h his diving-boat, he was always thinking of the
paddle-wheel scow he used to fish in when a boy. I turned those
paddle-wheels by a crank, said he, but what is to hinder my putting
a steam engine into such a boat, and making it turn the crank for
me? that would be a steamboat. Such boats had already been tried,
but, for one reason or another, they had not got on very well. Robert
R. Livingston was still in France, and he helped Fulton build his
first steamboat. It was put on a river there; it moved, and that was
about all.

197. Robert Fulton and Mr. Livingston go to New York and build a
steamboat; the trip up the Hudson River.--But Robert Fulton and Mr.
Livingston both believed that a steamboat could be built that would
go, and that would keep going. So they went to New York and built
one there.

In the summer of 1807 a great crowd gathered to see the boat start
on her voyage up the Hudson River. They joked and laughed as crowds
will at anything new. They called Fulton a fool and Livingston
another. But when Fulton, standing on the deck of his steamboat,
waved his hand, and the wheels began to turn, and the vessel began
to move up the river, then the crowd became silent with astonishment.
Now it was Fulton's turn to laugh, and in such a case the man who
laughs last has a right to laugh the loudest.

[Illustration: FULTON'S STEAMER LEAVING NEW YORK FOR ALBANY.]

Up the river Fulton kept going. He passed the Palisades;[5] he passed
the Highlands;[6] still he kept on, and at last he reached Albany,
a hundred and fifty miles above New York.

Nobody before had ever seen such a sight as that boat moving up the
river without the help of oars or sails; but from that time people
saw it every day. When Fulton got back to New York in his steamboat,
everybody wanted to shake hands with him--the crowd, instead of
shouting fool, now whispered among themselves, He's a great man--a
very great man, indeed.

[Footnote 5: See map in paragraph 55.]

[Footnote 6: See map in paragraph 55.]

198. The first steamboat in the west; the Great Shake.--Four years
later Fulton built a steamboat for the west. In the autumn of 1811
it started from Pittsburg[7] to go down the Ohio River, and then down
the Mississippi to New Orleans. The people of the west had never seen
a steamboat before, and when the Indians saw the smoke puffing out,
they called it the "Big Fire Canoe."

On the way down the river there was a terrible earthquake. In