American History Revised (13 page)

Indeed it did. Finished in 1825, the Erie Canal was the engineering feat of the nineteenth century. Some called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. Certainly it was the only such wonder ever built by the labor of free men, and not by slaves or by forced conscription. Paid eighty cents a day, aided by horses, the workers dug up and removed 11.4 million cubic yards of rock and earth—more than three times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

Even more remarkable was the engineering. America had no trained civil engineers then. The project was undertaken by two amateurs, one a judge and the other a surveyor. Asked the Albany legislature: “Who is this James Geddes and who is this Benjamin Wright … what canals have they constructed? What great public works have they accomplished?”

Obviously such a project would not attract financing today, but then was then—the age of amateurs—whereas now we live in an era of bureaucracy and professional credentialism. One historian, writing about canals in 1905, identified the key issue when he compared the Erie Canal’s founders to the founders of the nation, Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson: “These men were working for a cause, for the development of their native land, and not for personal gain and aggrandizement….What they did not understand they conquered by diligent study, unwearied zeal, and sound common sense.”

The parallel was particularly apt, for the Erie Canal was nothing less than the fulfillment of the Founding Fathers’ dream to unify the nation. George Washington’s great fear was that the western United States might splinter off from the original thirteen. “The western settlers,” said Washington in 1775, “stand, as it were, upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them away.” At a time when western America had no choice but to use the rivers running through Spanish, French, and Indian territory, “the whole future of America would be at risk.” It was essential to build canals to unify the new nation.

Enter DeWitt Clinton, one of the political giants of the day, called by Thomas Jefferson “the greatest man in America.”
*
Clinton, after narrowly losing the 1812 presidential election to the Republican Party candidate, James Madison, had served as mayor of New York City and was now the governor of New York. Known as “the Father of the Erie Canal,” he used his considerable clout to get the state legislature in 1816 to proceed with the canal construction. He did so by addressing head-on George Washington’s “touch of a feather” issue:

A magnificent achievement

The physical obstacles to executing this vision were formidable. Between the Hudson River and Lake Erie was a rise of almost six hundred feet, requiring eighty-three locks to be filled with water to enable the barges to float up and down from one level to the other. One of the locks is almost as high as Niagara Falls. To cut through the rock, considerable blasting was necessary. But no matter the obstacles, the project got done and became such an economic success that it recouped its cost in nine years. Freight rates dropped more than 95 percent from one hundred dollars to four dollars resulting in an explosion of trade (the volume of wheat trading, for instance, skyrocketed 275-fold in twelve years). The state of New York became known as the Empire State, and New York City quickly eclipsed the larger cities of Boston and Philadelphia to become the dominant city it is today. Thanks to the canal, thousands of immigrant farmers traveled west to settle and develop the rich farmlands of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

Connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean may be a feat worthy of Rameses II, but as always, Osymandias beckons. Nothing lasts forever. As boats grew in size, the canal had to be made bigger. Designed for boats with a capacity of thirty tons, the canal went through two major renovations, completed in 1862 and 1918, to accommodate
boats carrying 250 tons. In the process, parts of the canal were abandoned and the expanded canal rerouted to rivers and other canals to make a larger system of 525 miles, now renamed the Barge Canal.

With the emergence of railroads and trucks, the heyday of the canal was over, and the New York State Barge Canal eventually ceased commercial freight operations in 1994. Today, defaulting back to its original name, the canal and its towpath are used for small boats and bicycles to promote tourism. The U.S. Department of Transportation has a National Scenic Byways Program to “help recognize, preserve and enhance” 126 selected roads of particular historic, cultural, or recreational value, but the Erie Canal apparently is not one of them. A search of the program’s website (
www.byways.org
) yields no mention of the Erie Canal, just part of the canal now called the Mohawk Towpath Scenic Byway (though the Mohawk Indians had nothing to do with building it).

As for DeWitt Clinton, the ten-time mayor of New York who made the Erie Canal possible, his backers planned on a large memorial to be built in front of New York’s City Hall. The memorial was never built, and today’s bloggers ask the inane question whether he was possibly related to a later Clinton named Bill.

