t public rejoicing which had welcomed the
canals.

In a few years the magnificent fleets of the river began to feel
the fatal rivalry of the trains that swept along its borders. Travel
deserted them, and traffic sought the surer and swifter transportation
of the shore. The great packets that had carried swarms of passengers
to and from Pittsburg and Cincinnati and all the points between,
disappeared or were converted into freight-boats, and then these
began to fail for want of traffic, and the Beautiful River was almost
abandoned to the stern-wheeler pushing a flotilla of coal-barges. A
like change took place upon the lake; steamers which formed the means
of communication between the towns and cities from Cleveland to Buffalo,
and from Cleveland to Detroit, ceased to touch at the smaller ports,
and became the pleasure-craft of the summer tourists, or the carriers
of heavy freight, and the ports which did not become the feeders of the
railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect
the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river;
the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea
from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could
not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had
his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period
of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them
dry. or where he left their slow currents to stagnate unstirred by the
keels of the leisurely craft once so jubilantly welcomed to them.

Except for the occasional breaking of an embankment, the history of the
canals could hardly be marked by any incidents of exciting interest. It
was not so with steamboating and railroading, which has each its long
tale of disasters such as give times of peace almost as dark a record
as those of war. The most tragical of these events took place at the
opposite extremities of the state, in Cincinnati and in Ashtabula, and
they occurred at the beginning and the end of an interval of nearly
forty years.

The rise of steamboating on the Western rivers was perhaps all the more
rapid because of the daring and reckless spirit of the Western people,
who took almost any risk in order to carry a point in their rivalries
or to gain an end of their ambition. It is certain at any rate that the
builders and the crews of the popular boats joined in contriving and
urging them