Big Ditch

By Michael Demarest

STARS IN THE WATER

by GEORGE E. CONDON

338 pages. Doubleday. $9.95.

Until the first quarter of the 19th century, the American wilderness began a few miles west of the Hudson River. Despite exhortations to the young to go west and grow up with the country, there was no practical way to penetrate the primeval forests, broad swamps and mountains that had for so long kept the Eastern seaboard an isolated enclave.

What broke the barrier and opened the hinterland was a shotgun marriage between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. The Erie Canal was only 4 ft. deep and 40 ft. wide; yet it connected the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and pushed back the West to where it belonged, thereby, as Cleveland Newsman George Condon argues, "giving to the Union a unity it never had before."

Snake Bite. Plans for the canal began as the 19th century equivalent of science fiction. To slice a 363-mile waterway through rock and muck, hill and valley, without benefit of earth-moving machinery, pumps, tractors, dynamite or even trained engineers and professional contractors would seem today on a par with pyramid building. In addition, the canal's western terminus at Lake Erie would be 571 ft. higher than its eastern connection with the Hudson -- 486 ft. more than the maximum rise that the Panama Canal would take when it was cut through to the Pacific. Some enthusiasts urged that the ditch be built on a gentle incline, resembling a funland water chute (upon which eastbound canalboats, a wag suggested, might have ended towing their mules). The ultimate solution was a marvelous system of 62 locks, aqueducts and river connections that became America's first highway.

What looked only mildly impossible on the drawing board turned out to be a nightmare in human terms. Thousands of laborers died of malaria, pneumonia and even snake bite. There was, from the start, a distinct lack of enthusiasm among native-born Americans to toil under such punishing conditions for 37 1/2-c- a day. The real heroes of the canal were new Irish immigrants, escapees from a subsurvival economy back home and eager for work on any terms. Fueled with as much as a quart of whisky a day per man, doled out in the Hibernian equivalent of coffee breaks (whole hogsheads were also placed a tantalizing distance ahead of each day's dig), they wielded the shovels and picks, trundled the wheelbarrows, braved the mosquitoes, cold and heat, completing what was then the world's longest canal in an astounding eight years, be tween 1817 and 1825.

Despite the need for harrowing labor, the Erie was a triumph of Yankee ingenuity. Inventing as they dug, its builders came up with a simple machine (an endless screw, connected with a roller, cable and crank) to pull down tall trees and another to yank out stumps and root systems. They devised a horse-operated crane to raise rock rubble from the cut. Even more vital, they found a method and material to manufacture waterproof cement, which had never before been produced in America.

The Erie's De Lesseps was New York's Governor DeWitt Clinton, a nature lover and amateur scientist, who tramped the route, figured out the financing, and after years of evangelical effort persuaded a skeptical legislature to authorize construction. In the process, he probably forfeited his hopes for the presidency. "Clinton, the federal son of a bitch/ Taxes our dollars to build him a ditch," ran one barroom refrain. The canal was variously dubbed "Clinton's Folly," "the Governor's Gutter" and "that damfool dig." Yet it was an immediate success, opening new cities and industries with every section, returning in tolls and levies its $7 million construction cost in less than ten years of completion. It proved one of the most profitable ventures in the nation's history, and even the original skeptics eventually hailed it as the Hellespont of the West, the Grand Canal.

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