1857
A group of religous fanatics pulled out their guns and knives and slaughtered 120 men, women, and children. The outrage included cutting off fingers to get valuable gold rings. “They were not only scalped,” said one witness, “but … their throats cut from ear to ear and heads severed from their bodies.” The killers justified their massacre in the name of a higher being, and gave “thanks to God for delivering our enemies into our hands.”

And who were these people? They were the Mormons, who had immigrated to Utah to create a kingdom of God. Their leader, Brigham Young, ran a dictatorial theocracy. He espoused the doctrine of “blood atonement,” justifying the killing of people to cleanse their souls of sins, as deemed by him as the tribe’s sole judge, jury, and executioner. When a Mormon minister in Arkansas was killed for his polygamous behavior, and rumors ran amok that the United States was sending an army to assert greater control over Brigham Young’s theocratic realm, tensions in Salt Lake City ran high. “Woe, woe to those men who come here to unlawfully meddle with me and this people!” thundered Young.

At about this time, a wagon train of 137 people from Arkansas heading for California happened to stop in Utah for a week’s rest. The Mormons, fidgety and nervous, resolved
to kill them and keep their eight hundred cattle and sixty horses as booty. As a cover-up, they recruited a local Indian tribe, the Paiutes, to lead the attack (with some Mormons, disguised as Indians, participating). When the five-day siege failed, the Mormons resorted to a dastardly ruse: coming forth as saviors and waving a white flag, they offered safe passage out of the valley of Mountain Meadows. The emigrant party members accepted, innocently surrendered their guns, and were promptly massacred. Only seventeen children under age seven were allowed to survive. The bodies of the dead were stripped of all clothes and jewelry, and left unburied for the wolves and coyotes. After hearing of the massacre, Brigham Young claimed he went to God and asked “if it was a righteous thing that my people have done in killing those people at Mountain Meadows. God answered me, that the action was a righteous one, and well-intended.”

Three weeks later the corpses were discovered by another wagon train passing through, and the U.S. Army started asking questions. Brigham Young ordered his people to stonewall and put all the blame on the Indians. Anyone who didn’t obey would have God to fear: “Unless you … will keep secret of all you know, you will die a dog’s death and will be damned, and go to hell.” Almost everyone obeyed. Two years later, agents of the federal government conducting an inquiry managed to find fifteen surviving children and return them to their Arkansas relatives, but only after paying ransom to the Mormons, who had the audacity to demand money for feeding the children whose parents they had murdered.

Also passing through the area and hearing the gossip was Mark Twain, who reported the massacre to Eastern newspapers and wrote in his classic,
Roughing It
, “The whole United States rang with its horrors.” His report calling Brigham Young “an absolute monarch” who “laughed at our armies” became one of the most widely known stories in the country. But with the Civil War in full rage, the Mormon scandal looked as though it would fade away.

After the war, the U.S. government resumed its investigation. In 1874 a book was published exposing the Mormon Church,
Tell It All
, with a preface by Harriet Beecher Stowe. By 1875 the government had collected enough evidence to go to trial, only to find that putting together an impartial jury in a land of Mormons was nigh impossible. The trial resulted in a hung jury, with the prosecutors accusing the Mormon Church of colluding to prevent key witnesses from testifying. Two years later the government tried again, in what was quickly dubbed “the most important criminal case ever tried in the United States.” This time it succeeded. To minimize the inevitable defeat, the Mormons and Brigham Young put up one of their own—Brigham Young’s adopted son, no less—as the ringleader of the massacre.
The man was promptly convicted and executed.

“A crime that has no parallel in American history for atrocity” said the U.S. superintendent of Indian Affairs after visiting the site of the Mountain Meadows massacre (picture from
Harper’s
magazine
, 1859)

In a land of religious fanatics, the message that the Mormons had committed murder never registered. They were the righteous ones, and for one of them to die to spare the others was in keeping with tribal code. In the words of the modern Western novelist Larry McMurtry, describing the man who had been sacrificed by Brigham Young:

To this day, the Mormon Church has never fully acknowledged its role in America’s most infamous massacre. In 1998, the head of the church spoke at the dedication of a new memorial at the Mountain Meadows site. “It is time to leave the entire matter in the hands of God,” he said. “It cannot be recalled. It cannot be changed.”

But it can be remembered. There is hardly a history book of the United States nowadays that mentions what was considered at the time the “darkest deed of the century.”