Throughout the next month, Seneca Chief will be front and center in all the canal towns between Buffalo and New York City, which is indeed a canal town. I hope tens of thousands will see the boat and its entourage; some of you will take imaginative photos and share them here on Dispatches. Debates will consider whether it’s a packet boat, what that design actually is, and what other types of vessels plied the canal during the nineteenth century.

Bill Hecht recently cleaned up this page from a July 1872 issue of Scientific American. It features an article about an innivative new design for a self-propelled barge. See the “wheel” in the image below delineated by dotted lines? There’s a smoke stack because of the boiler to propel this vessel.

Study the article below to Mr. Mahan’s innovation.

Many thanks to Bill for all the efforts in cleaning up images in the CSNY collection.