Minnie the Mule and the Erie Canal

Formatted for children in grades four through eight, this first in a series of historical adventure stories, is told through the eyes of Sarah, Captain John's thirteen-year-old daughter, and Minnie the Mule, one of the mules who towed Captain John Fairweather's barge on the Erie Canal. The story takes place in the middle of the nineteenth century when the Erie Canal teemed with activity twenty-five years after its opening in Rome, NY in 1825, and introduces young readers to the locks along the canal and the lives of "canawlers" those hardy folk who traveled from New York City's busy harbor, up the Hudson River to Albany and into the Erie Canal, going west to Buffalo, where the canal emptied into the Niagara River and Lake Erie, "the way west". Leaving Rome that spring to deliver freight to New York City the Fairweathers seem to be followed by a series of bank robberies along the canal. Read how Sarah and Minnie come to suspect that their "hogee" the man who walks the mules, is connected with the robberies, and how they catch him. Along the way readers will learn a little about the lock system of the canal, and some of their country's history in its colonial days.