[Illustration: _The first Houstonian to fly an airplane, one he built himself, was L. L. Walker, in 1910. The plane, above, was a Bleriot-type with a forty-horsepower engine; it flew at a peak altitude of three hundred feet and had a top speed of nearly thirty miles an hour. The photograph—Walker, at the controls, is hidden by the wing—was made at the start of an attempt to fly to Galveston late in 1910. He reached La Marque, well over half way, and prudently decided to return. Walker died in 1960, aged seventy-one._] The history of Houston’s material success is to some extent the history of its port and the bayou it was to make into a ship channel. Buffalo Bayou was once the mouth of the Brazos River, though the Brazos long ago cut its present course to the southwest. A traveler who wrote of the bayou nearly ten years before Houston existed found it an exceptional stream. “... this most enchanting little stream [has] the appearance of an artificial canal in the design and course of which Nature has lent her masterly hand,” J. C. Clopper wrote in 1828. Other early travelers were to comment on Buffalo Bayou’s “strong resemblance to a canal.” Moreover, Andrew Forest Muir has written, “Buffalo Bayou had another peculiar advantage.... Unlike most significant Texas streams, it flows almost due east and west. With the Brazos [River] extending in a general northerly direction, this meant that the head of navigation on the Bayou was but twenty miles or so from the heart of the fertile agricultural region of the Brazos.” Indeed, Buffalo Bayou was the principal reason the founders of Houston chose the area for their city. They wanted the most interior point of year-round navigation in Texas. Unable to buy the town of Harrisburg, they went upstream for their site. A vessel of size first succeeded in reaching a boat-landing at Houston in 1837. It was a former warship, the Constitution, a forty-four-gun frigate in 1797 but then a merchant vessel, whose captain chanced the voyage to win $1000 offered by the new city’s promoters. Within ten years vessels were making daily runs between Houston and Galveston. The improvement of the bayou channel was begun in 1839 with funds raised by public subscription and lotteries. The Port of Houston was established by city ordinance in 1841. Widening and deepening of the channel was begun in 1869 and continued into the 1960s, by which time the minimum depth of the channel was thirty-six feet and the minimum width was three hundred feet. The port is linked with the Intracoastal Canal. “Probably the greatest, most farseeing project ever consummated in Texas was the deepwater channel to Houston,” the Dallas News said in an editorial in 1955.