THREE GREAT INDUSTRIES OF THE LAKES
No part of the story of the Great Lakes is more significant than the
tale of the building up of the large enterprises that have made that
region one of the leading centres of production and consumption in
the United States and the world. The heroes of exploration and of
adventure were the forerunners of commerce, and the founders of cities
were the leaders of industry. Two of the three great industries of the
early days have persisted to the present time; all three of them have
contributed largely to exploration and occupation and deserve to be
treated somewhat in detail.
Washington Irving has well said that two leading objects of commercial
gain have given birth to wide and daring enterprise in the early
history of America. The precious metals led the Spaniard to Mexico and
Peru, while, as he puts it, the “adroit and buoyant Frenchman” and the
“cool and calculating Briton” pursued the “less splendid, but no less
lucrative traffic in the rich peltries of the north.” The pioneer fur
traders were followed only after many, many years, by what Irving has
characterized as “the slow and pausing steps of agriculture.”
Apart from the land which agriculture might in times of settled peace
make profitable, the white man found three great natural sources
of wealth. These were animals bearing fur of great value, enormous
deposits of copper and iron, and primeval forests filled with trees
suited to the uses of civilized man. Profits from these financed many
an enterprise, from the earliest voyages and the building of the
_Griffon_ to the days of the railroad and the “Soo” Canal. For two
centuries, from 1634 to 1834, the fur trade was the leading interest
and source of profit of the Great Lakes.
During Champlain’s governorship the French, through Nicolet, first
opened an active system of trade and barter with the Indians of the
lakes, and the history of French control thereafter is the history
of the fur trade. It paid the bills of many of the voyages we have
chronicled. In 1660 Radisson and Groseilliers returned to Quebec from
their Lake Superior voyage with sixty canoes loaded with furs valued at
two hundred thousand pounds, in return for which they had distributed
among the Indians kettles, graters, awls, needles, tin looking-glasses,
ivory combs, and knives. Even the official expedition of Saint Lusson
to take possession of the Northwest for France was to be paid for by
gifts to the Indians and return offerings of fur.
The fur trade of the Great Lakes supported not only those who took
up their dwelling on these shores, but the struggling settlements
of Canada as well. It kept up home interest in the support of these
colonies by the rich profit that it brought across the seas. In 1703
La Hontan wrote that Canada subsisted only on the trade of skins and
furs. The profits and the fascination of this pursuit robbed Canada of
its young men while it supplied it with money. An official reported,
in 1680, that eight hundred men out of a population of ten thousand
had vanished from sight into the wilderness, and that there was not a
family of any condition or quality that had not children, brothers,
uncles, or nephews among the traders. There came to be in the woods
a distinct class of men known as coureurs de bois, or rangers of the
forest, who had escaped from the restraints of civilized life and
reported themselves only once or twice a year at the trading posts.
The government tried to stem the rush of young men into the wilderness
by requiring licenses for trading with the Indians and limiting the
number to seventy-five a year; but the country was too large and remote
and the government too feeble to carry out any such policy. In the
end the rulers turned their attention instead to providing fortified
trading posts for these wanderers, first to afford defence against the
Indians, and more especially to concentrate and monopolize the trade,
protecting it from the rival Englishmen. These forts also made a claim
of possession in the regions which they commanded. Thus Mackinac,
Detroit, Niagara, Green Bay, Oswego, and a dozen minor posts sprang up.
