If you look at a map showing the navigable streams of the United States you will see that nearly all of them lie in the eastern part.
The Mississippi is like a great artery with branches extending in all directions, east and west. The Great Lakes, with their outlet, the St. Lawrence River, and the many important rivers emptying into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, such as the Merrimac, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, Potomac and Rio Grande, form great highways for all the commerce of the eastern part of the country, while the Columbia, Sacramento and Colorado Rivers, with their branches, are the only navigable streams of any importance west of the Mississippi River system.
In some places a small portion of land divides two important water areas, and canals dug through this neck of land change the commercial routes of the whole world. Such are the Isthmus of Suez, eighty-seven miles wide, through which a canal was cut that saves a sailing distance of 3,700 miles from England to India. Only the Isthmus of Panama, forty-nine miles in width, divides the Atlantic from the Pacific Ocean. When the canal across this narrow strip is completed, the sailing distance from New York to San Francisco will be shortened 8,000 miles, the entire distance around South America.
The Sault Ste. Marie Canal, connecting Lakes Superior and Huron, is only a little more than a mile and a half long, but it opens up the entire iron, copper, lumber and wheat resources of the Northwest to cheap water passage through the other lakes to the manufacturing region of the East.
The Erie Canal, by connecting Lake Erie with the Hudson River from Buffalo to Albany, New York, makes the only water passage from the Great Lakes to the ocean that lies within the borders of the United States.
If you will turn to the map again, you will see still other places where a short canal may open up an entirely new and important water route. From Chicago to Lockport, Illinois, is only thirty-seven miles, but Chicago is on Lake Michigan, while Lockport is on the Illinois River, a branch of the Mississippi. This canal, a large part of which is now in operation, is a part of the Lakes to Gulf waterway. One plan is to broaden and deepen the channel so that large vessels may pass, without unloading, from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
Another proposed canal which would be undertaken largely by individual states and a part of which is already completed, would afford a safe inside passage connecting the many bays, channels and navigable rivers of the Atlantic coast.
Still another proposed measure is the cutting of a canal from the southern end of Lake Michigan to the western end of Lake Erie at Toledo, Ohio, to avoid the long haul up Lake Michigan and down Lake Huron again.
The United States now has 25,000 miles of navigable rivers and a nearly equal mileage of rivers not now navigable but which might be made commercially important; five great lakes that have a combined length of 1,410 miles, 2,120 miles of operated canals, and 2,500 miles of sounds, bays and bayous, that might be joined by tidewater canals easily constructed, less than 1,000 miles long altogether, and making a continuous passage from New England to the Gulf of Mexico.
In all, our waterways at the present time are 55,000 to 60,000 miles long, the greatest system in the world, but almost unused.