped make New York City the most important city in the United States.
Imagine a whole bunch of land, and on that land are forests of trees. And some mountains. And one side of the land is a higher elevation than the other. Have you ever carried something heavy before? Use that memory to imagine how hard it might be to get lots of heavy stuff across that vast and varied land. But the stuff has got to get across it – the quicker the better. When it comes to New York, on one side of the state there are a couple of the Great Lakes – Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. On the other, the Hudson River which leads to the Atlantic Ocean and to the world. Oh if only, the bodies of water were connected! Think of the possibilities. But it was just a dream…at least for a while…
Monologue:
Moving things is hard. It’s hard work. And though people can do hard things, and working hard is admirable, wouldn’t it be easier if you just didn’t have to work so hard.
I mean, that’s kind of the definition of easier, right?
Well, there has to be a better way.
But what are you saying Mr. Clinton?
Oh, I’m sayin’: There’s nuthin’ on earth like a genuine, bonafide, horse-tide, super long Erie Canal What’d I say?
(Erie Canal)
Say it again pal!
(Erie canal!)
Erie Canal Erie Canal Erie Canal Erie Canal Erie Canal Erie Canal
You gonna dig a big ditch about 40 feet wide?
Yeah man that’s the way to do it.
For boats to float filled with cargo inside?
Yes That’s plan so let’s get right to it.
But what about the mountains and the rock and the stone?
We’ll scoop it and blast it and we’ll dig right past it.
The world is our oyster so we’ll conquer these trials,
We won’t stop digging til we’ve dug three hundred and sixty three miles!
(Erie Canal Erie Canal)
A famous politician named Dewitt Clinton was the driving force behind the Erie Canal. As far as we know he never broke into song. But he didn’t need to in order to get attention. He was a big deal. His father was a Revolutionary War Officer. His Uncle was George Clinton (p-funk). No not that Geroge Clinton. This Geroge Clinton was almost a signer of the declaration. He was a part of the Congress that decided to declare independence, but in early July 1776 before he could sign the famous piece of paper, he was asked to go serve the army as a brigadier general. He still made history though – he later served as Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President and is remembered as the second-longest serving Governor in New York History. And He founded a political dynasty that his nephew Dewitt carried on. Dewitt was also a politician and one of the most powerful people in New York State in the early 1800s.
Dewitt knew that if people could connect the great lakes – which are practically inland seas – with the Atlantic Ocean it would profoundly change not just New York, but the entire United States. In a time before trains, if you could sail a boat with goods and people from New York City to anywhere on a Great Lake – or the other way around, well, it would boost the economy, create opportunity and lead to the development of cities on land both in its path, and along the shores of the Lake. It would also make a few people rich. Himself included.
Anyway, consider Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Buffalo – they’re all cities on Great Lakes. Much of their earlier development and growth had to do with shipping goods to and from their ports to other places – and the Erie Canal would give them access to the world from the middle of the American Continent.
So once he convinced everyone, teams spent eight years digging a slow and steady path heading out in both directions from somewhere in the middle of New York. It wasn’t deep – just about four feet. But once it filled with water, it would be more than enough to ship cargo and people in canal boats. And those boats wouldn’t even need power on board. The canal was narrow enough that most of the boats were pulled by teams of horse or mules walking on the shore. Let me tell you – if you were used to the bone-rattling bounce of riding in a stage coach, this horse-drawn water journey seemed as smooth as shaving cream on the inside of a sea-shell.
What’s not to love about a smooth ride? Of course, one side of their canal project was 571 feet higher than the other, so that wasn’t going to work well. Boats travelling the entire 363 mile trip would have to wait in 83 locks, to make up for the elevation difference.
Basically the boat would wait in a chamber as water-tight walls closed off the canal around it. Then the water level in the chamber would be changed to match the next elevation – up or down depending on the direction the boat was travelling in. When the locks opened up again the boat could continue on at the new altitude.
When the project was finally complete, everyone wanted to celebrate. That’s why they fired cannons one by one across the state along the path of the canal. In Buffalo, Dewitt Clinton and a parade of others in boats set out in the morning of Oct 26th 1825. At the beginning of their journey a cannon was fired, and farther down the canal, when it was heard by the next cannon, they fired as well. When the next one heard it, well…You get the idea… Cannon after cannon was fired in the cascade until 90 minutes later the message reached it’s destination and last one was fired in New York City. Everyone there knew it meant that the Erie Canal was finally open. So they turned the message around and fired their cannon back. Then one by one all of the cannons were fired yet again this time in the opposite direction. So around noon, three hours after the first cannon shot in Buffalo, that town’s people heard the cannon fire returning and they knew that New York City had gotten their message. Luckily the cannon communication stopped there.
