The steamboat made its appearance on the Great Lakes in 1818 in the shape of a side-wheeler, naïvely called the _Walk-in-the-Water_, which was launched at Buffalo. Even a contemporary described her as a “weak but elegant boat,” and an oil painting shows her to be a little craft with a curious tiller at the stern, no pilot-house, a smoke stack of six lengths of stove-pipe put together, and unboxed wheels. She was a profitable venture while she lasted, making the trip from Buffalo to Detroit with forty or fifty passengers, each of whom paid eighteen dollars, but often taking thirteen days to do it. For four years she held a monopoly on the lakes as the solitary steam-propelled craft, and then one stormy night in October she went ashore after riding out a furious gale. None of her passengers were lost, and there is an old picture portraying this mournful event, “one of the greatest misfortunes that has ever befallen us,” as a journal of the day said. The vessel is depicted as going to pieces on the shore while its passengers stand up straight in unruffled silk hats, pointing apparently at spots of interest in the vicinity,--a very different state of affairs from that told of by those who spent that fearful night on the little vessel hoping for daylight to come before she was knocked to pieces. [Illustration: The Old and the New. General Cass’s Canoe and a Modern Freight Steamer. Copyright, 1905, by Detroit Publishing Co.] The steamboat did not disappear from the lakes, as the journal had feared it would, but in 1827 the first steamboat reached Sault Ste. Marie, carrying among her passengers General Winfield Scott, who came to visit the military post there. She made no effort to pass the barrier of the rapids, as even the little canal built by the Northwest Company in 1790 for canoes and bateaux had been blown up in the War of 1812. The first steamboat reached Chicago in 1832, and from that time on they began to multiply on the lakes. It was not, however, till 1845 that the need of steam navigation for working successfully the rich copper mines south of Lake Superior made it so necessary to have some craft not dependent on the uncertainties of the wind that the mine owners combined and bought a little steamboat which they had hauled laboriously over the portage on rollers, an undertaking that occupied seven weeks.