Buffalo was founded by Joseph Ellicott, brother of the first surveyor-general of the United States. He laid out the town on the plan of Washington city, with broad, radiating avenues, and gave to them Dutch names, as Vollenhoven and Schimmelpennick, calling the village New Amsterdam. When the town was incorporated in 1810, the inhabitants renamed it Buffalo, according to the old Indian name for the creek which makes into the lake at this point. The prosperity of Buffalo and Rochester, and of Oswego, which was incorporated as a village in 1828, was assured by the building of the Erie Canal system in 1825. In spite of her hundred years of history Detroit began life anew under American rule. In 1805 the town caught fire, and within four hours the old French settlement was gone. Of two hundred buildings within the stockade, only one was left standing. The newly elected officers of Ohio Territory reached Detroit the day after the fire to find the town wiped out, and in a few years the American Detroit was laid out and built up on the favorite plan of the city of Washington. The western lakes had been the first to be approached by Frenchmen coming from the north; they were the last to be settled by Americans coming from the Atlantic seaboard. But when their importance came to be recognized their cities sprang up with amazing rapidity. By the treaty of Greenville the Indians ceded to the white men, along with other territory, “one piece of land six miles square at the mouth of the Checagau River.” This spot had always been a centre for Indian tribes and for fur trade. In 1821 Governor Cass bought from the Indians this part of Illinois and the state of Michigan. Trade with the Indians attracted a few settlers to Chicago during the next few years, and in 1833 twenty-eight electors met and chose trustees to administer public affairs. They established a free ferry across the river, reconstructed and strengthened the log jail, and built for twelve dollars an estray pen for lost animals, and thus the town of Chicago began. Four years later it became an organized municipality with a population of four thousand. It was the centre of one of the land-booms which collapsed in the panic of 1837, and suffered for many years thereafter a succession of disasters. Floods swept the low ground on which the town was built, which has since been elevated; cholera, droughts, and financial panics came upon her but were unable to conquer. From the great fire of 1871 Chicago rose once more to justify the opportunities of her location and to become the leading city of the Great Lakes. [Illustration: Map: “Gateways of the lakes” showing major cities along the shores of the five Great Lakes, including Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Toronto, Buffalo, Rochester, and Kingston]