In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the five-hundred-mile journey from New York City by way of the Hudson River Valley and the Erie Canal to Niagara Falls arranged itself in a ready-made sequence of perfect landscape types. The urban setting, the picturesque scene, the technological landscape, and the sublime site called for different kinds of language and for different displays of emotion. Each stage of the journey demanded its set-piece, and American and British travelers rapidly established four subgenres that became a demanding series of writerly tests. It is true, as Alan Wallach argues, that in this period “landscape tourism in the United States tended to focus on scenes of awesome grandeur” - waterfalls, mountains, rivers. It is even more true that criticism of travel literature has emphasized the naturally awesome, but the people on the ground, as it were, did not overlook the technologically impressive, and, following Wordsworth, they believed that the Earth “has not anything to show more fair” than a great city seen at the right time in the right light. The canal and the city would not supplant the river and the falls, but they could complement and offset them in the great journey. The basic route is outlined in a remarkable document not formally published until 1849 when William W. Campbell included it in The Life and Writings of DeWitt Clinton under the title “His Private Canal Journal - 1810.” Clinton's “Canal Journal ” is not an account of a journey along the Erie Canal but an account of a journey from New York City to Niagara made to plot the path of the Erie Canal.