Once begun, the conquest of the lakes as a highway for trade was rapid.  We who live in the days of railroads can hardly appreciate how tremendous was the impetus given to the upbuilding of a region if it possessed practicable waterways.  The whole history of the settlement of the Middle West is told in the story of its rivers and lakes.  The tide of immigration, avoiding the dense forests haunted by Indians, the rugged mountains, and the broad prairies into which the wheel of the heavy-laden wagon cut deep, followed the course of the Potomac and the Ohio, the Hudson, Mohawk, and the Great Lakes.  Streams that have long since ceased to be thought navigable for a boy’s canoe were made to carry the settlers’ few household goods heaped on a flatboat.  The flood of families going West created a demand that soon covered the lakes with schooners and brigs.  Landed on the lake shore near some little stream, the immigrants would build flatboats, and painfully pole their way into the interior to some spot that took their fancy.  Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois thus filled up, towns growing by the side of streams now used only to turn mill-wheels, but which in their day determined where the prosperous settlement should be.

The steamboat was not slow in making its appearance on the lakes.  In 1818, while it was still an experiment on the seaboard, one of these craft appeared on Lake Erie.  The “Walk-in-the-Water” was her name, suggestive of Indian nomenclature and, withal, exceedingly descriptive.  She made the trip from Buffalo to Detroit, not infrequently taking thirteen days.  She was a side-wheeler, a model which still holds favor on the lower lakes, though virtually abandoned on the ocean and on Lake Superior.  An oil painting of this little craft, still preserved, shows her without a pilot-house, steered by a curious tiller at the stern, with a smokestack like six lengths of stovepipe, and huge unboxed wheels.  She is said to have been a profitable craft, often carrying as many as fifty passengers on the voyage, for which eighteen dollars was charged.  For four years she held a monopoly of the business.  Probably the efforts of Fulton and Livingstone to protect the monopoly which had been granted them by the State of New York, and the determination of James Roosevelt to maintain what he claimed to be his exclusive right to the vertical paddle-wheel, delayed the extension of steam navigation on the lakes as it did on the great rivers.  After four years of solitary service on Lake Erie, the “Walk-in-the-Water” was wrecked in an October storm.  Crowded with passengers, she rode out a heavy gale through a long night.  At daybreak the cables parted and she went ashore, but no lives were lost.  Her loss was considered an irreparable calamity by the settlers at the western end of the lake.  “This accident,” wrote an eminent citizen of Detroit, “may be considered one of the greatest misfortunes which has ever befallen Michigan, for, in addition to its having deprived us of all certain and speedy communication with the civilized world, I am fearful it will greatly check the progress of immigration and improvement.”