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and Buffalo passengers were compelled to embark at Black Rock, much to their disgust. It would have been easy enough to run in at Buffalo Creek, but civic pride prevented that accommodation. In her brief life of three years the steamboat earned a handsome profit for her owners.

In her time she carried many distinguished passengers. On her first trip she brought to Detroit the Earl of Selkirk with his Countess and their two children. The Earl had established a little colony called Belladoon on the Chenal Écarté, by which one now makes a steamboat trip to Wallaceburg. There were also Col. Dixon, British Indian agent for the Northwest; Col. John Anderson, U. S. engineer, his wife and sister-in-law, Miss Taylor; Col. Leavenworth, U. S. A., with his wife and daughter; Col. James Watson, of Washington, D. C.; Maj. Abraham Edwards, who then lived in Detroit, but later settled in Kalamazoo, and a number of others.

In 1820 she brought to Detroit Rev. Jedediah Morse, who published most of our early geographies as a sort of side line to his ministry in the Park Street Congregational Church in Boston. The Rev. Mr. Morse was one of the founders of Andover Theological Seminary and he had been an instructor in Yale College, a director of Indian missions and a defender of orthodoxy. At Detroit he remarked that he had been publishing maps, atlases and geographies of this western country for many years and he thought he would like to have a look at it with his own eyes.

In company with this early American geographer was his son, Samuel F. B. Morse, a portrait painter who, after spending three years in London studying with Washington Allston and Benjamin West, had opened a studio in Boston, but found himself compelled to travel about seeking commissions to paint portraits of notable persons. Twelve years later he was destined to turn his attention to electro-magnetism, out of which, with the assistance of abler men than himself, he evolved the electro-magnetic telegraph, which made his name immortal.

Our Weather Bureau service which gives warnings to mariners of approaching storms was not even dreamed of until more

than 50 years after the period of the Walk-in-the-Water. Lake and sea captains in those days watched their barometers, kept their weather eye on the horizon and took their chances with the elements.

On the afternoon of October 30, 1821, the Walk-in-theWater started on her last voyage. The boat was now in charge of Capt. Jedediah Rogers, who had succeeded Job Fish. She lay for a time at a pier which had been built on the middle ground in front of Buffalo, and among the passengers who came to her in a yawl were Thomas Palmer of Detroit, Mrs. Palmer and Mr. Palmer's sister Catherine, who later became Mrs. Hinchman, of Detroit. The Palmers were newlyweds returning from their honeymoon journey to New York City.

The weather looked threatening, but Capt. Rogers started for Dunkirk in the face of a hard wind which soon became a gale against which it was impossible to make headway. He turned about, hoping to take shelter behind Point Abino, 12 miles from Buffalo. Darkness fell and a driving rain forced all passengers to take shelter below. The boat became unwieldy and Capt. Rogers decided to run for Buffalo for shelter, but the mist was so thick and the darkness so intense he could make out no light. About 10 o'clock, fearing that he might run ashore, he had three anchors dropped, one with a chain cable and two with hawsers.

The frail hull soon began to show the effect of the lurching strain as the Walk-in-the-Water tugged at her anchors. Oakum began to work out of her calked seams and water began to gather inside her hold. To keep her afloat all the power of the engine was applied to the pumps, but she continued to settle and at the same time to drag her anchors. Below the deck all was confusion. The uproar of crashing crockery was heard in the galley and shrieks of women were heard in the cabin aft. Everybody was forced to hold on to stanchions and other supports to avoid being dashed about like dice in a box.

The night wore on with no abatement of the gale and with no prospect of improvement in the condition of the steamboat. About 4 o'clock in the morning the sound of heavy surf was

heard from the deck, but nothing was visible. The deck gun was loaded and fired as often as possible to call help. The nature of the shore could not be discovered and it became a question whether the boat would remain afloat long enough to be stranded on the beach.

