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Here comes the 111th episode of The Past and the Curious.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Mick Sullivan.
This is The Past and the Curious, and I'm so glad you are joining me.
This episode is coming out at the very end of October 2025, which happens to be the same week 200 years prior that the Erie Canal opened.
It was a pivotal event in American history, world history, engineering history, marriage of water history, all of those things.
It's a really fun story and there's some aspects about it that I found fascinating, including how they just communicated with cannons to let everybody know that it was open.
It was a novel idea.
So the first story that you're going to hear is about the opening of the Erie Canal.
And there definitely is a little bit of a Simpsons monorail moment in there.
Couldn't resist.
And then the other story is about the Chicago River and some amazing steps they did to make Chicago cleaner, including lifting up the city for sewers and eventually changing the direction of the Chicago River.
What?!
!
On October 26, 1825, a cannon blast rang out through the fall air of western New York.
Cannons tend to be loud and powerful, so hopefully the surrounding crowd was covering their ears.
A few seconds later, after the sound of the blast faded, it was met with the sound of another cannon blast an answer somewhere off in the distance.
A few moments later, another blast sounded again. even further into the land.
Then another further away, and then another.
The booms reached across the countryside like a row of dominoes, one triggering the next.
No telling how long people around the first cannon could hear each one that followed, but cannon blasts continued across the entire state of New York for over three hours that day.
One after another, after another.
These cannons were not fired in conflict.
They were blasts of celebration and of communication meant to tell anyone within earshot that the Erie Canal was open.
It might not seem like much, but this 363-mile-long canal changed the world, changed the lives of the people around it and helped make New York City the most important commercial city in the United States.
Imagine a whole bunch of land and on that land are forests of trees and some mountains.
And one side of the land is higher in elevation than the other.
Have you ever carried something heavy before?
Use that memory to imagine how hard it might be to get lots of heavy stuff across that vast and varied land.
But the stuff has got to get across it and the quicker the better.
When it comes to New York.
On one side of the state there are a couple of great lakes Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
On the other, the Hudson River, which leads to the Atlantic Ocean and to the world.
Oh, if only those two bodies of water were connected.
Think of the possibilities.
But that was just a dream.
At least, for a while.
Moving things is hard!
It's hard work.
Though people can do hard things, and working hard is admirable.
Wouldn't it be easier if you just didn't have to work so hard?
Uh, that is kind of the definition of easier, right?
Well, there has to be a better way.
But what are you saying, Mr. Clinton?
All I'm really saying is...
There's nothing on Earth like a genuine, bonafide, horse-tied, super-long Erie Canal.
What'd I say?
Erie Canal!
Say it again, pal!
Erie Canal!
Erie Canal!
Erie Canal!
Erie Canal!
Erie Canal!
You're gonna dig a big ditch about 40 feet wide?
Yeah, buddy, that's the way we do it.
For boats to float filled with cargo inside?
That's the plan, so let's get right to it!
Nah, but what about the mountains and the rock and the stone?
Well, we'll scoop it.
We'll blast it.
We'll dig right past it.
The world is our oyster.
We'll conquer these trials.
And we won't stop digging until we've dug 365 miles.
A famous politician named DeWitt Clinton was the driving force behind the Erie Canal.
And as far as we know, he never broke into song.
But he didn't need it in order to get attention.
He was a big deal.
His father was a Revolutionary War officer, and his uncle was George Clinton.
No, not that George Clinton.
This George Clinton was an almost signer of the declaration of independence.
See, he was part of the Congress that decided to declare independence.
But in early July 1776, before he could sign the famous piece of paper, he was asked to go serve in the army as a brigadier general.
He still made history though.
He later served as Thomas Jefferson's vice president and is remembered as the second longest serving governor in New York history.
That's pretty funky. in a way.
And he founded a political dynasty that his nephew DeWitt carried on.
DeWitt was also a politician and one of the most powerful people in New York State in the early 1800s.
And DeWitt knew that if people could connect the Great Lakes, which are practically inland seas, with the Atlantic Ocean, it would profoundly change not just New York but the entire United States.
Clinton had a good point.
