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Chapter Six Empire State Exports Whoever is “first in the field” of natural science, has an exclusive right to give names. His successors should either adopt his names, or give them as synonyms and equivalents. This is essential to the very being of science. But English and French geologists have introduced new names, not adopted in Germany; because new discoveries have made them necessary. I have done the same thing in America, and for the same reasons. —Amos Eaton, 1830 Amos Eaton made no research excursions along the Erie Canal route in 1825, but an extraordinary parade of public figures did travel from Buffalo to New York City in the celebration that officially opened the completed canal to navigation. As Eaton had foreseen, the new era brought a massive influx of migrants heading westward, as well as a growing number of tourists who wished to see the wondrous natural sights of New York State. By all accounts, the “Wedding of the Waters” on 26 October 1825, was a glorious and noisy affair. A flotilla of boats loaded with symbolic cargo convened at Buffalo. At the head of the procession, the Seneca Chief carried kegs filled with Lake Erie water, potash from Detroit and Buffalo, flour and butter from Michigan and Ohio farms, a canoe made by American Indians from the shores of Lake Superior, and bundles of cut red cedar and bird’seye maple wood for making boxes to hold medals to commemorate the event. A harvest of unprecedented prosperity was to be reaped by this symbolic unification of the nation. But amid the hyperbole, some legitimate accolades were showered upon those talented social engineers—DeWitt Clinton first among them—who had coaxed New York science, politics, and technology into fertile embrace. After crowds heard Governor Clinton and his fellow canal visionary Jesse Hawley speak in Buffalo, the procession commenced. Behind the Seneca Chief came 118 Engineering for a New World’s Geology the Superior, followed by the Commodore Perry (a freight boat named after the War of 1812 hero of the Battle of Lake Erie), the Buffalo, and finally a boat “fitted out to portray the wilderness as it was before the white man came.” This last vessel , dubbed Noah’s Ark, was a barge assembled to serve on this one occasion as a parade float; it carried two young Seneca Indian boys, two eagles, a bear, two deer, a beaver, a cage of wild birds, and a tank of fish.1 News of the flotilla’s departure raced ahead of the procession using the fastest communications technology then available: bursts of cannon fire were relayed from one town to the next along the entire route. Eighty-one minutes after the first cannon had been fired in Buffalo, residents in New York City heard a rumbling blast. City leaders immediately returned the salute that ushered in New York’s new preeminence as a gateway to the center of the continent. Nine days later, on 4 November 1825, the oceanbound boats themselves arrived from Buffalo, having been joined by forty-two other vessels. The Seneca Chief ceremoniously disgorged its store of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic Ocean, thus consummating the marriage of Great Lakes and seaboard commerce that Clinton had worked so long and hard to realize. Through a combination of political will, persistent leadership, and the fortuitous geological circumstances of its terrain, topography, water resources, and a recognizable native limestone supply, New York had managed to cobble together a structure that would invite both a mass influx of coastal American people into the interior of the continent and an efflux of natural resources and agricultural produce, more or less fulfilling the promise of continental transformation depicted by the Wedding of the Waters. Generations of American historians have produced groundbreaking works in their turn, each tying major societal shifts to the opening of the Erie Canal, including the emergence and spread of novel religious cults and utopian community experiments across what became known as the “burned-over” district and the galvanizing of political and market revolutions in the Jacksonian era.2 Fewer historians have traced the far less grandiose but immensely practical and intellectually significant collateral effects of science’s essential complicity in DeWitt Clinton’s program of internal improvements. These unsung “exports” of 1820s New York include Eaton’s diluvial theory of surficial geological deposits, the educational philosophy and apparatus Eaton developed to turn out trained professional scientists, and Clinton’s idea that science could be utilized to...

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