At 4:30 Capt. Rogers called all the passengers on deck and told them he had decided to cut loose from his anchors and

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WRECK OF Walk-in-the-Water, NOVEMBER 1, 1821

allow the boat to drift ashore as their only chance of salvation, for otherwise they might go down in deep water. The men all agreed that that was the thing to be done, so the chain cable was slipped and the hawsers were cut with axes.

Immediately the vessel lifted on the waves and began to sweep shoreward. In a few minutes she struck lightly on a bar, where she rested for a little and then a huge wave swept her farther up on the beach. When it subsided the vessel careened far over on her side and apparently everything inside her hull went crashing across the cabins and baggage room.

There she held for an hour or more, with every sea making a breach over her, drenching the passengers and threatening to

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tear them from their hold on the bulwarks and stanchions. Some of the women were in their night clothes and all suffered from exposure. At daybreak a small boat was launched from the leeward side and a sailor went ashore in her carrying the end of a hawser. His boat was dashed high on the beach and he ran to a tree and gave the hawser several turns and knotted it fast. Then, working his way back in the yawl by pulling on the hawser, he reached the stranded vessel, and first the women and then the men were all safely brought ashore.

About a mile away they discovered a lighthouse and all made their way to it. The lightkeeper had heard the gun and had built up a big fire for the comfort of any who might come ashore. A little later carriages came from Buffalo to carry them to the Landen House, which was the principal hotel. The Detroit passengers made their homeward journey by wagons across Canada.

Among the passengers of the wrecked vessel were: Maj. Jedediah Hunt, Lieut. McKenzie, U.S.A., John Hale, merchant of Canandaigua, N. Y., and afterward of Detroit, Alanson W. Welton, William Berezy, Chauncey Barer, Thomas Gray, John S. Hudson, James Clark, Orlando Cutter, Silas Merriam, Rhoda Latemore, Martha Breary, George Williams, Elisha N. Berge, Edson Hart, George Throop, Miss Osborn, Thomas Palmer, Mary A. Witherell Palmer and Miss Catherine Palmer, and Mr. and Mrs. Salmser of Ohio.

John S. Hudson, with his wife and Miss Osborn, were on their way to found an Indian mission at Fort Gratiot, above Port Huron. Mr. and Mrs. Palmer later became the parents of Senator Thomas W. Palmer, of Detroit, who was also president of the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, and the donor of Palmer Park to the citizens of Detroit.

J. D. Mattheis, of Buffalo, went to the wreck and made several sketches, one of which he presented to Mrs. Palmer, which was the original of the illustration with this chapter. The engine of the Walk-in-the-Water was saved and it afterward served to propel two other lake vessels successively before it went to the junk pile.

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CHAPTER XLVII

A NEW ERA BEGINS

ITH the beginning of steam navigation at Detroit came a demand for more systematic ferry service across the river. Ferrying passengers across the stream had been the casual employment of a number of Frenchmen and even Indians from time to time. At several landings along the Detroit shore were small wharves for rowboats and canoes, and tied to a post by each was a large tin horn which a person desiring to make the crossing would blow persistently if no ferryman would offer his services along shore. Usually this would call a boat from the other side. In 1818 Edwin Baldwin established a regular ferry between Detroit and the Windsor shore, in which service he gradually progressed from a canoe to a larger rowboat and when there was sufficient wind he used a sailboat. There was no landing on the Canadian shore. Passengers jumped ashore on the slippery clay bank and scrambled up the bluff. Quite a number of canoes were kept in the mouth of the Savoyard River, which was navigable for canoes and bateaux as far as the present corner of Bates and Congress

streets.

The second steamboat on Lake Erie was the Superior, built at Buffalo Creek, at the foot of the present Washington Street, Buffalo. The old Black Rock wharf was at the foot of the present Porter Street, Buffalo. The model of the second boat was very different from that of the first, but for many years the modeling of lake vessels remained in the experimental stage, for the lake channels were quite shallow in places until the Government deepened them.

The Superior started on her first trip to Detroit April 23, 1822. In 1824 a sister ship was built and named the Henry Clay. During 1825 the two boats maintained a four-day service between Detroit and Buffalo. The Superior was converted into

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