Muncy Historical Society and Museum of History

BY LEWIS E. THEISS

Presented before the Northumberland Historical Society January 9, 1948

When I was tasked to speak to you about the Pennsylvania Canal, I was rather resistant, for only recently Mr. William Schnure, of Selinsgrove, told us about the section of the canal that passed through this immediate region, and years ago Mr. Edwin Charles, who was a real authority on the subject, spoke to us at length about the Pennsylvania Canal. Furthermore, I myself have already told you most of what I know about our canal in a previous talk. The problem was to find something new to present. Fortunately, I was asked by the University of Pennsylvania Press to write something about canals, and in my researches for for that job I came upon an aspect of canal lore that was new to me. I believed that perhaps this matter might be new to you also. And so tonight I am going to talk to you about Piracy on the Pennsylvania Canal.

But before we come to that aspect of history, I would like once more to call to your attention the significance of the canal, to emphasize the part this waterway played in the development of our national life.

The thirteen colonies that won independence from Great Britain, you will recall, occupied the coastal plain between the Appalachians and the Atlantic Ocean. The successful outcome of the Revolution gave us, in addition, a vast territory to the west that has now become the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and so on. In these early days we called this region the Northwest Territory. Immediately settlers by the tens of thousands poured westward over the Alleghenies and took up land in this territory and there developed frontier homes.

Although no single settler produced much surplus for sale, the sum total of merchantable produce in the Northwest Territory soon grew into an enormous tonnage. This produced the same situation that we have seen recently in the western wheat fields, where farmers have poured hundreds of thousands of bushels of wheat out on the open prairie because they have not enough railroad cars to transport their wheat to market. However, the situation then was vastly worse than it is now. The only way those pioneers could get anything to market was to put it on rafts or arks or flatboats and float it to market, just as the early pioneers of the Susquehanna Valley region did, before the coming of the canal. The difficulty of that situation with regard to these early western pioneers was that their streams flowed either westward or northward. In short, they either took their products down the Ohio and the Mississippi, to New Orleans, or made a commercial connection with the French, or they took the stuff northward into the Great Lakes and sold it to the British. It was a dangerous situation for the new nation. For, as Washington warned, unless we provided transportation to tie those distant settlers to the United States, they would inevitably connect themselves with the French or the British, or with both. Thus, instead of having one great union, we should help to perpetuate the rule of other nations on this continent.

The building of the Erie Canal in New York, which was finished in 1825, reversed the flow of goods and brought it eastward to the Hudson and New York City, making New York the Empire State and New York City the metropolis of America. So great was the flow of men into the Erie Canal region that the springs of prosperity in Pennsylvania began to dry up. In sheer desperation, we built the Pennsylvania Canal, to try to secure a share in this sudden prosperity.

Our Canal was finished in this region not later than 1834.

To a large extent, the canal accomplished its purpose. Pennsylvania did secure a considerable portion of the traffic between East and West. Not only did this traffic consist of the hauling of goods and food products, but also thousands of immigrant settlers found their way west through the Pennsylvania wilderness on our canal boats.

I call your attention to this combination of helpless ignorant immigrants, and a wild, unsettled forest region through which they had to travel. Could anything more certainly invite brigandage?

This matter of the wilderness of the country through which the Pennsylvania Canal passed should be emphasized for present-day folks. I suspect that few of us realize how near to being a wilderness this region was.

Probably every one of us has seen photographs of some stretch of the old Pennsylvania Canal that pictured a scene of rural peace and beauty, wherein a team of mules, driven tandem, plodded slowly along a towpath, pulling a canal boat through an idyllic stretch of scenery, at two or three miles an hour. The glowing sunlight, the rarely beautiful setting, the glassy water, rippled only by the tiny waves thrown up by the slowly-moving barge, all combine to suggest such somnolent peace and safety that we have probably unconsciously come to think of the canal as a place of complete quietude and restful beauty. Certainly these photographs suggest such an idea.

But I call your attention to the fact that, according to the encyclopedia, the first sunlight picture of a human face made in the United States was not made until 1840, and that the photographic industry-that is, the manufacture and sale and common use of sensitized materials and apparatus, began about 1876-half a century after they began to dig our canal. I do not need to remind you of the amazing changes that fifty years can make in the appearance of such a thing as a canal, or what similar alterations the same half century can produce in the atmosphere of a think like the infant canal. The fact is that there probably exists no really accurate photograph of the early canal.

