Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 13).djvu/214

 of the Mississippi Basin are concerned.

Though exceptionally interesting and suggestive, the Allegheny Portage Railway was only a link in a chain. The two great canals, in the valleys of the Juniata and Conemaugh were the greater links; a horse-car rail road was laid from Philadelphia to Columbia on the Susquehanna and this, soon supplied with locomotives, became the eastern link in the chain of communication of which the Pennsylvania Canal was the important part. By 1835 the complete system was in operation between Philadelphia and Pittsburg; a table of distances will be interesting: