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Updated: May 21, 2025
For seventy miles the lake is navigable for vessels of the heaviest draught. Beyond the lake there must be a clean-cut over or through the mountains to the Pacific, and here six locks are reckoned sufficient. Cross-cuts from one bend in the river to another can be constructed at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or less, per mile.
In this way the great French and British explorers found it possible to travel by water from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean across a width of land of something like 2500 miles. The only serious walking that had to be done was the crossing somewhere or other of the Rocky Mountains, where the streams, of course, were far too precipitate in descent to be navigable.
After the lapse of four anxious hours, we had the great satisfaction to hear the welcome sound of the fog-horn of Manistee, the county seat of Manistee County, in Michigan. It is situated at the mouth of the same-named river, which is navigable for vessels, drawing ten to twelve feet of water, for the distance of one and one-half miles to Manistee Lake.
The enterprise was not yet completed, but the remainder was less difficult and not nearly so hazardous, for the creek which separated Duiveland from Schouwen was much narrower than the estuary which they had just traversed. It was less than a league in width, but so encumbered by rushes and briers that, although difficult to wade, it was not navigable for vessels of any kind.
This theory of stewardship in the interest of the public was well illustrated by the establishment of a water-power policy. Until the Forest Service changed the plan, water-powers on the navigable streams, on the public domain, and in the National Forests were given away for nothing, and substantially without question, to whoever asked for them.
The United States now has 25,000 miles of navigable rivers and a nearly equal mileage of rivers not now navigable but which might be made commercially important; five great lakes that have a combined length of 1,410 miles, 2,120 miles of operated canals, and 2,500 miles of sounds, bays and bayous, that might be joined by tidewater canals easily constructed, less than 1,000 miles long altogether, and making a continuous passage from New England to the Gulf of Mexico.
By this time the rainy months were set in, and we could scarce, for above two months, look out of our huts. But that was not all, for the rivers were so swelled with the land-floods, that we scarce knew the little brooks and rivulets from the great navigable rivers.
On the 9th in the morning, we proceeded to examine some of the inferior branches; their general direction was to the southward, and the longest was not more than five or six miles in length, and was navigable for such boats as ours; the general depth was three and four fathoms for about four miles up, and then shoal water; the others were inconsiderable.
The lengthening shadows from rock and fallen crag were in some places flung quite across our little boat, and so through the soft, lovely air, flooded with brightest sunshine, we made our way, up past Picnic Creek, where another stream joins the Buffalo, and makes miniature green islands and harbors at its mouth, up as far as the river was navigable for even so small a steamer as ours.
The Cassiquiare, as broad as the Rhine, and the course of which is one hundred and eighty miles in length, will no longer form uselessly a navigable canal between two basins of rivers which have a surface of one hundred and ninety thousand square leagues.
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