A Glimpse of Buffalo Harbor.
The history of the Niagara is so closely interwoven with that of the great "Queen City of the Lakes," Buffalo, that it would seem as though the famous waterway was in the suburb of the city and its greatest scenic attraction. However true this is to-day, it was very far from the case a century ago, for though the site of Buffalo was historic and important, the city, as such, is of comparative recent origin, coming to its own with giant strides in those last decades of the nineteenth century. Writes Mr. Rowland B. Mahany in his excellent chapter on "Buffalo" in The Historic Towns of the Middle States:
Few cities of the United States have a history more picturesque than Buffalo, or more typical of the forces that have made the Republic great. At the time of the adoption of the Federal constitution, in 1787, not a single white settler dwelt on the site of what is now the Queen of the Lakes; and it was not until after the second presidency of Washington, that Joseph Ellicott, the founder of Buffalo, laid out the plan of the town, which he called New Amsterdam.
On February 10, 1810, the "Town of Buffaloe" was created by act of the State Legislature, a name originally given to the locality by the Seneca Indians, who, we shall see, dominated the old Niagara frontier; it is believed that the name came from the animals which visited the neighbouring salt licks; and the name therefore may be much older than any settlement or even camping site. The village of New Amsterdam was now merged into the town of Buffalo, which boasted a newspaper in the second year of its existence, 1811. The story of the following years falls naturally into that of the disastrous war with England from 1812 to 1814, in which Buffalo suffered severely. As Mr. Mahany suggests, the story of Buffalo is characteristically American, and its phases, as such offer an inviting field, but one too wide for full examination in the present history.[2]
The important position of the city with reference to the Great Lakes was very greatly increased with the building of the Erie Canal from 1817 to 1825. It is interesting to recall the fact that it was in reality fear of the possibility of another war with England that caused the deciding vote for the Erie Canal project to be cast in its favour.[3] In the proper place we shall have impressed upon us the great distance that separated the Niagara frontier from the inhabited portion of the Republic at this early period, the great length of the land route and the difficulty of it; it was said to be far more than a cannon was worth to haul it to the frontier during the War of 1812. All this shows very distinctly the early condition surrounding the rise of the metropolis of the Niagara country, and, from being strange that little Buffalo did not grow faster, it is amazing to find such rapid growth during the first twenty-five years of her life.
With the opening of the canal in 1825 a new era dawned; the work of the great land companies in north-eastern New York drew vast armies of people thither, and the canal proved to be the great route for a much longer migration from the seaboard to the further north-west, to Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as to neighbouring Ohio. All this helped Buffalo. Numbers of travellers arriving at the future site of the Queen City of the Lakes at once decided that they could at least go farther and fare very much worse, and so sat down to grow up with the Niagara frontier. The proximity of the Falls had something to do, of course, with bringing increasingly larger numbers of travellers and transients to the Lake Erie village. But it was slow work, this building up a great city, and no doubt the very fact that the stones of the mighty edifice one finds beside that beautiful harbour to-day were laid slowly accounts for the solidity of the structure; Buffalo was not built on a boom.
From James L. Barton's reminiscences, for instance, we have clear pictures of the early struggle for business in this frontier town, which prove it to have been typically American. Mr. Barton owned a line of boats on the Lakes and canal but found it very difficult to find freight for the boats to carry down the State: