It is scarcely necessary to note now that the apprehensions of the worthy citizen of Michigan were unfounded.  Steam navigation on the lakes was no more killed by the loss of the pioneer craft than was transatlantic steam navigation ended by the disapproving verdict of the scientists.  Nowhere in the world is there such a spectacle of maritime activity, nowhere such a continuous procession of busy cargo-ships as in the Detroit River, and through the colossal locks of the “Soo” canals.  In 1827 the first steamboat reached the Sault Ste. Marie, bearing among her passengers General Winfield Scott, on a visit of inspection to the military post there, but she made no effort to enter the great lake.  About five years later, the first “smoke boat,” as the Indians called the steamers, reached Chicago, the pigmy forerunner of the fleet of huge leviathans that all the summer long, nowadays, blacken Chicago’s sky with their torrents of smoke, and keep the hurrying citizens fuming at the open draw of a bridge.  All side-wheelers were these pioneers, wooden of course, and but sorry specimens of marine architecture, but they opened the way for great things.  For some years longer the rushing torrent of the Ste. Marie’s kept Lake Superior tightly closed to steamboats, but about 1840 the richness of the copper mines bordering upon that lake began to attract capital, and the need of steam navigation became crying.  In 1845 men determined to put some sort of a craft upon the lake that would not be dependent upon the whims of wind and sails for propulsion.  Accordingly, the sloop “Ocean,” a little craft of fifteen tons, was fitted out with an engine and wheels at Detroit and towed to the “Soo.”  There she was dragged out of the water and made the passage between the two lakes on rollers.  The “Independence,” a boat of about the same size, was treated in the same way later in the year.  Scarcely anything in the history of navigation, unless it be the first successful application of steam to the propulsion of boats is of equal importance with the first appearance of steamboats in Lake Superior.  It may be worth while to abandon for a moment the orderly historical sequence of this narrative, to emphasize the wonderful contrast between the commerce of Lake Superior in the days of the “Independence” and now—­periods separated by scarcely sixty years.  To-day the commerce of that lake is more than half of all the great lakes combined.  It is conducted in steel vessels, ranging from 1500 to 8500 tons, and every year sees an increase in their size.  In 1901 more than 27,000,000 tons of freight were carried in Lake Superior vessels, a gain of nearly 3,000,000 over the year before.  The locks in the “Soo” canal, of which more later, have twice had to be enlarged, while the Canadian Government has built a canal of its own on the other side of the river.  The discovery and development of the wonderful deposits of iron ore at the head of the lake have proved the greatest factors in the upbuilding of its commerce, and the necessity for getting this ore to the mills in Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, has resulted in the creation of a class of colossal cargo-carriers on the lake that for efficiency and results, though not for beauty, outdo any vessel known to maritime circles.