So we have absorbed our ideas of the canal from likenesses of its later days, after it had wholly changed in aspect and character.

Actually, in our part of Pennsylvania, and particularly in regions farther west, the canal originally penetrated a country that was very rough and rugged, and that was hardly removed from its frontier status that obtained in the days of the Revolution. Like every frontier of life, be it a gold mine town, or a new oil field, or a region freshly opened to settlers, this Pennsylvania canal region also had many rough characters, and in addition untold numbers of additional rough and desperate characters were drawn hither by the digging of the new waterway. Many of them remained in the region. Many of them became operators of boats, or hangers-on of the canal; desperate men who saw in the canal and its rich cargoes a means of living by plundering. Especially was this true in the coal regions. Although it is no essential part of this talk, it might

be well to emphasize the great extent of the Pennsylvania Canal system, and the rugged, lonely, crime-inviting regions through which our canals wound their way. When the canals were completed, Pennsylvania had the greatest canal system in the world, with close to 1,000 miles of canals. The Schuylkill, the Brandywine, the Lehigh, the Conococheague, the Conestoga, the Lackawanna, the Octorora, the Delaware, the Chesapeake, the Susquehanna, the Juniata, the Conemaugh, the Kishkiminetas, the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and other Pennsylvania streams were all paralleled by canals, which often were in part canalized stretches of these rivers-like the four miles above the Muncy Dam, where the canal boats were dragged in the river itself. Practically every one of these streams winds its way among rough, mountainous country. Certainly it was an ideal setting for crime.

As an illustration of the scope of canal travel in those early days we might mention the voyage of one, Jesse Crissman, who built a boat at his home in the valley of the Lackawanna, near Scranton, Pa., and set forth on the canal. He got as far as Hollidaysburg, on the Juniata, where he had intended to sell the boat. But some one induced him to have it hauled over the Alleghenies by the portage railway, which hauled all Pittsburgh-Philadelphia canal boats over the mountains-and to continue his journey. He went on down the Conemaugh canal to Pittsburgh, where he got into the Ohio and eventually landed at New Orleans. Quite a canal boat trip from Scranton to New Orleans.

It well illustrates one of the features incidents to ideal crime conditions – ease of getting away and diversity of hide-outs.

Incidentally, Crissman's boat was named Hit or Miss.

Only if we truly grasp this background of the early canal, can we really understand the early canal boatmen. The canal was something novel. It penetrated a new country. First, it offered employment in its construction, and rugged indeed were the men who constructed it. The canal offered a chance for adventure, an opportunity for easy travel to distant parts-something entirely new in the land -and for stirring experiences. It was something altogether novel in American life. Farm lads, laborers, lumbermen, adventurers, bullies, pirates – rough characters of all sorts – swarmed to the canal. Quite naturally, they scared away more desirable persons. The result was that for years canal boatmen were considered as little better than ruffians. Lack of home restraint, absence of customary observation by neighbors, the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of their calling, all tended to free these early roving boatmen of customary restrictions of conduct.

Crime, feuds and fighting, rowdyism – all were characteristic of the early days of the canal.

This is easily understandable. We are still close enough to the lumbering days to remember what a swaggering, roistering, profane, lawless set those men of the lumber camps were-when they got their pay and came to town. All frontiers are peopled with such characters.

It goes almost without saying that if such men infested the canals, the men who operated the canal boats had to be their equals as rough and ready fighters. Otherwise, they could never have brought their cargoes safely through to their destinations. For in the early days the Pennsylvania canal was as much infested by pirates as ever was the Spanish Main.

There was much besides Isolation and rugged country that promoted crime. Literally, it was a day when men drank whiskey as today they drink water. For whiskey sold for as little as a fip a half pint, a fip being 61/4 cents. Applejack – most deadly stuff – sold for 25 cents a gallon.

"Black strap," rum and molasses, cost three or four cents a glass. Boatmen drank it endlessly. At every canal basin and dock, and sometimes even at locks, drink could be had.

There were floating saloons. Boats to be loaded with coal often were held at coal docks an entire week before they could be loaded. Meantime, the boatmen were hardly sober. In places, canal-side saloons offered free stabling for their horses to boatmen who bought drink. There were lewd women aplenty, and not infrequently boatmen fought over them.

