The Seneca Chief, a replica of the boats which once traveled regularly along the Erie Canal, is now on a slow journey toward New York City to celebrate the canal’s completion 200 years ago.
The vessel, built in Buffalo over the past several years to commemorate the bicentennial of the Erie Canal, shoved off from Canalside in a grand ceremony Wednesday morning.
“Who would have thought that this young, tiny nonprofit could pull this off? We did,” declared Anne Conable, president of the Buffalo Maritime Center, which led the boat construction project, aided by approximately 200 volunteers and private and public investments.
The Erie Canal connects the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Work on the canal began in 1817, and was finished in October 1825. Along the way, the project had its critics who referred to the Erie Canal as “Clinton’s Ditch,” a derisive reference to then New York Governor DeWitt Clinton.
The canal opened access to Lake Erie, which in turn helped the United States to expand westward. It allowed Buffalo to grow into one of the nation’s most important economic hubs in the 19th Century, though emerging technologies would change that.
“For just over a generation, it was on the top of its game. Then the train came along, other things came along, but in that 30-some-year period of relevancy, the economic impact is still felt to this day,” said State Senator Sean Ryan, one of 15 scheduled speakers. “There is no Buffalo without Erie Canal. There is no Duluth without the Erie Canal. There are no Great Lakes towns. It's amazing what the Erie Canal has done and its impact is still far reaching and felt today.”
Some speakers pointed out that there is also a lasting impact, a painful one, on Indigenous communities. Dr. Joseph Stahlman, who directs the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum on the Allegany Territory, was the opening speaker and reminded the crowd in attendance that countless Haudenosaunee people were displaced to make way for the Erie Canal.
“This wasn't a singular event, but a deliberate process that employed armies, laws, treaties, propaganda and force to move people from the very ground that defines their identity and history to honor Mother Earth,” Stahlman said.
As the Seneca Chief stops in towns and cities along the Erie Canal, trees will be planted, trees that another speaker suggested will grow to become reminders of the shared responsibility to care for the land, for each other, and ensure a land more truthful and peaceful for future generations.
“The Erie Canal brought progress and opportunity, but it also brought displacement and grief. For some, those harder truths are treated as a footnote. But for us, they are central, and I believe that real celebration has meaning only when it's balanced with remembrance,” said Seneca descendant scholar Melissa Parker Leonard.
The Seneca Chief is scheduled to complete its ceremonial voyage October 26 in New York City, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal’s opening, when Gov. Clinton famously emptied water from one end of the state to another. Before the boat left Buffalo, Stahlman and Buffalo Maritime Center founder John Montague teamed up to pour water from the Commercial Slip at Canalside into a barrel which is being carried during the trip. Water from the stops along the way will be added and then the blended waters will emptied at New York City.
Dave Rogers, a major benefactor for the Buffalo Maritime Center, compared the bicentennial celebration to the centennial recognition in 1926, suggesting the former gives the Erie Canal more dignity.
He held up the water cans which were used in the 1926 ceremony.
“These cans were filled with water from Lake Erie, put on a plane, flown to New York, dumped in the harbor, refilled with water from the harbor, flown back to Buffalo and dumped in the Lake Erie. All this was to show that what took weeks 101 years before could now be done round-trip in five hours,” Rogers said. “To sum up the Erie Canal centennial celebration, it was a year late. It was thousands of dollars short. It was done backwards and without including any towns along the way. And it ended with a stunt to show that the canal was outdated and obsolete. So, I think we can all agree today that our little excursion this year with this boat and this crew and this organization is quite an improvement upon that.”