Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 14).djvu/128

 above ground in those ancient woods was not less easily penetrated than was the straggling mass of root and fiber that was found for many feet below the surface. No work in America before its time began to compare in magnitude with grubbing that sixty-foot aisle from Lake Erie to the Hudson and the digging of a forty-foot canal in its center.

Since necessity is the mother of invention, it is not strange that here in the New York woods should have been perfected some strange machinery—great tugging monsters which should bodily haul down immense trees with a crash and pluck out green stumps with single groan. It may be these engines of forestry were imported from Europe; we know from the correspondence of that indefatigable promoter, Washington, that great engines for clearing trees from forest land were known in Europe and were probably imported to America not long after the Revolutionary War. "Machinery has hitherto been used," recorded the commissioners of the Erie Canal, "with most success, in the