an enterprising race of agriculturists
it bade fair to play as equally important a part in the grain industry.
Copper and iron no less came out of the blue of this cold northern
region than did the mighty crops of Minnesota wheat, corn, and oats.
In the decade preceding the Civil War the export of wheat from Lake
Superior rose from fourteen hundred bushels to three and a quarter
millions of bushels, while in 1859 nearly seven million bushels of corn
and oats were sent out to the world.

The commerce of Lake Superior could not await the building of a canal
around the foaming rapids of the St. Mary's River, its one outlet to the
lower lakes. In the decade following the discovery of copper and iron
more than a dozen ships, one even of as much as five hundred tons, were
hauled bodily across the portage between Lake Huron and Lake Superior.
The last link of navigation in the Great Lake system, however, was made
possible in 1852 by a grant by Congress of 750,000 acres of Michigan
land. Although only a mile in length, the work proved to be of unusual
difficulty since the pathway for the canal had to be blasted throughout
practically its whole length out of solid rock. It was completed in
1855, and the princely empire "in the moon" was in a position to make
its terms with the coal fields of Pennsylvania and to usher in the iron
age of transportation and construction.

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