Travellers of the eighteenth century were likely to meet on any one of
the lakes fleets of fifty or sixty canoes, heavily laden with beaver,
otter, mink, and marten skins, and paddled by Indians in their paint
and feathers, or by hardly less picturesque coureurs de bois in their
blanket coats, leathern moccasins and leggings, and scarlet sash and
cap. These men were no mere traders whose knowledge was limited to
prices and profits. They were experts not only in the science of the
woods but also in the arts of diplomacy. The success of the trade
depended on the maintenance of peace between the various Indian tribes
and groups of tribes; and the life of the individual trader, as well
as his earnings, depended on his own adaptability. There came in time
to be leaders to whom the most difficult negotiations with the Indians
were left. Daniel de Greyselon Du Luth, a prince among coureurs de
bois, was the chief hero of the early French period in the upper
country. In the summer of 1679 he made a tour of Minnesota, planting
with all ceremony the arms of France in the leading Indian villages,
many of which he was the first Frenchman to visit. At the end of the
summer he held on the shores of Lake Superior, near the site of the
present city of Duluth, a great Indian council of chiefs from all these
villages, and negotiated a treaty of peace. The city that bears his
name may well be proud of the fact that after ten years among the
Indians he entered a written protest, still preserved in the archives
of Canada, with his disapproval of the sale of whiskey and brandy
to the natives. These leaders were very important to the success of
the administration in Canada and were relied on and treated with all
respect. Their names were even sent across the ocean, as we see in the
laconic but warm commendation of Du Luth sent by the Governor of Canada
in his colonial report of 1710: “Captain Du Luth died this winter; he
was a very honest man.”
After the fall of New France, a time of chaos followed in the
wilderness. With the restraint of the strictly enforced code of French
rule removed, with a host of French traders in the woods who did not
yield to British control, and with an opportunity for rivalry and
ill-feeling between every two traders, Indians as well as white men
became demoralized and the profits decreased greatly. Then twenty-three
merchants of Montreal formed the Northwest Fur Company (1783) and took
into their employ two thousand French and other fur traders. They
traded with the Indians of the Northwest, with Mackinac as a centre.
A rival company soon started competition in the southern region of
Wisconsin, Illinois, and the Mississippi Valley. A careful statement
concerning the British trade was sent to the authorities in Canada
in 1790, when the possible future evacuation of the southern shores
of the lakes was beginning to be considered. By this estimate the
average produce of furs and skins amounted for ten years to two hundred
thousand pounds a year. How this was distributed among the various lake
posts is shown in the following table:--
_Statement concerning Trade at Detroit and Other Posts_
POUNDS
The whole Country & Posts below Montreal 30,000
The Grand River, the North Side of the Lakes
Ontario, Huron, & Superior 30,000
In the Country generally called the North
West 40,000
In the Countries to the Southward of the
Lakes, the Trade of which is principally
brought to the posts of Detroit and Michillimackinac,
there being very little Indian
Trade at Niagara 100,000
-------------------------------------------------------
As above £200,000
Dividing this general estimate into smaller districts, the estimate was
as follows:--
In the District of the Garrison of Detroit PACKS
The Fort of Detroit, Sagana & the South
Side of Lake Huron 1000
Miamis & Wabash Country 2000
Sandusky 400
-----------------------------------------------------------
Say 3400 packs of
Furrs estimated at 12£ each is £40,800
In the District of Michillimackinac:
On Lake Michigan PACKS
The Grand River 100
St. Josephs 300
Checago 100
Milwaki 120
La Bay or Green Bay, including the upper
ports of the Mississippi, the South Side
of Lake Superior 300
The Illinois Country 600
-------------------------------------------------------------
Say 3220 packs of
Furrs estimated at £20 each £60,400
-------------------------------------------------------------
Total of the two Districts £101,200
This estimate was sent to the colonial office to show that if the lake
posts were ceded to America, at least half if not seven-tenths of the
Indian trade would be lost.
The Americans were not ignorant of this great opportunity for trade.
When the lake posts were evacuated by the British in 1796, they
began to take a hand in the competition. The United States government
sent out agents, and John Jacob Astor found a field for his business
enterprise. In 1809 he organized the American Fur Company, and two
years later he bought out the Mackinaw Company and the Northwest
Company south of the boundary line. His plan to unite the Pacific
and the Great Lakes failed for the time being, and the War of 1812
interfered with his schemes; but his organization of the lake trade did
its work in turning the stream of profits southward of the border and
Americanizing Lake Superior.
