The Navigators: A Journal of Passage on the Waterways of New York 1793 (New York State Museum Bulletin 498)

Few voyagers heading west on the inland waterways of the 1790s ever saw the Great Falls at Cohoes, near the mouth of the Mohawk River. But it was this obstruction that prevented direct navigation west from the Hudson and which forced them onto an overland trek of sixteen miles through sand and pine barrens to the harbor at Schenectady.

This lavishly illustrated New York State Museum Bulletin follows the account of one boatload of adventurers as they made this journey in the autumn of 1793. Their observations along the route to the Great Lakes and back again provides an unprecedented glimpse of life on the edge of the American Frontier after the Revolution, and records the first tentative experiments in artificial navigation in the State of New York - an emergent canal age decades before the Erie Canal.