The Canalway Trail System offers hundreds of miles of scenic trails and numerous parks for walking, bicycling, cross-country skiing, and other recreational activities along the New York State Canal System, whose four historic waterways—the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca Canals—span 525 miles across New York State and link the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, Lake Ontario, the Finger Lakes, the Niagara River, and Lake Erie. Beginning as early as the 1830s, railroads competed with the Erie Canal for cargo and passengers, often running alongside it, and in the narrow Mohawk River gorge speeding trains contrasted with canal boats moving at the pace of a walking horse or mule, less than five miles per hour; despite the canal's early commercial success, political support, and costly enlargements and modernization, the railroads' higher speed, lower costs, and year-round operations eventually prevailed. The canal also transformed daily life by connecting small towns with the outside world, bringing goods from distant markets, travelers with stories from afar, traveling actors, curiosities, an embalmed whale, and even Sig Samuels's circus troupe, while local tradition in Canajoharie recalls a touring elephant that fell from a bridge into the canal and swam out unhurt. An 1894 advertisement for Cohen's Store in nearby Sprakers called it the biggest and best canal store on the Erie and claimed it sold anything and everything, including wines and liquor, while staying always open to serve the canal's transient population; alongside such stores, taverns offered food, lodging, and stables, and nearby towns might provide craftsmen, doctors, or dentists, though Cohen's also sold drugs and medicines for self-treatment. Decades before the Erie Canal was built, Jost Spraker operated a ferry across the Mohawk River and a tavern on the river's north shore just west of dangerous rapids, serving weary upriver boat crews and travelers on the nearby King's Road, and his descendants later adapted by building a store on the river's south shore near the canal route.