The settlements built up by the fur trade were unique and amazing
when we consider their isolation in the midst of the wilderness. With
Mackinac under French rule we are somewhat familiar, having visited
it with La Salle and Saint Lusson. At Fort William, at the western
end of Lake Superior, the British merchants built an establishment
that reminds one of the feudal castles of the Old World. In 1805 the
Canadian companies awoke to the fact that the old Grand Portage,
the former gateway of the North, was on territory claimed by the
American government. They promptly demolished their old fort there,
and built Fort William, forty-five miles north of the portage. There
they established a village surrounded by a high palisade, within
which stood a big central building, a counting-house, a doctor’s
residence, stores for merchandise and depots for furs, workshops for
mechanics,--carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, and canoe
builders,--boarding-houses for traders, a powder-house and guard-house,
and not the least necessary of the many buildings, a jail. Outside the
palisade was a long wharf, a ship-building yard, a cemetery, and a
considerable line of log houses and Indian wigwams.
The great feature of the settlement, however, was the central building.
This wooden edifice stood in the middle of a spacious square and had
a long balcony, five feet from the ground. In the centre, flanked
by rows of apartments, was a great dining hall, sixty feet long by
thirty wide, where two hundred agents, partners, clerks, interpreters,
guides, and visitors could dine. Across the upper end of the hall
was stretched a very large map of the Indian country, with all the
Northwest Company’s posts and routes from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay
and the Pacific,--probably the only accurate map of that region on the
continent, save for its smaller copies in the factories themselves.
Along the sides of the room were portraits of various proprietors of
the company, a bust of Simon McTavish, a pioneer member of the company
and long its head, a full-length portrait of Nelson, and a painting of
the battle of the Nile.
To this post came every spring from Montreal two of the directors of
the company, with a retinue of cooks, bakers, clerks, and attendants,
and in the great hall from the last of May to the end of August there
was always high carnival of feasting and merriment. In this room, too,
were held the parliaments of the fur trade, when with all solemnity
the Scottish chiefs regulated the affairs of the company and shrewdly
made their bargains and estimated their earnings. About them gathered a
host of traders, coming every day out of the bleak wilderness to enjoy
the good cheer of this metropolis of the Northwest and spend their
hard-earned gains in the short summer holiday; and with these came a
legion of half-breeds, Indians, and hangers-on. It was a picturesque
and motley throng. Ross Cox, visiting there in 1817, found natives of
every part of the British Isles, of France, Germany, Italy, Denmark,
Sweden, Holland, and Switzerland, and, in the capacity of servants, of
Africa, the Sandwich Islands, and Bengal. “In their features,” he says,
“all shades of the human species,--in their dress, all the varied hues
of the rainbow.”
If the paddle and moccasin of the fur trader had been the pathfinder
for the lake region, the axe of the lumberman and the pick of the miner
who followed them opened up and cleared the wilderness. The fur trader
had discovered and explored the wilderness. He was driven out by the
lumberman and miner, who spoiled his field with such speed that in a
decade or two fur trading as a leading industry was banished to more
distant regions. The newcomers made a place for their successors, the
pioneer farmers and settlers, by clearing and preparing the country.
Extensive lumbering and mining operations came only with the Americans.
For two hundred years the French and English tried to keep the western
part of the lake region a wilderness and preserve for hunting. The
French did it by instinct, for they preferred the wild, free life it
offered them; the English did it by policy. In the Parliament of Great
Britain leading legislators argued for the restriction of immigration,
so that the hunting-grounds should not be disturbed. By a royal
proclamation of 1763 the valley of the Ohio and the country about the
Great Lakes was declared closed to settlement or purchase of land
without special leave or license. A forest preserve was created, and
the northwest country was designated by the English “the habitation of
bears and beavers.” Only with the coming of the Americans was the lake
region developed, and the first signs of the approaching civilization
were the cutting down of forests and the mining of copper and iron
deposits.
