Our clothes and bedding were all drenched, and to make our
condition still more perilous, the boat was discovered to be on fire.
This was kept as quiet as possible. I did not know that it was burning,
until after it was extinguished; but I saw father, with others, carrying
buckets of water. He said the boat had been on fire and they had put it
out. The staunch boat resisted the elements; ploughed her way through and
landed us safely at Detroit.
Some years after our landing at Detroit, I saw the steamboat "Michigan"
and thought of the perilous time we had on her coming up Lake Erie. She
was then an old boat, and was laid up. I thought of the many thousand
hardy pioneers she had brought across the turbulent lake and landed
safely on the shore of the territory whose name she bore.
But where, oh where "are the six hundred!" that came on her with us? Most
of them have bid adieu to earth, and all its storms. The rest of them are
now old and no doubt scattered throughout the United States. But time or
distance cannot erase from their memory or mine the storm we shared
together on Lake Erie.
CHAPTER II.
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