From Cleveland the boat proceeded with only two stops, at Black River and Huron, to Sandusky Bay, and steamed past the lighthouse and up the carefully staked-out channel to the town of Sandusky, which was at the bottom of the seven-mile inlet. This town had the fresh, bright appearance of all the recently built settlements, with an added air of substantiality which it owed to the abundance near by of good building material, which had led the inhabitants to erect fine stone residences. After a brief stop the steamer ran out of the bay and northward across the lake to the mouth of the Detroit River, passing on the way the islands near which Commodore Perry won his victory. At the entrance of the strait on the Canada side was the town of Amherstburgh, formerly known as Malden, and the scene of much fighting in the War of 1812. All the twenty miles of shore from here to Detroit were lined with pretty villas and gardens, many of them of the old French style. To the traveller of 1840 as to the tourist of to-day, Detroit made from the water a most pleasing picture. For a mile along the bank of the river and half a mile back from the water stretched regular avenues with large white houses and green patches of gardens interspersed, and in the centre of the city were the court-house with its dome and turrets, the churches with their tall spires, and the blocks of solid brick business buildings. The low-lying French buildings had disappeared, and with them the French atmosphere of twenty years before. Detroit had become in the last ten years a busy port and thoroughfare for the emigrants who yearly composed one-half or even two-thirds of the city population. Even in 1830 they were arriving by the thousands,--ten, even fifteen thousand in a single season. In May of that year the _Free Press_ of the city announced that besides those arriving by land or by sailing vessels, over two thousand people had come in that one week on the seven steamboats. In 1836 a diligent citizen kept watch of those who came and went, and computed that, in the twelve hours between daylight and dark, a wagon left the city for the interior every five minutes.