From the time of the settlement of Massachusetts Boston has had a large share of the business of the country. Her natural advantages are great. On the one hand there is her harbor, sheltered by many islands from the storms of the Atlantic; on the other are tidal rivers and level highways leading to the interior of the state. Emerson, who was born in Boston, wrote:

For generations, as the city has grown, her people have been crowding back the ocean by filling in the shallows, and now her busy streets extend over acres of “made land,” while from the south, the west, and the north, lines of railway connect her with all parts of America.

Not many years after the War of the Revolution a Boston merchant ship went around the world. She took on board a native at Hawaii, sold her load of furs in Canton, rounded Cape Horn, and anchored at length in Boston harbor. So great an achievement did this seem that Governor Hancock and the people said fine things and made merry.

This little ship was eighty-three feet long, and you could measure off seven or eight times her length on one of the big liners of to-day. Later the same ship set sail again, and on the west coast of America, in one of the roughest seas, her master, Captain Gray, saw the mouth of a great river. He was determined to enter it. Having crossed the breakers, he sailed up the river more than twenty miles, and to-day it bears the name of his ship, the Columbia. Boston was reaching out into the wide world. Many years later this discovery had much to do with securing the rights of the United States in the Oregon country against the claims of Great Britain.

Young lads often went out on these voyages, and the training made them strong men. There were dangers on the ocean then which to-day we do not fear, for pirates still lay in wait for merchantmen and foreign powers took liberties with American ships. One vessel seen in Boston harbor was named Catch-me-if-you-can.

Many years later, when Mr. Samuel Cunard of Halifax took a contract to carry the royal mail between Liverpool and America, there was an immediate protest from the Boston merchants against ending the voyage at Halifax. They urged the great commercial advantage of having the ships run westward to Boston after stopping at Halifax, and so powerful were these arguments that the first Cunard liners came steaming into Massachusetts bay.

This was not pleasant for New York people, who tried to show that theirs was the better port. As if to help in the fight against Boston, the harbor froze over in the winter of 1844, and the Cunard ship, the Britannia, could not sail. Determined to hold their own, the Boston people engaged Frederick Tudor, a great exporter of ice, to bring his machinery from the fresh-water ponds and cut a way. He soon made a lane of open water, and the Britannia sailed out for Liverpool.

While ocean trade was growing much had been done on the land. Settlements were first made at Plymouth, Salem, and Boston, and as soon as possible the rough forest trails joining these towns were changed into roads. Many ferries and bridges were needed to cross the streams, and roads were carried back into the country as the people settled farther from the sea.

After Providence was begun, in the Narragansett country, and the rich lands along the Connecticut were settled, there was need of roads across the hills of Massachusetts, so that the colonists could visit each other, exchange letters, and thus be less exposed to danger from savages in the great American wilderness.

The highway leading along the east coast was called Bay Road. A post rider went between Boston and New York in 1704, and a rough path he had to travel. It was thought remarkable, four years later, that a woman, Madam Sarah Knights, made that journey. She afterwards taught school in Boston, and Benjamin Franklin was one of her pupils. Somebody scratched these lines on a window pane in her schoolroom:

There is no doubt about the “great rocks and many stones” of New England, but around Boston, at any rate, one usually sees them now at a safe distance.

In western Massachusetts is the great Berkshire country. Through most of its length the Housatonic river runs to the southward. At the north the Hoosick river flows from it, across a corner of Vermont, to the Hudson. On the first is beautiful Pittsfield, and on the second is busy North Adams with its mills. In sight everywhere are the mountains, not very high and usually covered with forest, but sometimes bold and rocky. Farther north we should call them the Green mountains, but here we name them the Berkshires. The eastern range, which separates the Housatonic valley on the west from the Connecticut valley on the east, is Hoosac mountain, of which we shall hear again.

These long ranges of mountains run from north to south, and while it was easy to follow the valleys between them, it was hard to go across them from east to west or from west to east. Boston and all the chief towns of New England lay eastward, and the rest of the country was west of the mountains. If a Massachusetts family wished to settle in the fertile lands of western New York or Ohio, they had to cross the mountains. In our day the mountain region is full of towns and beautiful summer homes, but then it was a wilderness which in places was almost impassable. If it was difficult to make a single journey between the Connecticut river and the Hudson, it was quite out of the question to carry grain and fruit from the West to Boston, and to bring back in exchange the goods made in her factories.

Near Pittsfield, in the heart of the Berkshires, rises the Westfield river, which has cut a deep valley eastward through the mountains. Opposite the place where this stream enters the Connecticut the beautiful city of Springfield has now grown up, partly on the low grounds and partly on a terrace. It is readily seen that the Westfield valley forms a natural roadway from here westward to Pittsfield, and on toward Albany and the Mohawk in New York. We cannot say that the valley was made for the cities, but the cities were made, in part at least, because the valley was there.

The first roads that improved on the Indian trails were, of course, made for wagons. The gorge of the Westfield was so rugged that a hundred years ago it seemed almost impossible to make a good wagon road through it. There were some people, however, who thought that it could be done and who determined to do it. Their courage won, and before long there was a good highway all along the roaring river. The bowlders were rolled out of the way, the trees were cut, the roadbed was made, and people could go east and west in the stages without risk of losing their lives or even of breaking their bones. This was accomplished soon after 1825, but it did not solve all the problems of the Massachusetts people, for, as we shall soon learn fully, the Erie canal was finished in that year, and a long string of canal boats began to carry produce from the West to New York.

