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Updated: June 12, 2025
At the confluence of the Cherwell and Isis we saw a good many boats, belonging to the students of the various colleges; some of them being very large and handsome barges, capable of accommodating a numerous party, with room on board for dancing and merry-making. Some of them are calculated to be drawn by horses, in the manner of canal-boats; others are propellable by oars.
It will not be difficult to understand why Buffalo has attained commercial supremacy in Western New York, if you add to this never ceasing activity, betokening business, the enormous canal traffic; for it is here where innumerable canal-boats are weighted with the rich products of the west, carrying a large floating population of boatmen's families.
"In burghers' mansions, peasants' cottages, mechanics' back-parlors; on board herring-smacks, canal-boats, and East Indiamen; in shops, counting-rooms, farm-yards, guard-rooms, alehouses; on the exchange, in the tennis court, on the mall; at banquets, at burials, christenings, or bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts.
The day was not far distant when the very Calvinists, to whom, more than to any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland, England, and America are due, were to be hunted out of churches into farm-houses, suburban hovels, and canal-boats by the arm of provincial sovereignty and in the name of state-rights, as pitilessly as the early reformers had been driven out of cathedrals in the name of emperor and pope; and when even those refuges for conscientious worship were to be denied by the dominant sect.
It was good to be out again and good to look at something other than board walls. Our road lay along the canal which connected Vehnemoor with Oldenburg. Peat sheds, where the peat was put to dry after it was cut, were scattered along the canal, and we passed several flat-bottomed canal-boats carrying the peat into Oldenburg. They were drawn by man-power, and naturally made slow progress.
They saw birds and squirrels, and once caught a glimpse of a wolf. At Montezuma they changed canal-boats, because the craft they were on went through to Buffalo, and they wished to go to Geneva, where John, Andrew and Jane were getting rich. Two miles out of Geneva the boat slowed up, a plank was run out and all went ashore. John worked for a farmer a mile away. They found him.
We embarked early in March, and in seven days reached Greytown, where we united with the passengers from New York, and proceeded, by the Nicaragua River and Lake, for the Pacific Ocean. The river was low, and the little steam canal-boats, four in number, grounded often, so that the passengers had to get into the water, to help them over the bare.
Along the road, an old inn; some aged stone houses, built for merely respectable occupants; a canal, with two canal-boats, heaped up with a cargo of potatoes; two little girls, who were watching lest some cows should go astray, and had their two little chairs by the roadside, and their dolls and other playthings, and so followed the footsteps of the cows all day long.
This last most invaluable, and all important article in manufacturing, can not be obtained anywhere else on the Lakes without the extra expense of shifting from canal-boats to other craft.
The stage from Staunton now crosses during the night, and, when the roads are favourable, arrives about two A. M. When the roads are unfavourable, it gets in generally in time for an early breakfast. The canal-boats have resumed their trips now, so you will have a choice of routes from Richmond, if you conclude to go there. All unite with me in much love, and I am, always,
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