The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

"No Situation Could Make Me More Happy" ~ Reconstruction: 1814 - 1829 81 situation in the area "retards its improvement" since the natives were prevented from "alienating lands" or actually selling land to the settlers. This resulted from the government's view that the land had been originally granted for the natives' use only, resulting in the unwieldy leasing system. This comment regarding the land granting system was in direct response to Gourlay's final and most controversial query: "What in your opinion, retards the improvement of your township in particular, or the province in general; and what would most contribute to the same?" This issue and others would be addressed in the years to come. These concerns and observations echoed similar reports made across the province and set the scene for the main preoccupations of Upper Canadians in the aftermath of the War of 1812: land, wheat, and transportation. Transportation had always been a major concern for the inland areas of Upper Canada. As we have seen, completion of the Hamilton and London road and the resultant increase in traffic aided the early development of Brantford. The Great Mail Road, eventually a 300­mile road linking Niagara and Detroit, passed through Brantford, thus promoting its development as well. Yet another type of transportation route helped change Mount Pleasant's economy from subsistence farming to the commercial "wheat culture" of the 1820s and beyond and secured, at least for the moment, the continuation of the village's prosperity and growth. As Bruce Hill explains, the waterways of British Upper Canada had long been prized transportation routes, from the natives to the voyageurs. But by the early 19th century military and economic threats from the United States fostered a vision to improve upon these natural waterways and end the isolation of the inland districts. Such visionaries chartered the Welland Canal in 1824, to bypass the mighty Niagara Falls and connect Lake Ontario and Lake Erie in a way the Niagara River never could. This technological feat promoted for many settlers the potential for power in the province's small streams. The next year the Americans opened their Erie Canal, a technological improvement on the old Mohawk-Hudson River canoe route. It provided a direct route from Buffalo on the eastern end of Lake Erie to New York City and the Atlantic Ocean, and had profound effects on Mount Pleasant's growing grain trade with wheat shipped from