The Buffalo - Erie Canal Foundation

The sketch below was published in 1825, the year of the completion of the Erie Canal.

BUFFALO "HARBOUR" FROM THE VILLAGE - Looking West

Drawn from nature and lithographed by George Catlin, Esq.
 

      From Buffalo’s Southtowns, three streams; Cayuga, Buffalo and Cazenovia Creeks, flow generally northward to conjoin into Big Buffalo Creek, now called the Buffalo River.   Just past their juncture, the river meanders and turns more westerly toward the Lake Erie shoreline, and discharges into the lake at Buffalo.  In colonial times, another small rivulet existed, called Little Buffalo Creek.  It entered the Buffalo River just before its confluence with the Lake. 

       When Buffalo was still the unincorporated village of New Amsterdam, in the early 1800’s, Little Buffalo Creek was the boundary between it and a settlement of aboriginal Senecas.   The historic Erie Canal was completed in 1825, after Buffalo had prevailed over the village of Black Rock to become the Western Terminus of the famed waterway.  The excavated and lined portion of the Canal initially ended at Little Buffalo Creek.  There, Canal packets from Albany and New York City could turn into the Creek, then into the Buffalo River.  They unloaded their goods or passengers, to be transferred to craft plying Lake Erie. 

       On the completion of the Canal, Governor De Witt Clinton, who conceived it, came to Buffalo and boarded the packet boat Seneca Chief, which held two cedar kegs filled with fresh water from Lake Erie, to be transported to New York City via the new Canal and poured into the Atlantic Ocean.  On the Seneca Chief’s return trip, it carried a keg of Atlantic Ocean water, which was poured into the Lake’s waters by Judge Samuel Wilkeson, who stated “the waters of the Lake were mingled with those of the Ocean; and we, in return, now unite those of the Ocean with the Lake”. [Buffalo Journal, Nov. 29, 1825]   Wilkeson eventually became Mayor of Buffalo, and the Canal went on to change the history of the nation.
 

Below is a portion of the previous sketch, showing key elements of the Western Terminus of the Erie Canal. 

 

         The sketch of Buffalo Harbor is from the Appendix to the following report.  Sketches and text were made possible through the courtesy of Raymond Huckles, who loaned us an original copy of the book, published in 1825.

M E M O I R,

PREPARED

AT

THE REQUEST OF

A

COMMITTEE OF THE COMMON COUNCIL

OF

THE CITY OF NEW YORK,

AND

PRESENTED TO THE MAYOR OF THE CITY,

AT

THE CELEBRATION OF THE COMPLETION

OF THE

NEW YORK CANALS.

 

----------------------------------------
BY CADWALLADER D. COLDEN.
----------------------------------------

 

PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CORPORATION OF NEW YORK.

BY W. A. DAVIS.
-------------
1825.
 
 

       The opening of the Erie Canal was greeted with much fanfare all along its route, and with no less joy in New York City than in Buffalo.  On 'opening day', cannons were set up all along the route of the canal, to signal from Buffalo to New York City and back, that America's great West had been opened to waterborne commerce. 
     
       Cadwallader D. Colden was a former Mayor of New York City, and a United States Congressman from New York State.  A proponent of a national canal system, he was commissioned by the Common Council of New York City to write his Memoir on the Erie Canal during the last days of its construction in 1825.  Some excerpts from Colden's Memoir and its Appendix appear on the following pages.

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