Two great divisions are recognized in the forest distribution of the
United States,--the Atlantic and the Pacific. These are separated by
the great interior plains and prairies of the continent. The line of
cleavage between timber land and prairie is nowhere so defined that
it does not have inlets of prairie land in the forest region, and
stretches of wooded land in the plain, but the Mississippi River is
in general the western boundary of the Atlantic forest area, and the
states of the Great Lakes are all included in this section. Within this
eastern forest there are several belts of different kinds of woods. Two
of these are in the lake states. The northern belt, largely of white
pine mixed with red or Norway pine, stretches from New England across
New York State and northern Pennsylvania to Wisconsin and the eastern
part of Minnesota, and is broken only by Lake Erie. This tract has
been the chief source of supply for the United States. South of this
white pine belt runs a central hardwood section, where are particularly
valuable forests of hickory, maple, oak, and walnut. This section
extends from Niagara eastward into New York, and westward across the
northern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. As it was in the natural
line of migration both from the rivers of the south and the lakes of
the north, this central belt was cut long before the pine sections were
touched. It fell out in this way, therefore, that for three-quarters of
a century these states have been in the main agricultural, rather than
forest lands.
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have had a long history of lumber
prosperity. The first railroads of Michigan were welcomed by the
settlers as a means of transporting lumber from the logging-camps and
sawmills that were springing up all through the central part of the
state. The northern industry was taken care of by the lake vessels,
which took the lumber from the ports on the shore through the straits
of Mackinac. Lake Superior, which had long been a centre for the
shifting fur trade, was settled permanently for the first time by the
men who were brought by lumber interests. The Mackinac region, the
Saginaw and St. Croix rivers, and many smaller streams became the
scenes during the winter months of a busy and picturesque activity, and
have been associated ever since in fact and fiction with the romance
as well as the profit of the lumber industry. As Rochester in the East
had begun with a sawmill, so Duluth and Superior in the West came
into being as supply stations for the rivermen, and their prosperity
depended in 1870 so largely on the lumber traffic that the contest over
the railroads, which each place wanted on its side of the state line,
was determined by the interests and preferences of the lumber kings.
No accurate record of the entire amount of lumber produced was made in
the first decades of the industry, but in 1890 Michigan, Wisconsin,
and Minnesota were cutting more than one-third of all the lumber
supply of the United States, and to this Michigan contributed one-half
the amount credited to the three states, and one-fifth of the whole
product of the country. Four-fifths of Michigan was then reported to be
forested,--a record leading that of any other state.
As early as 1850 the Michigan lumber business was so large as to
attract attention throughout commercial centres of the country, and
it grew with the amazing rapidity of all western development. In 1854
there were in the state sixty-one sawmills with an output of 108
million feet; in 1872 there were fifteen hundred sawmills, to say
nothing of all the other activities incident on lumbering, such as
making shingles and planing. By 1881 the amount had jumped to nearly
forty million feet, and it was calculated that the output of Michigan
mills that year would have loaded a train of cars nearly twenty-five
hundred miles long.
These figures have come from the western states, but here as everywhere
else the cities and states of the lakes show their interdependence.
Buffalo, at the eastern extremity of Lake Erie, becomes one of the
leading lumber markets of the world by reason of the immense shipments
that come to it from the upper lakes. In 1907 Buffalo had one hundred
and thirty-two lumber firms, and an annual output from her yards of
over two hundred million feet of pine and over one hundred and fifty
million feet of hardwood. This product was made up of the best species
of pines, sought for by all dealers, and the hardwood embraced every
known variety of American trees.
It is beginning to be evident that this pace cannot be kept up without
exhausting the forests. In 1903 the cut from the three northern states
was not fifty million feet, a smaller cut than any year since 1878
and hardly more than half that of 1890. To the danger involved in
reckless cutting without reforesting our people and legislators have
become aroused, and these states are matching their past leadership in
output by a corresponding activity in protecting their forest areas.
Minnesota led in having an effective system of fire-wardens, and each
state is creating forestry commissions and buying up preserves. In thus
rescuing from destruction our forests no one can be too prompt or too
energetic. Less than a hundred years of occupation of the lake region
must not wipe out this industry or destroy the natural beauty and
resources of the country. The fur trade had to go before the advance of
civilization; the lumber industry must not be allowed to follow in its
wake.
