Leaving Crysler Park, we headed down the St Lawrence river to the next set of locks – a pair run by the US government in US territory. Traveling on the St Lawrence River is intimidating because of the very large commercial traveling companions.
In 1959, Queen Elizabeth II and President Dwight Eisenhower formally opened the St Lawrence Seaway (formally the stretch from Lake Erie’s Welland Canal to Montreal) but effectively has created a 2,300-mile-long superhighway for ocean freighters reaches from the western end of Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean. The locks traversed today were the Eisenhower and Snell locks – respectively giving us a drop in altitude of 42 and 45 feet respectively.
The Eisenhower and Snell Locks
The Seaway is sometimes accused of driving the Erie Canal to obsolescence and creating the economic decline of upstate New York. But as we have seen in earlier blog entries, the importance of the Erie Canal diminished with the introduction of the railroads and sad story of upstate New York began far before 1959. After passing these two locks, we passed the final stretch of New York shoreline – strangely ended by the St Regis Mohawk oblast. This strange block of land attached to New York but part of the Province of Quebec at the mouth of the St Regis River is tribal land. The St Regis Mohawk tribe has found itself in the midst of patent litigation in the past year by accepting ownership of pharmaceutical company Allergan’s patents and attempting to shield those patents from legal attack by claiming Native American tribal sovereign immunity.
The green marker is near the spot the NY shore becomes the Quebec shore - the land on the right is part of the St Regis Mohawk & Akwesasne tribal lands; the Akwesasne Bridge
After a long zig-zag passage across Lake St Francis - largely created by downstream dams as part of the St Lawrence Seaway project to eliminate the Soulange Rapids – we arrived at Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, a former canal town about 50 miles upstream from Montreal. We arrived during the hangover day of Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste or better known as the Fête nationale du Québec, celebrated on June 23 evening through today.
The town of Salaberry-de-Valleyfield is known for its remnants of the old Beauharnois Canal – the new one of which we shall pass tomorrow on the way to Montreal.