The good people of Boston watched all this going on. Every load of grain was headed straight eastward as if it were coming to Massachusetts bay, thence to go by vessel to Europe. But when it reached the Hudson it was sure to turn off down that river to help load ships at the piers of New York. And New England had only a wagon road across the mountains! A wagon road will never draw trade away from a tidal river, and thus we can understand why a prominent Massachusetts man, Charles Francis Adams, spoke of the Hudson as “a river so fatal to Boston.” Boston might have all the ships she wanted, but if she could not get cargoes for them they would be of no use. Shipowners, seeing that there was plenty of western freight in New York, sent their boats there. It was indeed time that Boston people began to ask themselves what they could do.

They still had ships, but these were usually “down East” coasters, and the noble vessels from far eastern ports, laden with spices and teas, silks, and all the spoils of Europe and Asia, rarely came to Boston, but brought more and greater loads to New York and Baltimore, where they could lay in corn and wheat for the return voyage. Even the Cunards transferred most of their boats and finally all their mail steamers to New York.

The people of Boston first said, “We will build another canal, up the Hoosick and down the Deerfield valley, and then the canal boats will keep on to the east.” As states often do, they appointed a commission to see if the canal could be built, and what it would cost. But what were they to do about Hoosac mountain, which stood a thousand feet high, of solid rock, between the Hoosick valley on the west and the Deerfield valley on the east?

They decided that they would tunnel it for the water way. Rather strangely they thought it could be done for a little less than a million dollars. A wise engineer made the survey for the canal, and when he remarked, “It seems as if the finger of Providence had pointed out this route from the east to the west,” some one who stood near replied, “It’s a great pity that the same finger wasn’t thrust through the mountain.” The plans for the canal were finally given up, and though many years later such a tunnel was made, it was not for a canal, nor was the work done for a million dollars.

Every one was talking now of railways, but few thought that rails could be laid across the Berkshires. It was even said in a Boston paper that such a road could never be built to Albany; that it would cost as much to do it as all Massachusetts would sell for; and that if it should be finished, everybody with common sense knew it would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon. We need not be too hard on this writer, for it was five years later when the De Witt Clinton train climbed the hill from Albany and carried its handful of passengers to Schenectady.

One of the friends of the railway scheme was Abner Phelps. When he was a senior at Williams College, in 1806, he had thought of it, for he had heard about the tram cars in the English coal regions. In 1826 he became a member of the legislature of Massachusetts, and the second day he was there he proposed that the road should be built.

In time the project went through, but at first it was planned to pull the cars with horses, and on the down grades to take the horses on the cars and let them ride. We do not know how it was intended that the cars should be held back, for it was long before the invention of air brakes. The line was built to its western end on the Hudson in 1842, and thus Boston, Worcester, Springfield, and Albany were bound together by iron rails.

There was only a single track and the grades were heavy. The road brought little trade to Boston, and most of the goods from the West still went by way of the Hudson to New York. It was, however, a beginning, and it showed that the mountain wall could be crossed.

The subject of a Hoosac tunnel now came up again. It would take a long time to tell how the tunnel was made; indeed, it was a long time in making. It was begun in 1850 or soon afterwards, and the work went slowly, with many stops and misfortunes, so that the hole through the mountain was not finished until November 27, 1873. On that day the last blast was set off, which made the opening from the east to the west side; and the first regular passenger train ran through July 8, 1875, fifty years after it had been planned to make a canal under the mountain.

In order to help on the work the engineers sunk a shaft a thousand feet deep from the top of the mountain to the level of the tunnel, and from the bottom worked east and west. This gave them four faces, or “headings,” on which to work, instead of two, and hastened the finishing. The whole cost was about fourteen million dollars.

It took great skill to sink the shaft on just the right line, and to make the parts of the tunnel exactly meet, as the men worked in from opposite directions. They brought the ends together under the mountain with a difference of only five sixteenths of an inch! You can measure this on a finger nail and see how much it is. The tremendous task was successfully accomplished, and Boston was no longer shut off from the rest of the country by the mountains.

The end of it all is not that Boston has won all the ships away from New York, but that gradually she has been getting her share. Now she has great Cunarders, White Star Liners, and the Leyland boats,—all giant ships sailing for Liverpool,—and many other stately vessels bound for southern ports or foreign lands. Now you may see in Boston harbor not a forest of masts but great funnels painted to show the lines to which the boats belong, and marking a grander commerce than that which put out for the Indies long years ago; for to-day Boston is the second American port. The great freight yards of the railways are close upon the docks, and travelers from the West may come into either of two great stations, one of which is the largest railway terminal in the world. In and about Boston are more than a million people, reaching out with one hand for the riches of the great land to the west, and with the other passing them over the seas to the nations on the farther side.

Man has taken a land of dense forests, stony hills, and wild valleys, and subdued it. It is dotted with cities, crossed by roads, and is one of the great gateways of North America.