The fur trade was at its height in 1820 and was seriously on the wane
by 1835; the lumber industry was of a size to be reckoned with by 1830;
in the next decade, between 1840 and 1850, the mineral industry came
into existence. The earliest explorers had known of the presence in the
Lake Superior region of large deposits of virgin copper. References are
made to these deposits in the Jesuit “Relations.” The first attempt at
mining was made in 1770 by Alexander Henry, the trader at Mackinac,
after the Indian wars were over, but he was not successful.
With the coming of the Americans, copper mining began in earnest.
Indeed, it was said by a friend, who told the story twenty years after
the conversation, that Benjamin Franklin told him that when he was
drawing the treaty of peace in Paris he had access to the journals
and charts of a corps of French engineers who had been exploring Lake
Superior, and that he drew the line through Lake Superior to include
the best and largest supply of copper in the American possessions.
“The time will come,” said Franklin, “when drawing that line will be
considered the greatest service I ever rendered my country.”
Copper and silver were the minerals whose discovery created the most
enthusiasm, and several companies were formed for their mining in the
thirties and forties after the expedition of Governor Cass. Of these at
the time of the Civil War only two were paying dividends. In 1865 the
Calumet and Hecla mines were started and began to develop that part of
the rich upper peninsula of Michigan known as Keweenaw Point. From that
time the mines have sent out yearly thousands of tons, and millions of
dollars are realized every year from them. Until 1880, when copper was
found in Montana and Arizona, Michigan was the only source of supply
in the United States, and sent out five-sixths of the nation’s whole
product. Since that time her output has trebled, but owing to the great
increase of mining in the West this tremendous tonnage of copper is
to-day only one-fourth of the total, although still a most important
factor in the contribution of the lake region to the wealth of the
country.
[Illustration: An Early Lake Superior Copper Mine]
The presence of iron ore in the Lake Superior country was hardly
suspected until after 1840. All companies were formed to mine copper,
silver, or gold. The state geologist made no mention of iron in
his first report in 1840, but in September, 1844, a party of
government surveyors running the lines of a township twelve miles west
of Marquette, noticed the deflection of their compass needle. The
party was under the leadership of Mr. Burt, the inventor of the solar
compass, and he was overjoyed to find his instrument working according
to his predictions. The deflection was so great that he summoned his
party and sent them out in all directions to search for the iron which
he was convinced must exist in large quantities in the near vicinity.
Every one of them returned in a short time with specimens of the ore.
Thus was discovered the first of the famous ranges that to-day produce
one-third of all the iron mined in the United States.
At the time of the discovery of iron deposits there were not over
fifty people in Marquette County. Expeditions were fitted out in
each succeeding year, and companies began to operate the mines. They
worked against great natural obstacles in the remote wilderness.
It is hard for us to realize how far out of the world this country
seemed at that time. When Michigan was admitted as a state in 1837,
the reception of the upper peninsula in compensation for a cession to
Ohio of the well-known Toledo tract was regarded with the greatest
dissatisfaction. The “State Gazetteer” of that year spoke of the
new possession as a wild tract of twenty thousand miles of howling
wilderness, while one of the political songs of the time told with
scorn how the people were being coerced into trading away the southern
land for “that poor frozen land of Michigan.” Within twenty years that
sentiment underwent a swift and radical change.
The first companies struggled along in the wilderness carrying their
ore to a forge on the Carp River, bringing it first by Indian trail
and then by wagon road twelve miles down to the waterside, where it
was loaded on sailing vessels by being put on wheelbarrows and rolled
up a steep plank. In 1852 the Marquette Iron Company shipped six
barrels by this laborious method to Cleveland, which was the first ever
received from Lake Superior. The first considerable shipment was one
of five thousand tons three years later. Then the great panic of 1857
stopped people for the time being from venturing their money in new
and unproved enterprises; but the Civil War created a great demand for
iron, and from that time the industry has flourished.
When transportation facilities were needed, the “Soo” Canal was built,
and at that very time Mr. Heman B. Ely began an agitation for the
building of a railroad in this region. Owing to his influence and under
his direction the Iron Mountain Road was built from Marquette to the
shore of Lake Superior, the first road in the whole northern country.
