The appropriately named Lockport is a city in New York State located about twenty miles east of Niagara Falls. During his 1838 trip to Canada, the artist Willian Henry Bartlett would have passed through Lockport on his way to visit an author, Nathaniel Parker Willis, whose book he was illustrating. In Lockport, he would have made a sketch of an Erie Canal lock. The sketch was later converted into a steel engraving for publication in Willis’s American Scenery; or Land, Lake, and River: Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. This iconic and widely reproduced image provides a snapshot of the transportation revolution the young United States was undergoing as it was pushing its boundaries westward during the early decades of the nineteenth century. A key part of that revolution was the Erie Canal connecting New York City with Lake Erie. The illustration depicts one of the so-called Flight of Five locks in Lockport, a staircase lock that lifted or lowered canal boats over the Niagara Escarpment in five stages.