Canal battles often were savage affairs indeed-like fights in the lumber camps. Anything went. Fingers and ears were bitten off; eyes were gouged out; men were kicked brutally in face and body. Indeed, a man who had fallen in a fight might be beaten almost to death by his victorious antagonist.

In those early, brutal days, fighting went on constantly. The bullies on the canal boats and along the canal continually were picking quarrels. Their reputations were made by their fighting qualities. By physical violence, or insulting language, or both, they sought to make other men fight them. And terrible were the resulting struggles.

More than one man lost his life in these senseless battles. Many more were horribly maimed. And the number of those who were beaten almost to a pulp and left to recover as best they could was amazing. Yet that was not surprising.

Such a situation existed in any part of the frontier. In addition, boat crews fought endlessly. If one boat managed to overtake and pass another boat in the canal, the result was almost surely a battle. If two boats approached a lock at about the same time, a stiff fist fight resulted to determine which boat should go through the lock first. In this way lasting hatreds were often created, so that the crew of one boat "had it in" for the crew of another. They fought almost every time they came near each other.

Terrific battles often occurred at the docks. At Nanticoke, for instance, where a canal boat was often compelled to lie idle an entire week before it could be loaded with coal, the boatmen spent their hours in idling about the saloons and gathering on the big common by the dock. Almost every man of them had been drinking. Some of them were drunk. Many of them were pugnacious. Crafty boatmen who enjoyed a good fight, as we might enjoy a stirring movie, egged others on with sneering remarks about their being afraid to fight, or suggestions that some known enemy despised them for their cowardice, etc. For one cause or another, these idle men were always fighting. It hardly needs to be mentioned that many such characters were just as willing to acquire property by theft.

Canalside farmers suffered constantly. Orchards were robbed. Rail fences disappeared, for chestnut fence rails made the finest of firewood for canal cook stoves. Poultry and other edible property along the canal disappeared in amazing quantity. It is said that farmers living by the canal planted three extra rows of sweet corn in fields near the canal, because they knew that passing boatmen would strip about that number of rows. In the early days, canal boats kept moving day and night. Hen houses near the canal suffered again and again. The story is told of one boatman who stole into such a structure, only to get the surprise of his life; for he was in a pen of guineas, and they set up such a racket that the boatman skipped off fast, before a charge of shot came his way. The wily farmer had housed his hens further away from the waterway, and put his watchdog guineas by the canal. They served their purpose well.

Another canal story says that a farmer, thinking to start a business with passing boatmen, put a bucket of apples on a canal bridge, with this sign on it: "Take apples, leave ten cents." The boatmen obeyed the first half of the injunction. When they were upbraided by the farmer, they explained that boatmen could not read and they had supposed that the apples were put out as a present.

Another story tells of a boatman who espied a fat hen scratching for worms close to the canal. He got ashore and was vigorously pursuing the hen, when the farm wife ran out and upbraided him for trying to steal her poultry. With his tongue in his cheek, the boatman said, "Madam, I wouldn't think of stealing your poultry. This is a hen we had on the boat and it got away. I was only trying to get it back again." Thereupon the farm woman, mollified, helped the canaler catch her fat hen. Near the end of the canal at Havre de Grace lived a slatternly family in a slatternly home on a farm that seemed to have all sorts of live stock. A vicious gander was part of the outfit. Every time boatmen passed, this gander would rush at the boy mule drivers, hissing and if possible biting them with its beak. A youthful mule driver was greatly afraid of this gander. One time he determined to get even with it. He got a long, strong cord, fixed a strong fish hook on it and baited the hook with corn. When the gander rushed at him, he dropped the hook. The gander stopped and snatched up the corn. The boy ran down the towpath, and the hooked gander necessarily followed.

The slatternly housewife came out and said, "Don't run little boy. He won't bite you." But the little boy ran on, towing the gander, until he was around a curve and out of sight of the housewife. Then he slit the gander's throat and that night there was a great feast on the canal boat.

