Leaving Milwaukee Miss Fuller went by steamer, as did all lake travellers, to Mackinac, crossing Lake Michigan and passing near the beautiful western shores of the state of that name. All steamers stopped at Manitoulin Island for wood. They could not carry the very large amount of this fuel needed for their thousand-mile trips without so lumbering the decks as to lose the necessary space for passengers and cargo. So they must stop at this way-place and pay to the twenty wood-cutters who lived there an exorbitant price for wood enough to carry them the remaining one hundred miles to Mackinac. As the engines consumed a cord and a half an hour, the decks, immediately after the taking on of a new supply, were heavily loaded down, so that even the windows of the staterooms were darkened until the piles began to diminish. Mackinac, or Mackinaw, was out of the path of emigration and had scarcely changed in the last thirty years. Always a centre for Indian traders and American Fur Company buyers, it was doubly picturesque when Margaret Fuller reached there in August, 1843, for over two thousand Indians had just come in from distant villages and made their camps, waiting for trade and for the annual payments made them by the government. Of the beauty of the scenery and of the interest of these constantly arriving Indian parties Miss Fuller could not say enough. She stayed there nearly a fortnight, and made one day an excursion by steamer up to Sault Ste. Marie, where two Indians took her in a canoe through the rapids. To all travellers the days on the Strait of Mackinac were among the most pleasant of the trip, but when the steamer came from Chicago they reluctantly bade farewell to its beauties and sailed down the transparent waters of Lake Huron to the strait which led into Lake St. Clair and across that lake to Detroit, and thence back along Lake Erie, as they had come, to Buffalo. In taking the “Grand Tour” with one of these travellers, we have gained a picture of the beginnings of the western lake states and of the rapid progress of the eastern ones in a time not remote and distant, but scarcely seventy years ago. The accomplishment of so much in so short a time well deserved the adjectives and encomiums that were bestowed upon it by admiring travellers, who little dreamed of the vast changes that were to take place in the century to come. CHAPTER XXII THE COMING OF THE RAILROAD TO LAKE ERIE