But sound moves much faster than a boat being pulled by horses. It took DeWitt ten days to make it to New York City. Of course, he had to stop to celebrate with people at every town along the way – and a lot of towns had popped up around the canal. Without conostant stops to party, a typical speed for the journey would be about 5 days – not fast, but a whole lot faster and a whole lot smoother than journeys before that.
When he did arrive in New York City in early November, the boats made their way to the New York Bay where the Harbor finally opens up to the Atlantic ocean. This was where they held the famous wedding of the waters ceremony.
What do you mean wetting of the waters? Water’s already wet.
No my good sir, it is wedding – with d’s not t’s. You see we came with barrels of water from Lake Eire. I’ve carried them along the Erie canal
(erie canal erie canal) and I intend to ceremonially dump them into the waters of the Atlantic, thereby symbolically linking – or wedding – them together forever more.
(erie canal erie canal)
But Dewitt, wait. There’s more! I’ve got more barrels to dump.
Oh okay. What have you got?
So many barrels. We’ve got water from
“Elbe, the Danube, the Rhine, and Thames, Indus, Neva, Tagus, and Seine
Gambia, Orinoco, La Plata, and Ganges, Columbia, Amazon and the Mississippi, My Man
Geez! that’s a lot of water. How long is this gonna take?
I mean…a while.
Also, are we worried about invasive species that might be in that water?
Oh Mr. Clinton. It’s 1825, we’re not worried about invasive species.
Um, okay?
In just the first few years, millions of dollars of cargo made its way through the canal, along with thousands of people. It made goods like flour and salt and books cheaper and easier to get for Americans. It made tourism and seeing new parts of the country easier. It also changed areas of population by enabling towns like Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and Albany develop into large cities. It made New York City the final destination for many goods bound for international ports. And it also played a big role in the Underground Railroad, as a way for people to move quickly as they were escaping enslavement and fighting for freedom.
Unfortunately, The Erie Canal came at a cost to others. People in charge of the project took ancestral lands from Native Americans who lived in its path. Much of the land was home to Seneca people, as well as other members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
As the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal Opening continues this year, many indigenous people are playing a direct role in part of the celebrations and remembrances. In addition to the anniversary festivities, Eastern White Pine Trees are being planted along the original path – from Buffalo to New York City. The tree is a traditional peace symbol for the Haudenosaunee people.
Chicago River
Big cities have a lot of people. Those people can be pretty amazing, and the work they do and culture they create can be very beautiful. But large groups of people also create other, less beautiful things. I’m talking about trash, food scraps, sewage – you know, pee and poop and stuff. If you can’t get that stuff safely out of a city, well, there won’t be many people left to be awesome. They’ll get sick or else go somewhere less gross.
Just ask the city of Chicago from the 1800s. Chicago was growing faster than any other city at the time. Just overflowing with people. But like other several other cities – Chicago was also overflowing with disease. There were outbreaks left and right. Dysentery, cholera and typhoid got very bad and took many lives – in very gross ways – all because of poor sanitation. It can basically be summed up like this: if the water you drink is the same water that is filled with your sewage, then you are cooking up a recipe for disaster. And it is not a good recipe. Not even one star. No stars. Negative stars. Shut it down.
But Chicago had another problem standing in the way of cleanliness. The city, built where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan, was low. The land was not much higher in altitude than the lake. So drainage was a problem and water just kinda sat there and got swampy. Under the buildings filled with people and businesses, there was no sewer system. In some areas there were just open cesspools of gross. That made people sick. But most of the sewage wound up in the Chicago River, which flowed to Lake Michigan, which was where people got drinking water. So again – sick people. And also – I should say – it just wasn’t human waste – it was animal waste, as well as the leftovers from Chicago’s growing meat industry. Believe me – it was nasty.
So a guy named Ellis Cheseborough came to town with a bright idea to lift the city up – a sewer system. But since the city sat so low and it was so swampy underneath, his plan was to literally lift the city up. With screw jacks installed underneath, streets, homes, buildings, entire city blocks in some instances, were slowly raised, so the sewers could be installed under them and carry the sewage out of the city.
It took hundreds of workers to lift each building – as they each carefully turned their screw jacks in unison, the buildings would slowly raise with no stress to the structure. Many times there were actually people living normally inside them: people sleeping in hotel rooms, working at their desk, cutting fabric in a factory. Those days were oddly normal, other than the fact that they ended slightly higher up from where they started. Teams got so good at it, entire city blocks were done at the same time.
When it was done years later, there were sewers under the buildings to finally get all the gross stuff out of their lives. At least so they thought…Unfortunately it was all still just dumped into the Chicago River, which Dumped into Lake Michigan, which was everyone’s water source.
