In the summer of 1870 Capt. Daniel B. Boden began regular steam navigation of Otsego Lake by means of a small steamboat which he had brought to Cooperstown by railroad, and which had been used as a gunboat in Southern waters during the Civil War. The boat was renamed the _Mary Boden_. In the following summer a rival steamboat was launched, much larger than the former, called the _Natty Bumppo_, and owned principally by A. H. Watkins and Elihu Phinney. At the beginning of the next season the conservative folk of the village were scandalized by the _Mary Boden_, which then commenced to make lake trips on Sunday, a breach of ancient custom in which the owners of the _Natty Bumppo_ indignantly declined to compete. On a night early in July there was an alarm of fire, a great blaze at the lake front, and villagers running to the scene found that one of the steamboats was in flames and beyond hope of salvage. A small child at a front window of Edgewater, watching the fire, clapped her hands, and cried out, "It's the wicker [wicked] boat! It's the wicker boat!" But it was not the wicked boat that was ablaze. It was the _Natty Bumppo_, which burned to the water's edge a total loss, the boat that had never left its dock on Sunday. The event was long recalled by some in the village as an instance of grave error in the usually correct dispensations of Providence. The _Natty Bumppo_ was replaced, in the next season, by a new steamboat bearing the same name. The new _Natty Bumppo_ and the old _Mary Boden_ were the famous boats of the lake until they were succeeded by the _Pioneer_ and the _Cyclone_, and later by the _Deerslayer_, the _Pathfinder_, and the _Mohican_. Aside from the use of canoes, the first general navigation of the lake was undertaken in 1794 by a man known as Admiral Hassy, who in his day was the most celebrated fisherman of Otsego. He had a large flat boat which he called the ship _Jay_, and upon which he used boards for sails. This craft was safe, but not speedy. Some thirty years later a group of enterprising individuals built a horse-boat as a means of transporting lake parties. The boat had at each end a high cabin topped by a platform. These excrescences caught whatever breeze was blowing, and made the craft unmanageable. The struggles of the two poor horses who were expected to propel the boat were not equal to a gale of Pierstown trade-winds. More than once a lake party starting for Three-Mile Point, aboard this vessel, found itself stranded on the opposite shore.