Everybody was looking for failure. For though Fitch's boats had made
trips in the Delaware only some twenty years earlier, the fact did not
seem to be generally known. People had all along spoken of Fulton as a
half-crazy dreamer and had called his boat "Fulton's Folly." "Of course,
the thing will not move," said one scoffer. "That any man with common
sense well knows," another replied. And yet they all stood watching for
Fulton's signal to start the boat.

[Illustration: The "Clermont" in Duplicate at the Hudson-Fulton
Celebration, 1909.]

The signal is given. A slight tremor of motion and the boat is still.
"There! What did I say?" cried one. "I told you so!" exclaimed another. "I
knew the boat would not go," said yet another. But they spoke too soon,
for after a little delay the wheels of the Clermont began to revolve,
slowly and hesitatingly at first, but soon with more speed, and the boat
steamed proudly off up the Hudson.

As she moved forward, all along the river people who had come from far and
near stood watching the strange sight. When boatmen and sailors on the
Hudson heard the harsh clanking of machinery and saw the huge sparks and
dense black smoke rising out of her funnel, they thought that the Clermont
was a sea-monster. In fact, they were so frightened that some of them went
ashore, some jumped into the river to get away, and some fell on their
knees in fear, believing that their last day had come. It is said that one
old Dutchman exclaimed to his wife: "I have seen the devil coming up the
river on a raft!"

The men who were working the boat had no such foolish fears. They set
themselves to their task and made the trip from New York to Albany, a
distance of one hundred and fifty miles, in thirty-two hours. Success had
at last come to the quiet, modest, persevering Fulton. After this trial
trip the Clermont was used as a regular passenger boat between New York
and Albany.

The steamboat was Fulton's great gift to the world and his last work of
public interest. He died in 1815.

But the Clermont was only the beginning of steam-driven craft on the
rivers and lakes of our country. Four years afterward (1811), the first
steamboat west of the Alleghany Mountains began its route from Pittsburg
down the Ohio, and a few years later similar craft were in use on the
Great Lakes.

THE NATIONAL ROAD AND THE ERIE CANAL

But while steamboats made the rivers and lakes easy routes for travel and
traffic, som