Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

The Mohawk/Oneida Corridor: The Geography of Inland Navigation Across New York

— 275 — TheMohawk/OneidaCorridor:TheGeography ofInlandNavigationAcrossNewYork P h i l i p L o r d J r . Two hundred years ago, New York State stood at the crossroads of westward migration; spanning the distance that separated the Atlantic Ocean from the Great Lakes. Across this interval passed innumerable merchants and settlers as the new nation took advantage of a natural gateway to the West in the decades following the American Revolution. For many students of the early republic, the singular significance of this inland waterway in the history of North America is all but lost. For them the representative image of the pioneer, moving westward to occupy his wilderness homestead, is of a lonely man on horseback or a family piled into an ox cart or wagon with all their possessions; struggling along the muddy and rutted trails that sliced through the virgin forest. But, in the 1790s, and for the century preceding, the rural roadways of the Northeast were often a poor choice for travel, even on horseback. In 1797, one traveler reported, “The traveling in the Country in the spring and fall of the year is very unpleasant, as your horse is often from his knees to his body obliged to founder on through mud and mire, owing to the depth and richness of the soil, its uncultivated state and the want of proper roads.”1 P h i l i p L o r d J r . — 276 — Instead, in the late eighteenth century, the pioneer, standing on the west bank of the Hudson River at Albany, elected to use an inland waterway network to breach the Appalachian Mountain barrier and gain access to the rich lands located on the fringes of the Great Lakes. This was an era when water-borne transport represented the only effective method of movement across the northeastern region of North America, and the desire to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes through inland navigation remained a constant. This was a priority during the colonial wars of the mid and late eighteenth century, when the efficiency of strike and counter strike depended on the swift movement of armies between these domains of political power and population. The players may have changed; French versus British, British versus American; and the motives may have shifted—trade and exchange, attack and defense, commerce and market development—but the geography never did. The goal remained one of moving through the interior between the great ocean and that cluster of vast inland seas that sat in the American heartland nearly half the way across the continent. Two liquid avenues for this connection presented themselves, but only one was available to the Americans two hundred years ago. The St. Lawrence, perhaps in every way the superior passageway into the interior, was always in the hands of the “enemy.” So the Mohawk/Oneida corridor became, by default, the American highway west. Prior to the era of turnpikes and improved interior road networks, which did not begin in Upstate New York until the eighteenth century had virtually ended, the pioneer used the Mohawk/Oneida navigation corridor to gain relatively easy access to the frontier. Thanks to an accident of nature, which eons ago broke a passage through the Appalachian and Adirondack mountain barriers, this linked network of natural rivers, streams, and lakes provided a nearly level water route across the entire 150 miles separating the Great Lakes from the Hudson/Atlantic navigation.2 We can best comprehend the quality of the Mohawk/Oneida navigation by tracing the journey west as it would have occurred in the years just after the Revolution. In that time, a pioneer migrating west, newly arrived in Albany and hungry for land, a merchant anxious to ship merchandise to the expanding western settlements, or a military commander supplying essential provisions to the garrisons along our western frontier, faced an inadequate and severely restricted transportation network. Direct access to the upper Hudson River was rarely a problem. Ocean going vessels arriving in New York harbor could often continue up the river, which was T h e Moh awk/On e i d a C orridor — 277 — a tidal estuary to several miles above the port at Albany; or cargo and passengers could transfer into smaller river sloops to execute the 150-mile journey up river. Once in Albany, the traveler could continue a few miles further north, and enter the mouth of the...