In Indiana’s early decades its pioneers could see the state’s tremendous potential for agricultural production, but the obstacle to realizing that potential was the impossibility of transporting that product to eastern markets. The tremendous success of the Erie Canal, opening in the 1820s, seemed to show the solution for the transportation problem, and there followed a canal craze throughout the new Great Lakes states. This small book recounts the financial and political dramas that convulsed early Indiana during the canal-building era.

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