In a time before trains, if you could move a boat with goods and people from New York City to anywhere on a great lake, or the other way around, well, it would boost the economy, it would create opportunity and lead to the development of cities on land both in its path and along the shores of the lake, and it would also make a few people pretty rich, himself included.
Anyway, consider Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Buffalo.
They're all cities on the Great Lakes.
And much of their earlier development and growth had to do with shipping goods to and from their ports to other cities.
And the Erie Canal would help give them access to the entire world from the middle of the American continent.
So, once he convinced everyone, teams spent eight years digging a slow and steady path heading out in both directions from somewhere in the middle of New York.
It wasn't deep, just about four feet.
But once it filled with water, it would be more than enough to ship cargo and people in canal boats.
And those boats didn't even need power on board.
The canal was narrow enough that most of the boats were pulled by teams of horses and mules walking on the shore.
And let me tell you, if you were used to the bone rattling bounce of riding in a stagecoach at the time, then this horse-drawn water journey seemed as smooth as shaving cream on the inside of a seashell.
What's not to love about a smooth ride?
Of course, one side of their canal project was 571 feet higher than the other, so that was going to present some problems.
Boats traveling the entire 363-mile trip would have to wait in 83 different locks to make up for the elevation difference.
If you don't know what a lock on a river is.
Basically, the boat would wait in a chamber built in the canal, as watertight walls closed off the water around it.
Then the water level in the chamber would be changed to match the next elevation up or down, depending on the direction the boat was traveling in.
And when the locks opened up again, the boat could continue at that new altitude.
When the project was finally complete, everyone wanted to celebrate.
That's why they fired cannons one by one across the state along the path of the canal.
In Buffalo DeWitt Clinton, and a parade of other boats set out on the morning of October 26th 1825.
And at the beginning of their journey, a cannon was fired.
And farther down the canal, when it was heard by the next cannon, they fired as well.
When the next one heard it, they, well, you get the idea.
Cannon.
After cannon was fired in the Cascade, until 90 minutes later the message reached its destination and the last one was fired in New York City.
Everyone there knew that it meant the Erie Canal was finally open.
So they turned the message around and fired their cannon back.
Then, one by one, all the cannons were fired yet again, this time in the opposite direction.
So around noon, three hours after the first cannon shot in Buffalo, that town's people heard the cannon fire returning and they knew that New York City had gotten their message.
But sound moves much faster than a boat being pulled by horses.
It took DeWitt and his parade ten days to make it to New York City.
Of course, he had to stop and celebrate with people at every town along the way, and a lot of towns had popped up around the canal.
So without the constant stops to party, a typical speed for the journey would be about five days.
Not fast, but a whole lot faster. and a whole lot smoother than journeys before that.
When he did arrive in New York City in early November, the boats made their way to the New York Bay, where the harbor finally opens up to the Atlantic Ocean.
And this was where they held the famous Wedding of the Waters ceremony.
What do you mean, Wedding of the Waters?
Water's already wet.
No, my good sir, it is Wedding with D's, not T's.
You see, we came with barrels of water from Lake Erie, and I've carried them along the Erie Canal and I intend to ceremonially dump them into the waters of the Atlantic, thereby symbolically linking or wedding them together forevermore.
But DeWitt, wait, there's more.
I've got some barrels to dump too.
Oh, okay.
What have you got?
So many barrels.
We've got water from the Elba, the Danube, the Rhine, and the Thames.
Indus, the Neva, the Tagus, the Seine.
Oh, very well.
Orinoco, Gambia, La Plata, and Ganges, Columbia, Amazon, Mississippi, my man!
Jeez, this is a lot of water.
How long is this going to take?
I mean, it's going to take a while, yeah.
Also, are we worried about invasive species that might be in that water?
Mr. Clinton, it's 1825.
We're not worried about invasive species.
In just the first few years, millions of dollars of cargo made its way through the canal.
And along with thousands of people, it made goods like flour and salt and books and all sorts of other stuff cheaper and easier to get for Americans.
It made tourism and seeing new parts of the country easier.
It also changed areas of population by enabling towns like Syracuse and Rochester and Buffalo and Albany to develop into larger cities.
It made New York City the final destination for many goods bound for international ports.
