“His death was rather sudden; so much so that many attributed it to suicide. This was not so; he died a calm, natural death in the bosom of his family, at No. 5 Broadway, opposite the Bowling Green. In attending court at Trenton, N. J., he had taken a cold, and on returning home to New York the ferryboat on which he was was caught in the ice, and was thus delayed some three hours. It was a cold, stormy day in January; this confirmed and increased his illness, which finally sent him to his grave.” In 1811 Mr. Fulton built at Pittsburgh, Pa., a boat for the New Orleans trade; she was called the _New Orleans_, the first steamer on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. In 1810–11 a company was formed—they built two boats to run in opposition to Mr. Fulton’s. One was called _Perseverance_, Captain Bunker, and the other _The Hope_, Captain Sherman, afterwards well known on Lake Champlain. These steamers were some faster than Mr. Fulton’s. After a long contest in courts of law, the two Albany boats were confiscated to Mr. Fulton, and he had them soon broken up at Albany, in sight of their former owners. In 1812–13 some gentlemen in New York built a steamer called the _Fulton_, to run to Albany, by Mr. Fulton’s consent, under the following terms: The new boat was to charge $10 for each passenger, paying Mr. Fulton $3 out of every $10 paid by the passengers; this did not prove profitable, and the next season the _Fulton_ was placed on the East River and the Sound, being the first steamer ever before on the Sound.... It was expected that the steamer _Fulton_ would make the trip to Albany in thirteen or fourteen hours’ time, but I think she never made the trip in less than sixteen or seventeen hours. The first steamer on the Potomac River, Va., was built by Mr. Fulton in the last days of his life; she was called the _Washington_; she was intended to run between Washington City and Norfolk; she went there in May, 1815; the writer of these lines went out with her and stayed long enough to teach a black man, a slave, how to start and how to manage the engine. The first steamer for the great Western Lakes was built at Black Rock on the Niagara River by Mr. Noah Brown of New York, in 1818. She was a handsome vessel of 360 tons’ burden, full brig-rigged. She was called the _Walk-in-the-Water_. She was owned by Dr. J. B. Stewart, then of Albany. The writer put up her engine. She was totally lost in a terrible gale on Lake Erie, in October, 1820. In these years from 1818 to 1820, no dividends were made from the earnings of the steamer. Such was the little travel on those lakes at these times that if the steamer carried thirty or forty passengers, it was doing pretty well. The strength of the Black Rock Rapids was so strong that besides the power of the engine, it required the use of eight pairs of oxen to get the steamer up the rapids on to the lake, a distance of two miles.