Thefts of this sort, however truly they constituted crime, were really not of great importance. The thing that really mattered was the constant recurrence of robbery, often accompanied by brutal assaults. The canal necessarily passed through innumerable farming areas. To make it possible for farmers to go from a field on one side of the canal to a field on the other, innumerable little bridges were built over the waterway. They were low structures, just high enough to permit the passage of the boats. The well-known term "low bridge" stems from these structures, for it was the duty of the mule driver, when he approached such a structure, to call out "low bridge," so that the men on the boat would take warning and not suffer head injuries from colliding with the bridge. Because these bridges were so low, they were a great aid to crime. It was no trick at all to drop from one of them to a canal boat passing underneath. When boys dropped on a boat, they were usually welcome. They were harmless. But when men did, the two men of the boat crew were instantly fearful. They had reason to be. Again and again a gang sufficiently large to insure victory in any possible fight would drop on a passing boat, wait until the craft had reached a suitable spot, then rob the crew. Usually, such robbery was accompanied by a severe beating. Often boatmen were almost killed by these brutal robbers.

The story is told of one powerful boatman who was beset by a gang of ten ruffians. He jumped to a spot where only one or two could reach him at a time. As they rushed up he beat them down savagely. He kicked them away. He flung them against one another. He smashed their faces with terrific blows. One by one, his enemies were disabled, and he emerged triumphant. But he was a badly battered man indeed.

Such an outcome was most unusual. More often, the man attacked was left sadly maimed and battered, if not even dead. In one instance, a gang dropped on a passing boat just before it reached a dam. When the craft reached the deep part of the dam, they demanded the captain's money. He said he had none. Thereupon, the pirates beat him savagely. The captain's small son rushed into the cabin, picked up a loaded shotgun, aimed it at the leader of the gang, and fired. The charge blew the man's head off and temporarily drove the gang back. Instantly the captain leaped into the canal. His small son wriggled through a stern window and dropped into the water. Father and son got to shore safely.

One of the roughest sections of the canal was the Schuylkill division, where so much coal was hauled to market by canal boats. There canal robbers traveled in packs, attacking anything that appeared easy to capture. These organized canal pirates created a reign of terror throughout that entire region. They were known as the Schuylkill Rangers.

Mr. W. T. Follweiler, in a paper presented to the Historical Society of Schuylkill County, says that these pirates of the canal came principally from Philadelphia. They lived in a rough region on the east side of the Schuylkill, between Market and Shippen Streets. He says that their leaders were William Katon and "Red" Larry Carrol. They were organized for crime along the canal, just as today city "mobs" of criminals are organized for plunder in cities. It was, ordinarily, entirely useless to resist them, for the three members of a boat crew-captain, bowsman, and boy mule driver-were no match for a gang of desperadoes.

Yet on occasion some one did get the better of them. For instance, Peter Berger, captain of the boat "Rattlesnake," was one time attacked when his boat tied up at a Philadelphia wharf. Instantly drawing an old pistol, Berger shot the pirate leader and another gangster dead and drove the remainder away in precipitate flight. For this brave act, he was rewarded by the Mayor of Philadelphia with a fine new revolver.

On another occasion, Captain Henry Boyer, of Reading, was taking his boat through the Fairmount Dam, at Philadelphia, at night. Feeling sure that he would be attacked by the Rangers, Boyer told his boy mule driver to signal him if the Rangers appeared. Then he lay down on the deck with a sharp axe at hand. After a time he heard his driver's signal. He arose and stood ready. As a boat bumped alongside in the dark, and gangsters began to swarm aboard, Boyer laid about him violently with his axe. He routed the pirates. Cut and bleeding, they dropped hastily back into their boat and pulled for the shore. John Hesser, a boat captain, with a bowsman named Heiser and a boy mule skinner, reached a point on the canal below Dauberville, when they passed several boats belonging to Rangers. A Ranger in the rear boat called to Heiser, "How are you going to vote?" He received no reply. Thereupon, with frightful oaths, he leaped to the canal bank and began to curse Heiser. The latter, nothing daunted, also leaped to the canal bank and gave the man a beating.

Rangers on the boats that had passed, stopped their craft, grabbed their guns-which, fortunately, needed caps for firing-and mounting their mules raced back to the scene of the row. But already Hesser had his boat under way and well offshore. So the mounted Rangers pushed on ahead, to Dauberville, to cut Hesser off. They tried to secure gun caps in town but failed. Meantime, Hesser steered his boat to the opposite side of the stream and with his crew took refuge in a stout farm house. The Rangers were going to scuttle Hesser's boat, but the townsfolk organized and drove them off. Hesser got his boat back unharmed.

