The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

JANUARY k soon a hardy pioneer, Louis Campau by name, settled on the banks of the river near the Indian Village. The year was 1832. Soon he brought his family, and other adventurous souls followed suit. The transportation of needed materials to and from the growing little community required something more than a canoe, so in 1835 the first poleboat was built. It was the Young Napoleon and like the flatboats of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, it was a flat-bottomed affair that drifted with the current and was fitted with long sweeps for a somewhat limited degree of maneu- verability. It was a good boat, as poleboats go, and others soon followed but a man named John Almy had a better idea. He reasoned that if this new- fangled thing called steam was being successfully applied to vessels on the ocean and lake, why not use it for boats on the river? He was lack- ing materials to build his own steam engine, so in 1836 he bought one and the boat that contained it. Little is known of this steamboat, the Don Quixote; she was said to have been purchased at Detroit, and while en- route to the river she was wrecked at Alpena, on Lake Huron, in Novem- ber, 1836 Other men shared similar ideas and when the Don Quixote was destroyed, James Godfrey found in the wreck the engine he needed for his: steamboat. The engine was laborously brought to the village of Grand Rapids and the following spring was installed in a new vessel taking shape on the river bank. The steamboat era on the Grand SLeanboaies | Balt. anid sf) edison om Phe eGr amd. Rage r < 1837.0, Grand Rapids Public Library photo.