Erie Water West: A History of the Erie Canal, 1792-1854

14. The Trade of the "Teeming West"

14 The Trade of the ~~Teeming West" THE PRIMARY FUNCTION of the Erie Canal was carrying freight rather than passengers, and the tonnage carried on Erie water-first drawn from the trade of New York state and then increasingly from the greater Westincreased each year by geometric bounds. As early as 1825 the canal commissioners considered the total exclusion of packet boats from the portions of the canal where the press of business was heaviest. During the first years of navigation on the Erie Canal, the bulk of the goods carried came from New York state itself. Emigrants and tools had first to be delivered to the shores of the Great Lakes before western products could pass through New York in significant volume. Until about 1830, Buffalo forwarding houses could not find goods enough to fill the canal boats and sent them more than half empty to Rochester where a full cargo was gathered for shipment east.l Most of the comparatively small amount of grain shipped east from the Old Northwest in the early 1830s came from northern Ohio, while the products of the Ohio Valley and the southern part of the Old Northwest went south to New Orleans.2 Michigan did not begin to add wheat to the agricultural surplus moving northeast until 1835. The first shipment of wheat from Chicago to Buffalo arrived in 1838, and grain did The Trade of the "Teeming West" 261 not come east from Wisconsin until 1841.3 Tonnage from Western states nearly equalled that from New York on the canal in 1842, but it was not until 1847 that the former exceeded the latter. Little distinction in kind could be made, however, between the goods of New York and the products of Western states which filled the long snub-nosed freighters on the Erie Canal. Western New York exported essentially the same products as those beginning to be transshipped at Buffalo from the holds of Lake Erie schooners and steamers. Furs, lumber, staves, pot and pearl ashes, wheat, flour, barley, beef, pork, butter, cheese, and whiskey ,-all staples of Western trade-were carried east on the canal in volume. Merchandise, furniture, and salt comprised the principal cargoes carried west, whether destined for a port in western New York or for the Old Northwest. The tonnage of Western staples rose from 302,170 in 1826 to 735,191 in 1835.4 Goods going west from tidewater on the canal increased correspondingly from 35,435 tons to 128,910 tons. Six years later, in 1841, in spite of the panic of 1837 and the fluctuations in the foreign grain markets, down commerce totaled 774,334 tons and up commerce increased less rapidly to 162,715 tons.5 By this time, to be sure, Western produce was supplementing 1 James L. Barton, "Early Reminiscences of Buffalo and Vicinity," Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society, I (Buffalo, 1879), 17l. ~ A. L. Kohlmeier, The Old Northwest as the Keystone of the Arch of American Federal Union (Bloomington, 1938), pp. 19-20; R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest Pioneer Period 1815-1840 (Indianapolis, 1950), I, 5.'37. :I Rapp, "The Port of Buffalo," pp. 27, 29. 4 Buffalo Daily Commercial Adcertiser, March 14, 1836. r. Freeman Hunt, The Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Redew, VII (October 1842),366, (cited hereafter as Hunt's Merchants' Magazine ). The total value of property moving on the canal in 1841 was $92,202,939. J. D. B. De Bow, The Commercial Reciew of the South and West, VIII (May, 1850), 486 (cited hereafter as De Bow's Redew ). 262 Erie Water West that of New York, but as late as 1847 when the volume of Western products on the canal exceeded those of New York, New York contributed nearly a third of the two million tons going to tidewater.6 Wheat and flour were by far the most important articles of down canal trade. In 1834 they made up one-fourth of the property carried to tidewater, and by 1840 the proportion had risen to one-third of the property reaching the Hudson.7 Even more strikingly, they constituted 40 percent of the total valuation of thirteen millions estimated for the goods going to tidewater that year, and they continued to lead in value all other agricultural produce shipped on the canaP Nearly two million barrels of flour and more than one and a half million bushels of wheat reached...