Someone needs to combine this thread with the one seeking the tune for "The Raging Canal" Tune Req: The Raging Canal . It is awkward having two going at once on essentially the same issues.

Guest Q, you are right - of course - about the DT text having only the same first verse.

What intrigues me now is that there were apparently A LOT of variants of this song in the nineteenth century. Lionel Wyld (in the aforementioned 'Low Bridge! Folklore and the Erie Canal' devotes eight pages to the song in a number of different variants and fragments. And Bill Hullfish's (the one in the DT) parallels one of Wyld's for a number of stanzas and then goes off on a different tack.

   "Different versions worked in local references with the usual abandon of folk tradition...
   " Another version, written in the diary of a canal captain, deals with Ezekial Radford, a liniment manufacturer of Weedsport....One may easily conjecture that there was a verse for ever significant stop along the towpath, and another for each of the local characters the canawling captains ran into frequently." - Wyld, p.93

    Guest Q's original question - what was "The raging Canal" that inspired Mark Twain - becomes ever more interesting. It would seem to be no certain thing that it was Morris's version.

                      -George