And it also played a big role in the Underground Railroad as a way for people to move quickly as they were escaping enslavement and fighting for freedom.
Unfortunately, the Erie Canal came at a cost to others.
People in charge of the project took ancestral lands from Native Americans who lived in its path.
And much of the land was home to Seneca people, as well as other members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
As the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal opening continues over the fall of 2025, many indigenous people are playing a direct role in part of the celebrations and remembrances.
In addition to the anniversary festivities, eastern white pine trees are being planted along the original path all the way from Buffalo to New York City.
The tree is a traditional peace symbol for the Seneca people.
Grown-ups!
I often hear from grown-ups about my show.
I hear the words, why didn't they teach us this in school?
And I get it.
There's a lot of history to cover.
I try to fill in some of those gaps, and I'm glad to do it.
But I have my own.
Why didn't they teach us this in school moments?
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The past and the curious.
For You Have 30 Seconds.
This month I got submissions from some brothers in South Carolina so I flipped a coin to see who would go first.
Cameron, you're up.
Hi, my name is Cameron.
I live in Anderson, South Carolina.
I am going to tell you about Molly Stark.
Molly Stark was the wife of the General John Stark, who fought in the Revolutionary War.
Molly was patriotic, loving, and kind.
She would open her house as a hospital for weak and hurt men.
Molly and John Stark are my 7th grade grandparents.
She was born February 16, 1737.
She has her own state park in Dunbar in New Hampshire.
Bye.
Cameron, you did a great job.
Thank you so much for submitting.
That was a great story.
I am fascinated to learn more.
And Brother Elijah, you're up next month, buddy.
So you can go ahead and tell everyone to tune in.
If anyone else out there has a You Have 30 Seconds, it's very simple.
You just do what these two brothers did.
You just hit record on a smartphone and you email it to me at hello at the past and the curious.
It's very, very simple.
The hard part is telling me what you want to tell me in 30 seconds.
It's quiz time.
It's quiz time.
It's quiz time.
Time, time.
Okay, you know the drill.
Quiz time.
There's three questions coming at you right now.
And the first question is very simple.
Y'all, what's the longest river in Africa?
The longest river in Africa.
If you said the Nile, you are correct.
The Nile is a river that is 4,132 miles long, or 6,650 kilometers.
The Nile flows from Central Africa northward, through Northeastern Africa and into the Mediterranean Sea.
Okay, question number two.
What is the longest river in South America?
Well, if you said the Amazon River, you're correct again.
People actually argue about which one is longer, the Amazon or the Nile.
It's kind of a point of contention.
So I'm not going to say which one is the longest in the world, but one or the other the Nile or the Amazon, is the longest river in the world.
Which brings me to the last question.
What is the shortest river in North America?
If you said the Roe River in Montana, I'd be really impressed.
I'd also assume that you're either a geography nerd or you just love great facts like that, or you're from Montana, which would make a lot of sense.
Anyway, the Roe River is only 201 feet long.
That's pretty short.
It was actually in the Guinness Book of World Records for its slight size before they eliminated the award for shortest river.
Anyway, it's near Great Falls, Montana, if you ever want to quickly hike its banks.
Big cities have lots of people, and those people can be pretty amazing.
The work they do and the culture they create can be very beautiful.
But large groups of people also create other, less beautiful things.
I'm talking, of course, about trash and food scraps and sewage.
You know, poop and pee and stuff.
And if you can't get that stuff safely out of a city well, there won't be very many people left to be awesome.
They'll either get sick or else go somewhere else less gross.
Just ask the city of Chicago from the 1800s.
At the time, Chicago was growing faster than just about any other city, just overflowing with people.
But like several other cities, Chicago was also overflowing with disease.
There were outbreaks left and right.
Dysentery, cholera and typhoid got very bad and took many lives, often in very gross ways, all because of poor sanitation.
It can basically be summed up like this.
If the water you drink is the same water that is filled with sewage, then you are cooking up a recipe for disaster.
And it is not a good recipe.
Not even one star.
No stars.
Negative stars.
Shut it down.
But Chicago had some problems standing in the way of cleanliness.
The city, built where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan, was low.
