The voyage took fourteen days, and before undertaking it, he descended the two rivers in a flatboat, to familiarize himself with the channel.

The biographer of Roosevelt prints an interesting letter from Fulton, in which he says, "I have no pretensions to be the inventor of the steamboat.

Hundreds of others have tried it and failed." Four years after Roosevelt's voyage, the "Enterprise" made for the first time in history the voyage up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from New Orleans to Louisville, and from that era the great rivers may be said to have been fairly opened to that commerce, which in time became the greatest agency in the building up of the nation.

The Great Lakes were next to feel the quickening influence of the new motive power, but it was left for the Canadian, John Hamilton, of Queenston, to open this new field.

The progress of steam navigation on both lakes and rivers will be more fully described in the chapters devoted to that topic.
So rapidly now did the use of the steamboat increase on Long Island Sound, on the rivers, and along the coast that the newspapers began to discuss gravely the question whether the supply of fuel would long hold out.