not a line of
rail entered the town; its population then numbered about twenty-five
thousand and its property valuation approximated seven millions. Ten
years later four thousand miles of railway connected with all four
points of the compass a city of nearly one hundred thousand people, and
property valuation had increased five hundred per cent. The growth of
Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit during this period was also phenomenal.

When the crisis of 1861 came, the service performed by the
Walk-in-the-Water and her successors was seen in its true light. The
Great Lakes as avenues of migration had played a providential part in
filling a northern empire with a proud and loyal race; from farm and
factory regiment on regiment marched forth to fight for unity; from
fields without number produce to sustain a nation on trial poured forth
in abundance; enormous quantities of iron were at hand for the casting
of cannon and cannon balls; and, finally, pathways of water and steel
were in readiness in the nick of time to carry these resources where
they would count tremendously in the four long years of conflict.

CHAPTER XI. The Steamboat And The West

Two great fields of service lay open before those who were to achieve
by steam the mastery of the inland waterways. On the one hand the cotton
kingdom of the South, now demanding great stores of manufactured goods,
produce, and machinery, was waiting to be linked to the valleys and
industrial cities of the Middle West; and, on the other hand, along
those great eastward and westward rivers, the Ohio and Missouri, lay the
commerce of the prairies and the Great Plains. But before the steamboat
could serve the inland commerce of the West, it had to be constructed on
new lines. The craft brought from the seaboard were of too deep draft to
navigate shallow streams which ran through this more level country.

The task of constructing a great inland river marine to play the dual
role of serving the cotton empire and of extending American migration
and commerce into the trans-Mississippi region was solved by Henry
Shreve when he built the Washington at Wheeling in 1816. Shreve was the
American John Hawkins. Hawkins, that sturdy old admiral of Elizabethan
days, took the English ship of his time, trimmed down the high stern
and poop decks, and cut away the deep-lying prow and stern, after the
fashion of our modern cup defenders, and in a day gave England the
key to sea mastery in the sha