It Happened Here --Before the Erie, Champlain and other Canals

Halfway Creek, Ft.Anne

Before the Erie, Champlain and other canals the indigenous peoples, and explorers, traders, settlers and military invaders of early New York history relied heavily on the natural lakes and rivers of New York for most of their transportation with smaller streams and portage trails connecting them, and providing routes around unnavigable rifts and rapids. The Indians of the upper Great Lakes region introduced the French to the relatively light, durable birch bark covered canoes they had developed, while the Iroquois and the (Hudson) River Peoples, not having access to massive birch trees had to rely on slower, heavier dugout and elm bark covered canoes.

NY Rte. 4, Ft. Anne

A Reconstructed Batteau at the Herkimer House, Little Falls

Explorers and colonists were soon building boats for exploring and trading on inland waterways. It was probably the French who first created the simple, double ended, flat bottomed craft propelled by oars, or polls or occasionally a square sail they called simply batteaux* (boats). Made out of sawn lumber, they were less seaworthy than most ship's boats or whale boats of the day but they were often lighter and drew less water and could stand being dragged through the shallows. Straight sided, with ship-lapped joints they could be quickly constructed by men who had carpenter and joiner skills but who were not necessarily master ship-carpenters. Very quickly English colonists adopted the "battoe" for inland water travel as well. Batteaux were usually designated as three handed, four handed or five handed, depending on their size and the number of crewmen needed to operate them. Three handed batteaux were usually 24 to 30 feet in length and had two oarsman or polers and a stern man handling a long oar or sweep used for steering. A five handed batteau might be up to 58 feet in length and would have two sets of polers or oarsmen, while a four handed batteau might have the fourth crewman working as a second oarsmen rowing on one side to counteract the drift of the keel-less boat in windy conditions or up front, as a bow-man, to help navigate through rocky or twisting narrow channels.

War provided the impetus for the construction of fleets of batteaux as armies could be moved easiest over waterways. The small wooden forts that were constructed throughout English and French colonial America could usually stand up to infantry assaults but were no match for artillery and siege operations that could be brought to bear using weapons and sizable amounts of materiel that could only be carried through the road-less wilderness by watercraft. At various times Montreal, Albany and Schenectady became boat-building centers, mass producing batteaux for military expeditions. With standard whaleboats these became the major form of military transport along inland waterways.

CANADA 1760
AMHERST WITH 6000 AMERI-
CANS 4000 BRITISH & 200
BOATS MARCHED VIA MOHAWK
&OSWEGO TO CAPTURE OF
MONTREAL SEPT. 8, 1760
Location: AT INTERSECTION OF STATE ST. 

& WASHINGTON AVE., SCHENECTADY
(sign missing)


A Radeau, a heavy floating
raft-like battery with gun
ports cut into it and several
batteaux can be viewed by
scuba divers at the bottom
of Lake George harbor








Undoubtedly, the boats for Burgoyne's bridge in 1777 were batteaux. Their flat bottoms made them excellent, stable pontoons for bridges.
        
 "Albany" batteaux tended to be smaller, for most were built for carrying troops and materiel up the Hudson/Lake George/Champlain corridor which involved portages from Fort Edward to Lake George and Lake George to Lake Champlain or from the Hudson to the South Bay of Lake Champlain via Halfway Creek. In 1755 William Johnson ordered ordered boats about 24' in length with a 3' beam for his intended expedition against Crown Point. "Schenectady" Batteaux, on the other hand. could be much larger (up to 45 feet with a 6 foot beam) since they were portaged over the well trodden Oneida carry and would see service on Lake Ontario.

Ft. Bradstreet protected a carry on the Oswego River

In 1755 (then) Captain John Bradstreet was assigned the task of improving the fortifications at Fort Oswego and improving the logistics between Albany and the fort to ready it as a supply base for an assault on Fort Niagara. He worked to establish a corp of soldier/ "battoemen", 2000 strong, organized in forty companies. This became a tradition that saw its reincarnation in the American Revolution in John Glover's regiment of Marblehead (Mass.) soldier/boatmen and in the British/Canadian forces in the war of 1812.

While a couple locations on the Mohawk contained falls or rapids that required portages, like the falls at Little Falls, there were more locations that were navigable by the flat bottomed batteaux, if they were pulled over them with ropes, or during seasons when the water was higher. Rifts were fast water, flowing over shallow rocky sections, and they could be dangerous.  