As time passed, and these pirates became more and more successful, they also grew bolder. They even planned raids on towns. On one occasion they tried to take possession of Schuylkill Haven. This was a considerable centre. Very likely word of their coming had reached the townsmen, for the latter were ready for the pirates and were determined to crush them. There were perhaps a dozen pirates in the gang. The unexpected resistance dismayed them, and they retreated to a covered bridge, where, in the darkness, they thought they could hold out. But the townsmen separated into two groups, and a group crept toward either end of the bridge. Then they poured in a deadly crossfire. One Ranger was killed. Others were doubtless wounded. In the dark the survivors stole away. But on the following morning the townsmen took up the trail. They found and captured three of the gang on an old scow below the bridge. Four more were captured at a canal landing dock. Tied hand and foot, the gangsters were carted off to jail.

On one occasion, an enormous gang of these Rangers, grown bold to the point of folly, actually undertook to capture Pottsville. The gang numbered 200 to 300 men.

Naturally, news of their coming preceded them. The men of Pottsville had enough time to prepare for the pirates.

The sheriff called out a large posse of men, well armed. The militia was called out. Faced with this unexpected resistance, the pirates fled. But the soldiers were kept under arms for some time, ready to march at a moment's notice.

Probably the pirates were aware of this continued state of preparedness. They made no further attempt to take over Pottsville. Nor did they ever, apparently, make another attack on such a large scale. Like the Mollie Maguires, they eventually declined and disappeared, although they had no such startlingly tragic end as did the Mollies. But these two crime organizations-the Mollie Maguires and the Schuylkill Rangers-are characteristic of a certain early period in the development of a new country. The West solved its crime problem through the creation of its Vigilantes.

Although this paper on the Pirates of the Pennsylvania Canal properly closes here, I think it may be of interest to you to note some of the factors that led to a complete change in the character of canal life, so that the Pennsylvania canal, in the days which some of us knew before 1900, really was as you may have pictured it somnolently lovely and peaceful-at times. Although we should never forget that winds and storms and floods and the navigation of the Chesapeake again and again involved canal boatmen in danger and death.

These violent occasions had no relation to crime, of course. They were inherent in canal boating itself. But as the country developed and became more civilized and cultivated, life on the canal was necessarily affected. It, too, took on a tamer, gentler, more pleasing aspect. Indeed, for many years before the canal was officially closed in 1900, a canal boat captain was a highly respected member of any community, and canal boating was not only respectable but was to some extent the idyllic thing you may have pictured it as being.

What do you suppose was a leading cause of this change? I think it was the women. Everywhere women go, to mining towns, to oil fields, to gold strikes, to boom towns-yes, to the canal-things' change for the better. They certainly did on our artificial waterways.

I call your attention to the way history repeats itself. In this recent terrible war, women left the kitchen and swarmed to the factories. They ceased to scrub the home porch and took to washing locomotives. They became truck drivers, makers of airplanes, helpers in every sort of industry. It was the same in the Civil War. When men by the hundreds of thousands had heard Lincoln's call for volunteers, and had marched off until the country was drained of its shop workers, women stepped into the breech. We had no such development of industry in 1860 as we had in 1942; yet we had plenty of places where women could step in and substitute for men. And one of those places was on the Pennsylvania canal. It must have required a great deal of courage for any woman to take her place on the deck of a canal boat and hold her own in all that crowd of rough men. Perhaps the first women volunteers were somewhat rough themselves.

They had to be. But one by one, more and more women took up the work, until it was a commonplace for an entire family to live on a canal boat. This had become possible by reason of the fact that the canal was a common carrier or waterway, open to any one who owned a boat. As boating had proved to be a profitable occupation, more and more men had become boat owners. Some owned whole strings of boats. Thus, when the need came for women boaters, many, many women could move directly into the family boat. Children could not be left at home, uncared for, as too many of them were in this recent struggle, so they were of course taken aboard. Thus, the picture of a canal boat proceeding leisurely along an idyllic waterway, the family wash flying in the breeze, perhaps the woman of the family at the tiller while her husband performed some needed task elsewhere, and the children at play on the deck, or dragging little boats on a string behind the slowly-moving craft, is a very true picture of the later days of the canal. For, with such a family, a canal boat was like a family factory or store today.

