The Erie Canal was a vast commercial enterprise that required an army of men, women, and children to maintain and operate, including surveyors, engineers, lock tenders, toll collectors, bridge operators, repair crews, and bank patrollers who searched for leaks in the canal bank, and by 1845 an additional 25,000 people operated the 4,000 boats that traveled the canal. Packets, barges, cargo boats, and scows carried crews that included a captain, steersman, cook, deck hands, and hoggees, the teamsters who drove mule teams pulling the boats. This workforce also supported thousands of merchants, tavern keepers, hostellers, shopkeepers, liverymen, and others who fed, clothed, bathed, housed, and otherwise served canal workers and travelers. Written accounts by canal passengers show the range of people who traveled it: Nathaniel Hawthorne rode a more comfortable packet boat to visit Niagara Falls in 1832, Clarissa Burroughs traveled by packet boat from Schenectady to Utica in 1835 to visit Trenton Falls, and ten years later 24-year-old Job Mattison took a slower, less expensive freight boat while considering whether to emigrate west to Wisconsin Territory. Hawthorne, like James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain, wrote about the canal, praising the way it caused towns and urban life to spring up along its course, while Mattison recorded brief impressions of canal traffic, passengers, and a gambler winning five dollars from a red-haired Englishman playing thimble, and Burroughs's travel journal described New York landscapes, canal infrastructure, and life aboard a packet boat.