The story of the Erie Canal, Governor DeWitt Clinton’s much-criticized “ditch” connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie, is well known. To anyone who grew up in the northeast and is descended from 19th century immigrants, there is probably a family story of a young man who arrived penniless in New York or Boston and made his way to western New York to make a rough living excavating the canal. In those stories, the specific place the canal-builders were trying to reach is often forgotten. But it is right here, on the Niagara River just downstream from Lake Erie and just upstream of Niagara Falls. This was the magical place for commercial navigation. From here, there is open water to Cleveland and Chicago. With one more lock, there is navigable water to Thunder Bay and Duluth on Lake Superior, and then a nearly level railroad route to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The entire middle of the North American continent is open to commerce if there is a canal from the Hudson River to the Niagara River.

This exact place is the only place that made sense for the canal to end. It is just upstream of the Niagara Escarpment, the ridge of rock over which Niagara Falls tumbles and around which barges needed to navigate. If the canal ended any farther to the east, it would still need an enormous, cost-prohibitive series of locks to ascend the Escarpment around Niagara Falls. If the canal ended any farther west, the staggering cost of its construction would have only been greater and would have yielded no extra revenue because the easily-navigated Niagara River and Lake Erie would have been the preferred route for ships.

Today, the last few miles of the canal flow within Tonawanda Creek, to its junction with the Niagara River. It’s not much of a confluence, just a creek that’s about a hundred feet wide flowing into a river that’s less than a quarter-mile wide. But from that confluence, the productive capacity of the middle of North America could find its way to the Port of New York and, then, to the wider world. The canal opened a half-million square miles of arable land suitable for row crops in the Midwest to international commerce, an area three times greater than the suitable farmland east of the Appalachians. The canal also provided access to another 700,000 square miles suitable for grazing cattle in the western plains.

Buffalo does not merely link the east to the Midwest, it is a Midwestern city. It lies well east of the Appalachian Mountains. It does not hunker down in a river valley like an eastern city or nestle in a fold of the mountains like a Rocky Mountain city, but it rises abruptly from the plains in the style of Kansas City or Minneapolis. The Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style houses that its leaders of industry built for themselves look as much at home as they would in Iowa or Illinois.