It was the source of the family livelihood. Thus, as the war drew off more and more men, more and more women stepped into their places on these family boats. In the latter days of the canal, boat women were usually very fine persons, of good, upright character, concerned about the welfare and morality of their children. There were many excellent, Christian women thus afloat with their families. On such boats there was no coarse language, no profanity, no hard drinking. Instead, songs, hymns, and other good music was heard. I know well a man in Williamsport who has attained a nice place in life, who early sailed the canal with his mother and his father.

He told me how strict his mother was about matters of decency and morality. When I asked him what songs were sung on the canal in his day, he said we sang hymns principally, such songs as "Nearer My God to Thee," "Jesus Lover of My Soul," and so on. With unconscious humor they also sang, "Shall We Gather at the River." And in the days of the Spanish-American War, he said, they sang the usual patriotic songs.

But improvement on the canal was not limited to moral progress. Women made their boats more homelike. They spruced up the little cabins. They hung bright curtains at the windows. They grew flowers in little pots. And, as I have suggested, they washed the clothes. Before the day of women on the canal, boatmen were none too clean. It used to be said that a canal boatman took two baths a year – one in spring, before he started boating, and another in winter, after he left his boat. Be that as it may, women made the boats and their occupants clean. It certainly must be true that cleanliness is next to Godliness. Perhaps it is the introduction to Godliness.

I mentioned the fact that adventure was inherent in canal life. When women became boatmen they had to undergo some strenuous experiences. Mr. Newton Baker, a delightfully lovely old gentleman of Espy, whose mother took him on the canal when he was only seven years old, and who boated until the canal closed in 1900, told me about a tow of seven boats, including the one on which he was employed, that was caught in one of the sudden storms so characteristic of the Chesapeake. You see, the boats were towed from Havre de Grace to Baltimore or near-by, by tugs. There was great coal traffic from Nanticoke to Baltimore. These tows of canal boats were fastened together three abreast, with one such row after another, but far enough apart so that a rear boat would not crash into a forward craft, or vice versa, when the sea made up.

On this occasion the waves were terrible. The boats crashed into one another incessantly. Presently a boat captained by Jacob Reese went to the bottom, and Reese's brother was drowned. Then a boat owned by a Mr. Thornton sank. Its owner was drowned. Thornton's son, a lad named Dick, clung to the cabin steps, which had floated free, and managed to swim to shore, somehow taking his dog with him. There were many pets on canal boats.

The boat Prowess of Dauphin, on which Mr. Baker was sailing, grounded on an island. It went ashore at flood tide, which proved to be a piece of good fortune. For when the tide receded, there lay the boat on the sands, but little damaged. It was not far from the water, either. The crew at once began to dig the sands away from around it and to make a trench down to the sea. When flood tide returned, they had enough water in their little canal to float the boat, and it was gradually worked down to the sea, where a tug made fast to it and towed it to harbor. This incident was widely talked about, not only because of its tragic nature, but because it became especially noteworthy in the eyes of canailles as the owner of the boat, one McCarthy, was reputed to be the only man on the canal at the time who would not boat on Sundays. Very naturally, a story grew up attributing McCarthy's safety to supernatural causes.

I hope you will pardon this little digression in which I have spoken of the effect of women on the canal. Somewhere in this talk I used the overworked term that history repeats itself. It is interesting to me to see that that is not only literally true, but that the history of many different things follows a common pattern. I have mentioned the wild days and doings in pioneer points. I know something of that wildness from personal experience for I spent several months in a boom town that mushroomed up after a great oil strike in Texas. I assure you that life in such a place is all it has been pictured to be-and then some.

Well, the Pennsylvania canal evidently went through this same sort of wild youth, gradually becoming tamer and more civilized as the life of the region developed and itself took on a more cultivated tone. Today, the canal is only a memory-and a very lovely memory. The difficulty with that is that our memories do not go back quite far enough. I have been trying to take your minds back a little beyond your memories. I hope that, in the future, when you think of the Great Runaway, and the deeds of Captain John Brady and Major Moses Van Campen, and Col. Samuel Hunter, and other outstanding men of this region in the early days, you will also recall the fact that violence and crime did not cease with those men. Nor did it end with the cutting of the forest and the development of civilization.

In our picture of the long process of development, we shall do well to remember, among other stirring things, the days of the pirates of the Pennsylvania Canal.

Canalling in the Old Days

Pennsylvania Canal Along the Susquehanna