Hey man, Water’s still gross. I smell worse after taking a bath then I did before I got in it!
Yeah, you just gave all of our waste a fancier ride in your sewer tunnel, but it’s still a problem.
Well, at least it’s not in your front yard. And besides, there’s more to the plan. Right now, at this very moment we’ve got people digging a tunnel, deep under Lake Michigan. We’re building a pump several miles out there in the lake to pull the clean poop-free water far away from the city, we’ll send it back here and you have all the refreshing water you could imagine. Take a bath, quench your thirst, and uh…maybe brush your teeth. Or at least eat a mint. You got a lot going on up there.
What do you expect? I’m not gonna brush my teeth with your disgusting water.
But once the pump in Lake Michigan was finished it was clear that this was not the solution they had hoped for. Anytime it rained hard, the forceful flow of the river carried all of the sewage faster and further out into the lake. The pollution – in some cases big chunks of you don’t wanna know what – got sucked up by the pump and sent right back into town.
It’s like a feedback loop…of poop.
It’s a poop loop!
But relax, Chesebrough told everyone there was a third and final part to the plan.
Chese-bro you’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?
Here’s the third part of the Chicago Chesebrough Plan: It was an ambitious plan on the scale of something someone like Leonardo DaVinci might have dreamt up. He wanted to reverse the flow of the river. Make the Chicago River flow backwards.
That way instead of the sewage flowing into the river and then winding up in Lake Michigan for everyone to drink, the newly reversed current would take it the other way, away from town, and away from the lake.
Oh…okay…but what about people down river? Won’t that flow to the Mississippi River?
Well, I mean, yeah, but I think it’ll all dilute and dissolve before it becomes a problem for them…at least I think.
Well good enough for us. Let’s turn that river around!
Turns out reversing a naturally occurring river is a tough job. It took them a longtime to even get started – of course, the Civil War got in the way, and then the Great Chicago Fire happened. That catastrophe burned down almost all of the buildings Chicago had painstakingly raised in order to build sewers in the first place. It took so long that Chesebroogh died before they even began. But they were undeterred. In 1889 the project was in motion. They called their new creation the Big Ditch, and it was just that: a big ditch which was created through a high point in elevation – a subcontinental divide. Once through that high land, they could guide water with the help of gravity to the Des Plains River and then to the Mississippi.
For over a decade crews of workers along with new technology like steam shovels and dynamite dug and blasted the Big Ditch for a total of 28 miles to the Des Plains River. It wasn’t as long as the Erie Canal, but it was six times deeper and four times as wide. It was that largest earth moving project in America up to that point.
Finally, on the second day of the new century, January 2nd, 1900, a group of civic leaders and dignitaries traveled to the final dam in place holding the back the waters – one more explosion – controlled of course, would open it up and lead to the mingling of waters and the redirection of the Chicago River.
The man in charge of the Sanitary commission had lost both of his parents to Chicago’s cholera outbreaks of the 1850s. Clean water probably meant a lot to him. And it was he who gave the orders to blast open the dam – with the simple words “Let ‘er go.” It took a week or so for Chicago’s water to clear out – but sure enough water from Lake Michigan started flowing – for the first time ever – into the river sending the current in the opposite direction. Within days, people saw clean water, they even saw ice from the lake, clear as the sky, in what had been dangerously dirty water days before.
The plan worked. At least for Chicago. Chicagoan didn’t think the people down river would mind too much. Were they right? They worse than right, they were wrong: Cities down south were irate. The people of St. Louis were practically swimming in anger – along with other stuff – how dare Chicago send its sewage down the river to them? They made their waste someone else’s problem! So St. Louis fought in courts and in public opinion to turn the riverf back around.
Chicago had a saying though. The Solution to pollution is dilution. This was their response. They believed that the fresh water of the lake would dilute the pollution – water it down – and make it safer and safer as it made its way through America’s river systems. By the time it reached St. Louey, there’d be nothing left of the pooey!
St. Louis didn’t buy it, and their case was taken to the supreme court. But there it was decided that beforethe Big Ditch plan of Chicago, all of the other cities north of St. Louis on the river had already been doing the same thing – the river was already carrying plenty of waste – so it what was one more city’s worth!
Changing the Chicago River with the Bog Ditch was a marvel of engineering – people literally changed the direction of a river! But now we know there was some environmental things people should have considered. Invasive species, pollution, and dumping thousands of gallons of fresh water from the great lakes into the gulf of mexico are not totally awesome things.
So who knows, we may see the river re-reversed someday. It’s been discussed. We’ve done it, so we know we can do it again. And luckily sewage and waste management is more advanced today. Still, St. Louis would probably celebrate.
Leave a Reply