So drainage was a problem and water just kind of sat there and got swampy.
Beneath the buildings filled with people and businesses, there was no sewer system.
In some areas, there were just open cesspools of gross.
And that made people sick.
But most of the sewage wound up in the Chicago River, which flowed into Lake Michigan, which was where people got the drinking water.
So again, sick people.
And also, I should say, it wasn't just human waste.
It was animal waste.
As well as the leftovers from Chicago's growing meat industry, Huh, believe me, it was nasty.
So a guy named Ellis Chesborough came to town with a bright idea to lift the city up.
A sewer system.
But since the city sat so low and was so swampy underneath, his plan was to literally lift the city up.
With screwjacks installed underneath Streets homes, buildings and entire city blocks.
In some instances were slowly raised so that the sewers could be installed under them and carry the sewage out of the city.
It took hundreds of workers to lift each building, but a combination of mechanics and muscle got the job done.
As they each carefully turned their screw jacks in unison, the building would slowly raise with no stress to the structure.
Many times there were actually people living normally inside those buildings as they rose.
People sleeping in hotel rooms, working at their desk, cutting fabric in a factory.
Those days were oddly normal for those inside.
You know, other than the fact that they ended slightly higher up from where they started.
The teams got so good at it that entire city blocks were done at the same time.
When it was done, years later, There were sewers under the buildings to finally get all of the gross stuff out of the lives of the citizens of Chicago.
At least so they thought.
Unfortunately, it was all still just dumped into the Chicago River, which dumped into Lake Michigan, which was everybody's water source.
You see the problem.
Hey, man, water still gross.
I smell worse after taking a bath than I did before I got in it.
Yeah, you just gave all of our water a fancier ride in your sewer tunnel, but it's still a problem.
Well, at least it's not in your front yard.
And besides, there's more to the plan.
Right now, at this very moment, we've got people digging a tunnel deep underneath Lake Michigan.
We're building a pump several miles out into the lake to pull the clean, poop-free water far away from the city and we'll send it back here and you'll have all of the refreshing water you could imagine.
Take a bath, quench your thirst, and maybe brush your teeth.
Or at least eat a mint.
You've got a lot going on up there.
Well, what do you expect?
I'm not going to brush my teeth with your disgusting water.
But once the pump in Lake Michigan was finished, it was clear that this was not the solution they had hoped for.
Anytime it rained hard, the forceful flow of the river carried all of the sewage faster and further out into the lake.
The pollution, which in some cases was big chunks of.
You don't want to know what got sucked up by the pumps and sent right back into town.
It's like a feedback loop of poop.
It's a poop loop.
Oh, would you guys relax?
Chesborough told everyone there was a third and final part to the plan.
Ches, bro, you're making this up as you go along, right?
Here is the third and final part of the Chicago-Chesborough plan.
It was an ambitious plan.
On the scale of something someone like Leonardo da Vinci might have only dreamt.
Chesborough wanted to reverse the flow of the river.
That's right, make the Chicago River flow backwards.
That way, instead of the sewage flowing into the river and then winding up in Lake Michigan for everyone to drink, the newly reversed current would take it the other way away from town, away from the lake.
Okay, okay, but doesn't that water go to the Mississippi?
Like, what about the people downriver?
Won't that be a problem for them?
Well, I mean, yeah, I guess.
I don't know.
I think it's all going to dilute and dissolve before it becomes a problem for them.
At least, I think.
Well, Chez, you're a real straight shooter.
I can't fault you for that.
So let's get that river turned around, huh?
Turns out reversing a naturally occurring river is a tough job.
It took a long time for them even to get started.
Of course, the Civil War got in the way, and then the Great Chicago Fire happened.
And that catastrophe burned down almost all the buildings Chicago had so painstakingly razed in order to build sewers in the first place.
It took so long that Chesborough actually died before they even began.
But Chicago was undeterred.
In 1889, the project was in motion. and they called their new creation the Big Ditch.
And it was just that, a big ditch which was created through a high point in elevation, a subcontinental divide.
Once through that highland, they could guide water, with the help of gravity, to the Des Plaines River and then to the Mississippi.
