In 1814 the Americans launched their first steam-ship on the great waters of the Mississippi, at once showing the practicability of ascending that mighty river by accomplishing on her trial trip, immediately after she was built, a distance of 700 miles against the current. In 1818, they started a steam-boat to ply between New York and New Orleans, and, from that time, vessels of this description, steadily, and we may say rapidly, increased on their coasts and rivers. Their first steamer on the lakes was the _Orleans_, a two-masted vessel built at Pittsburg in 1811, but some time elapsed before any other steamer appeared on the Lakes, their then limited trade offering little inducement for profitable employment; hence, when the _Walk-in-the-Water_—a most characteristic name—commenced to trade on Lake Erie in 1819, there was no one to furnish her with a cargo except the American Fur Company. In 1827, the waters of Lake Michigan were first ploughed by steam, a boat having made an excursion to Green Bay, and in 1832, another steam-boat reached Chicago with troops, that site being then in course of clearance and settlement: in the following year, there were eleven boats on the lakes at a cost of 360,000 dollars, carrying in that year (1833) 61,480 passengers, and earning in freight 229,211 dollars. In 1834, seven new boats were launched, making eighteen in this service during that year; and in 1840, the number of boats trading between Buffalo, Chicago and other ports west of Detroit, their trip between these two places occupying fifteen days, had increased to forty-eight. Such was the beginning of the steam-boat traffic on the great North American lakes.[153] In the following woodcut may be seen a fair illustration of one of these early vessels. [Illustration] But it was on the rivers and along the sheltered bays on the coast that the new mode of propulsion made at first the most rapid progress. From the time when the pioneer boat ascended the Mississippi, steam-ships rapidly increased in number and in size, as well as in the power of their engines, so that, so early as 1832, there were no less than 900 arrivals of steamers at New Orleans from the upper country, and in 1834, there were 234 steam-vessels running on the Mississippi and Ohio, the large majority of which were built at Pittsburg and Cincinnati. [Sidenote: Dangers of river navigation.] [Sidenote: Number of steamers lost by “snags,” ice, fire, and collision, 1831-1833.]