It is only in the light of this awakening of the lands around the Great Lakes that one can see plainly the task which fell to the lot of the successors of the frail Walk-in-the-Water and sturdier Superior of the early twenties.For the first fifteen years the steamboat found its mission in carrying the thousands of emigrants pouring into the Northwest, a heterogeneous multitude which made the Lake Erie boats seem, to one traveler at least, filled with "men, women and children, beds, cradles, kettles, and frying pans." These craft were built after the pattern of the Walk-in-the-Water--side-wheelers with a steering wheel at the stern.No cabins or staterooms on deck were provided; and amid such freight as the thriving young towns provided were to be found the twenty or thirty cords of wood which the engines required as fuel.
The second period of steamboating began with the opening of the Ohio Canal and the Welland Canal about 1834 and extended another fifteen years to the middle of the century, when it underwent a transformation owing to the great development of Chicago, the completion of the Illinois and Michigan and St.Mary's canals, and the new railways.This second period was marked by the building of such steamers as the Michigan, the Great Western, and the Illinois.These were the first boats with an upper cabin and were looked upon with marked suspicion by those best acquainted with the severe storms upon the Great Lakes.The Michigan, of 475tons, built by Oliver Newberry at Detroit in 1833, is said to have been the first ship of this type.These boats proved their seaworthiness and caused a revolution in the construction of lake craft.Later in this period freight transportation saw an equally radical advance with the building of the first propellers.The sloop-rigged Vandalia, built by Sylvester Doolittle at Oswego on Lake Ontario in 1842, was the first of the propeller type and was soon followed by the Hercules, the Samson, and the Detroit.
One very great handicap in lake commerce up to this time had been the lack of harbors.Detroit alone of the lake ports was distinctly favored in this respect.The harbors of Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Chicago were improved slowly, but it was not until the great Chicago convention of 1846 that the nation's attention was focused on the needs of Western rivers and harbors, and there dawned a new era of lighthouses and buoys, breakwaters and piers, and dredged channels.Another handicap to the volume of business which the lake boats handled in the period just previous to the Civil War was the inadequacy of the feeders, the roads, riverways, and canals.The Erie Canal was declared too small almost before the cries of its virulent opponents had died away, and the enlargement of its locks was soon undertaken.The same thing proved true of the Ohio and Illinois canals.The failure of the Welland Canal was similarly a very serious handicap.Although its locks were enlarged in 1841, it was found by 1850 that despite the improvements it could not admit more than about one-third of the grain-carrying boats, while only one in four of the new propellers could enter its locks.