Rte 5, Palatine Bridge

NY 10, Canajoharie

    


                                                   
  There is at least one occasion when an expedition made its own high water, anticipating a practice that would be extensively used during the boom period of Adirondack logging in the mid-nineteenth century. While a large force of regular Continental Army troops assembled in Pennsylvania under General John Sullivan that might menace the British forts along the Ohio or strike into southern Iroquoia, a second army mobilized in Schenectady under General James Clinton. Equipped with 200 batteaux it gave every appearance of a force prepared to move up the Mohawk to strike at Fort Oswego and threaten northern Iroquoia--the homes of the Onondaga and northern Cayugas and Senecas. The British were faced with the necessity of dividing their forces to face two armies. Suddenly at Canajoharie Clinton's army left the

South end of Otsego Lake,  Cooperstown

Mohawk and began to march southward. Meanwhile a sizable contingent of axemen had begun building a dam on Lake Otsego and clearing away brush and obstructions from the headwaters of the Susquehanna River that drained the forested lake. When Clinton arrived at Otsego he assembled his men and supplies in their batteaux above the dam. The dam was knocked out and a large "bubble" of water surged down the Susquehanna. On the back of this flood rode Clinton's little army on its way to join up with Sullivan to create an army the British and their Indian allies were unprepared to resist.

Mohawk River, Little Falls. from the Rte. 167 bridge

After the Revolution commercial travel on New York's inland waterways began to flourish. General Phillip Schuyler and Albany businessman, traveler, and former courier for George Washington, Elkanah Watson pushed the state legislature into enacting its first "canal law" in 1791. It authorized and funded the exploration and land survey for improving the Mohawk, Woods Creek, Oneida Lake, Oswego River route to Lake Ontario. The following year the legislature authorized the creation of two companies, the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company and the Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company, both headed by
Schuyler and Watson. Though the Northern Company failed to materialize, the WILNC pushed ahead building a 5 lock wooden canal nearly a mile long around the falls and rapids at Little Falls and plowed out channels along the Mohawk to Schenectady**. Where rocky bottomed rifts occurred,  V-shaped dams were built funneling the

West Mill Street, Little Falls

water through the apex of the "V" to create a channel for boats to navigate through. Woods Creek was widened, cleared of debris, and thirteen short canals were cut through the stream's meanders, shortening the route by six miles. In 1796 a 1.7 mile canal between the Mohawk and Woods Creek was built at Rome. With these improvements, larger Durham boats could operate on the Mohawk.  The Durham boat, 60 feet long and 8 feet wide, and decked over at the bow and stern had been developed in the Delaware Valley in Pennsylvania in the 1700's. (It is likely Washington's army crossed the Delaware in 1776 in Durham boats.) Able to carry up to seven times the cargo of large batteaux, they were usually poled by crews of five or six men who walked along cleated walkways at either side of the boat.  Once again, Schenectady became a boat building center, constructing what became locally known as "Schenectady boats."

Port Watson St, US 11, NY 41,  Cortland

By the early 1800's rivers throughout New York were carrying their share of commercial traffic. Even Cortland, far removed from the Hudson, the Mohawk, Lake Champlain and the Finger Lakes was moving its lumber and farm produce by water, via the tiny East Branch of the Tioughnioga river which connected to the Susquehanna River and then to markets in Pennsylvania. The town on its banks, (founded by the ubiquitous Elkanah Watson), even aspired to call itself a Port, producing watercraft and rope. The "arks" they produced were little more than floating shipping containers with walkways on all sides enabling polers to guide the craft downstream on a leisurely one-way trip to market, where they would be broken up for the sawn lumber they contained. They could, however, be fairly elaborate with bunks and stoves and cooking facilities for crews shepparding rafts of logs to Pennsylvania sawmills. To the east, in the foothills of the western Catskills, Arkville got its name for the "arks" built there.

In another post we will look at the myriad of sailing vessels built along, and operating on New York's rivers and lakes.






*The modern French spelling is bateau (bateaux, plural) but in the 17th and 18th centuries it was generally spelled with two t's. The English either used the French spelling or anglicized it to "battoe".
**Remember, the Mohawk as it is seen today is the product of the dredging and dams of the NYS Barge Canal. In the 18th and early 19th centuries most of its length had shallows and sand bars.