right is the chief engineer and john randall is the chief contractor and after a few months, right to consider brandel a line nincompoop in a private letter, it gets randall fired from the chesapeake and delaware canal, randall's use in the case eventually goes to the u.s. supreme court. brandel wins a quarter of a million dollars which is in a store near amount of money, about a tenth of the value of the sea and the canal, and he builds a mansion overlooking the canal which is eventually build exactly on the lines that he has suggested and that wright had claimed was wrong. and goes down every morning to collect tolls. [laughter] which is how he collected his quarter million dollars because the canal company was not -- didn't believe pay off the judgment against him. and in any case, there are other aspects of the book that i think our new material which i don't think we really have time to go into your. you have a very long competition between new york and virginia about which state will get west first. and it has been talked about in other erie books but i should stress in this one

can tell pitted benjamin wright, the father of american civil engineering against a fellow named john randall relative various spellings, but in albany native a very prominent family in new york. he was a skilled surveyor and the man who had just spent a dozen years laying out in mapping the future street grid of manhattan. we are here on 57th street because 200 years ago john randle but markers of thousands of blocks which were then a very rugged and rural landscape. so john randle. here's the background of the path of the canal and the mohawk valley was supposed to be entirely along the southern bank of the river. using feeders from the mohawk to water the canal to get water into the canal. between schenectady and albany, the mohawk makes a very big north were dark. that in the most eastern section of the mohawk river. with the falls finally spilling the mohawk into the hudson. now randle involved himself in the process. he had been invited day she had been asked to become an engineer on the erie canal. he had said no probably because he was still continuing his work in manhattan and yet ot