Long before railroads reached the area, settlers relied on the Elkhart and St. Joseph Rivers to move products to market. The smaller Elkhart River flowed from the south into the larger St. Joseph River and, though navigable, was mainly useful when water was high in spring or fall. The larger St. Joseph River had a longer shipping season, but shallow rapids and shoals made the ninety-six-mile trip from the wharfs at the mouth of the Elkhart River near Island Park to St. Joseph, Michigan, a journey of more than two days. The meeting of these two navigable rivers in the village of Elkhart helped make it an early center of commerce, serving as a flour depository for farmers to the south and east while boats returned from the Lake Michigan port of St. Joseph with hard-to-find goods for settlers. Wheat flour was the chief cargo, in loads of up to 900 barrels, along with pork, corn, lumber, and whiskey, and these goods ultimately moved east to Buffalo, New York, by way of the Great Lakes. In the early days, river traffic used two kinds of craft, the ark and the keelboat. The ark was a flat-bottom raft that was cumbersome and hard to navigate, often used only to float downstream before being unloaded, dismantled, and sold for lumber. The later keelboat, built with a keel bottom and stern rudder, handled the winding rivers more easily; it was typically seventy-five feet long and twelve feet wide and could return upstream by poling, with an eight-man crew using sixteen-foot poles, sometimes aided by sail. In the 1840's, steam power brought river trade to a new height with side paddle boats, but because many steamboats drew too much water for the shallow upper St. Joseph River, smaller and lighter boats were built, often to tow larger barges upstream. River trade on the St. Joseph and Elkhart Rivers flourished from 1830 to the mid 1850's before declining rapidly with the coming of the railroads. Along the Elkhart River at the end of Washington St. stood four large warehouses, with two more downstream, storing flour, whiskey, lumber, and other products awaiting shipment and helping make Elkhart a major river port in the middle 1800's.