Up to a comparatively recent date the bulk of the lakes commerce was done by sailing vessels. Every town of any importance had its little fleet of schooners. As time went on, the vessels increased in size, and eventually a very fine class of three-masted schooners, with some brigs, barquentines, and even full-rigged barques, were employed in the carrying trade. One of the largest of these was the barque _Utica_, of 550 tons, which sailed on the Buffalo and Chicago route in the forties. A few of these clipper schooners may still be met with, but they are rapidly being supplanted by iron and steel steamships of great size, such as the _Maryland_, the _Owego_, the _E. C. Pope_, and the _Manitou_, representatives of fleets of first-class steamships, ranging from 300 to 350 feet in length, over 1,900 tons register, with triple expansion engines, a speed of from fourteen to sixteen miles an hour, and a carrying capacity of 120,000 to 125,000 bushels of grain. These, and many others like them, were accounted “queens” a few years ago; they are fine ships still, but there are much larger and finer than they now. The _Manitou_ here represented is one of the finest ships of her class on the lakes, built in 1893 by the Chicago Ship-building Company. Her hull is of steel, length over all 295 feet, breadth of beam 42 feet, and depth of hold 22 feet. Her average draught of water is 15 feet. She has triple expansion engines, a single four-bladed screw propeller 13 feet in diameter. Her gross tonnage is 2,944 tons. She is handsomely fitted up with sleeping accommodations for four hundred passengers, has a freight capacity of 1,500 tons, and develops a speed of eighteen miles an hour. Her route is between Chicago and Sault Ste. Marie, where she connects with the Lake Superior lines. She cost $300,000. [Illustration: THE “MANITOU,” 1893.]