For over a decade, crews of workers, along with new technology like steam shovels and dynamite, dug and blasted the Big Ditch for a total of 28 miles to the Des Plaines River.
It was nowhere near as long as the Erie Canal, but it was six times deeper and four times as wide.
It was the largest earth-moving project in America up to that point.
Finally, on the second day of the new century, January 2nd 1900, a group of civic leaders and dignitaries traveled to the final dam in place, holding the waters back from mingling and started the redirection of the Chicago River.
The man in charge of the Sanitary Commission had lost both of his parents to Chicago's cholera outbreaks of the 1850s.
It was he who gave the orders to blast the dam open with the simple words, Let her go!
It took a week or so for Chicago's water to clear out but, sure enough, Lake Michigan water started flowing into the river and sending the current in the opposite direction.
Before they knew it, people saw clear water.
They saw ice from the lake, clear as the sky, in what had been dangerously dirty water just days before.
The plan worked, at least for Chicago.
Chicagoans didn't think that people downriver would really mind too much.
Were they right?
They were worse than right.
They were wrong.
Cities down south were irate.
The people of St.
Louis were practically swimming in anger. along with other stuff.
How dare Chicago send its sewage down the river to them?
They made their waste someone else's problem.
So St.
Louis fought in courts and in public opinion to turn the river back around.
Chicago had a saying, though.
The solution to pollution is dilution.
Yeah, this was their response.
They believed that the fresh water of the lake would dilute the pollution, water it down and make it safer and safer as it made its way through America's river systems.
By the time it reached St.
Louis, they believed there'd be nothing left of the Pooey.
But St.
Louis did not buy it, and their case was taken all the way to the Supreme Court.
Louis on the river had already been doing the same thing.
The river was carrying plenty of other waste, so what was one more city's worth?
Changing the Chicago River with the Big Ditch was a marvel of engineering.
People literally changed the direction of an entire river.
But now we know that there were some environmental things that people should have considered.
Invasive species pollution, not to mention dumping thousands of gallons of fresh usable water from the Great Lakes into the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico, are not totally awesome things?
So who knows?
We may actually see the river re-reversed someday.
It's certainly been discussed.
And we've done it once, so we know we could do it again.
Still, luckily, sewage and waste management is much more advanced today.
If we did turn it back around, St.
Louis would probably celebrate.
All right, we did it.
We made it to the end of episode 111.
Thanks for joining me along the way.
This has been The Past and the Curious.
I'm Mick Sullivan.
If you enjoy this, there's all sorts of things you can do to support.
You can leave reviews.
You can support on Patreon.
I have some Patreon people to thank.
That helps keep the lights on.
I do this in my basement.
This is just something that I have committed myself to doing.
And it makes me happy to do it.
It makes me happy to share it.
So I just want you to know that I'm just a guy in doing this for the fun of it.
And because I think it should be done.
So if you enjoy it, let me know.
There's another.
You could just tell people.
Word of mouth is awesome.
I want to also thank everyone back in Pittsburgh.
Had such a great visit there.
It was so great to meet all of you and spend some time.
And it was awesome.
I hope to get somewhere else again soon.
I know that I'm going to Make a return to Boston in 2025.
And I'd like to get to maybe Virginia so I can cross another Commonwealth off the list.
So if there's someone out in Virginia that could you know, help me grease those wheels, that would be fantastic.
You can just have your people call my people.
You know, that's cool.
I am my own people, though.
I'm pretty much it.
Anyway, let's thank some Patreon people.
Catherine Cotto in Denver, Colorado.
Catherine!
Hey, thank you so much.
And if there's someone else that I need to thank in your place, or you want to dedicate this to anyone, you just let me know.
I will shout out whoever you would like, Catherine Cotto.
And I also want to thank out, thank out, shout out and thank a fine young man from a place called Syracuse, New York, named Dawson Johns.
And Syracuse, hey man, here we can go.
Huh?
Just worked out, didn't it?
All right.
Well, thank you so much.
Thank you for listening.
This has been The Past and the Curious.
I am Mick Sullivan.
I will be back with you very soon in November.
And I'm looking forward to a good end of the year.
I hope you are too.
The Past and the Curious