Mr. Ely was well known in other lake states, as well as being one of
the leading pioneers in the north. He had built the first telegraph
lines from Buffalo to Detroit and from Cleveland to Pittsburg, had been
president of a railroad company at Cleveland whose holdings were the
foundation of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, and was director of
the Northern Pacific. He was in all his activities a leader to whom the
Great Lakes owe much. Railroads built during these years in Ohio and
Pennsylvania helped to solve the problem of iron transportation, while
the freight traffic in iron ore helped these young roads to live. The
enormous demand for iron, due to the great era of railroad building,
made furnaces spring up in the Cleveland, Mahoning, and Shenango
valleys, and the Michigan industry was fairly launched.
For a long time only the Michigan and Wisconsin ranges were worked,
but in 1875 presence of large deposits in the Vermilion Range of
Minnesota was brought by Mr. George Stone to the attention of
Charlemagne Tower, a prominent lawyer and business man of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Tower had had large experience in coal mining, both in the
examination of coal fields in Pennsylvania for his cases in the law
courts, and as an owner and manager of companies. He sent an expedition
to explore the Minnesota ranges, and becoming convinced of their wealth
proceeded at once to their development. The friends and business
associates whom he endeavored to enlist in this venture were sceptical,
so Mr. Tower had to proceed single-handed in his task.
[Illustration: Iron Ore at a Lake Superior Port. From Stereograph,
copyright, 1906, by Underwood & Underwood, New York. Depicting iron ore
in a series of railroad cars.]
It is little wonder that men doubted the practicability of Mr.
Tower’s schemes; it is the more worthy of admiration that he dared
to undertake them amid the almost insuperable obstacles. To plant a
mining establishment ninety miles north of Duluth and seventy miles
west in a direct line from Lake Superior in a region that had no
intermediate connections with even the outskirts of civilization
seemed an impossible task. The country was densely wooded, with
only very small streams and impassable swamps breaking the forest
stretch. Provisions, supplies, tools,--everything needed for the camp
must be taken either in midwinter over frozen ground and snow when
the temperature was usually forty degrees below zero, or in summer on
the backs of men and in Indian canoes over a most circuitous route. A
railroad must be built to carry the ore, and dock and harbor facilities
must be provided on Lake Superior. All this Charlemagne Tower undertook
at the age of seventy-three, and carried through to a wonderful
success. He built a railroad from the mines to Two Harbors on Lake
Superior; he selected Two Harbors as the best place for his docks,
roundhouses, machine-shops, and sawmills; and he opened up his mines in
the iron district.
In August, 1884, the railroad was finished and the first shipments
of ore were made. These shipments were shrewdly distributed among
manufacturers of three states leading in iron industries, Illinois,
Ohio, and Pennsylvania, instead of being sent to a single dealer. They
met with instant favor from all the companies. The quality of all the
northern ranges had been found to be very fine. The percentage of
metallic iron contained in the best red hematites shipped from the
Michigan mines had been over sixty per cent; this first shipment from
Minnesota contained sixty-eight per cent, and with its success the
future of the country was assured. The country opened up rapidly, the
railroad was carried to Duluth, and a town sprang up about the docks at
Two Harbors. In the first year 68,000 tons were shipped; three years
later the output had jumped to 400,000 tons, and Minnesota had been
transformed in four years from a non-mineral district into one of the
foremost iron markets of the United States. Fifteen hundred men were
working in its mines, and five thousand were directly or indirectly
employed by the industry. In 1887 the Mesabi Range began to be opened
up, and together the five ranges,--the Marquette, Gogebic, Menominee,
Vermilion, and Mesabi,--located in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota,
supply to-day more iron than any single country in the world.
This is the history of three of the leading industries of the Great
Lakes. In the nineteenth century there came to be many more which have
contributed much to the prosperity of the region. From the earliest
occupation by the French the Great Lakes have offered not only a
comfortable means of livelihood to the settler who came to their
shores, but also wealth to the country which possessed them.