North America's vast network of rivers provided Native Americans and European settlers alike with their earliest transportation routes. Early in the nineteenth century, when overland routes were only crudely developed and railroads did not yet span the continent, rivers remained the most practical way to transport goods and people, though not all were navigable and even navigable rivers often had rocky shoals and other hazards. Beginning in 1794, American entrepreneurs, with government help, built a canal network that grew to more than 4,000 miles and linked the great waterways east of the Mississippi. The Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal, with its Pennsylvania section on the Susquehanna and its Maryland section on the Tidewater, was completed in 1841. Along its 45-mile route on the west shore of the Susquehanna River between Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, and Havre de Grace, Maryland, horses and mules pulled boats on the towpath carrying coal, lumber, iron, limestone, bricks, millstones, marble, coffee, grain, fish, salt, and passengers. Most traffic was bound to or from Philadelphia or Baltimore, although the canal formed part of a larger network reaching to the St. Lawrence River at the Canadian border and west to St. Louis and beyond. Never a financial success, it was leased to the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in 1872, and floods, ice flows, economic depression, and railroad competition brought its abandonment in 1894.