PART I

The Ships, their Owners, their Sailors, and their Cargoes

I

The Building of the Ships

Not long ago, I was on a Lake freighter pounding her way up Huron on

the “thousand-mile highway” that leads to Duluth. Beside me was a man

who had climbed from poverty to millions. He was riding in his own

ship. His interests burned ten thousand tons of coal a year. He was one

of the ore kings of the North--as rough as the iron he dug, filled to

the brim with enthusiasm and animal energy of the Lake breed; a man who

had helped to make the Lakes what they are, as scores of others like

him have done. Before and behind us there trailed the smoke of a dozen

of the steel leviathans of the Inland Seas. I had asked him a question,

and there was the fire of a great pride in his eyes when he answered.

“It would make a nation by itself--this Lake country!” he said. “And it

would be America. It’s America from Buffalo to Duluth, every inch of

it, and the people who are in it are Americans. That’s American smoke

you see off there, and American ships are making it; they’re run by a

thousand or more American captains, and they’re Americans fore ’n’

aft, too. We’ve got only eight States along the Lakes, but if we should

secede to-morrow the world would find us the heart and power of the

nation. That’s how American we are!”

This is the patriotism one finds in the Lake country, from the

roaring furnaces of the East to the vast ore beds of Minnesota. It

is representative of the spirit that rules the Inland Seas; it is

this spirit that has built an empire, and is building a vaster empire

to-day, along the edges of the world’s greatest fresh-water highways.

[Illustration: The First Step in the Making of a Ship--Laying the “Keel

Blocks.”]

With more than thirty-four millions of people living in the States

bordering on them, possessing one third of the total tonnage of North

America, and saving to the people of the United States five hundred

million dollars each year, or six dollars for every man, woman, and

child in the country, one of the most inexplainable mysteries of the

century exists in the fact that the Great Lakes of to-day are as little

known to the vast majority of Americans as they were a quarter of a

century ago. While revolutions have been working in almost all lines of

industry, while States have been made and cities born, America’s great

Inland Seas have remained unwatched and unknown except by a comparative

few. Upon them have grown the greatest industries of the nation, yet

the national ignorance concerning them can hardly find a parallel in

history. Were they to disappear to-morrow the industrial supremacy of

the republic would receive a blow from which it could never recover.

The steel industry, as a dominant commercial factor, would almost cease

to exist. One half of the total population of the country would be

seriously affected, and America would fall far behind in the commercial

race of the nations.

Notwithstanding these things, not one person in ten knows what the

Great Lakes stand for to-day. While a thousand writers have sung of the

greatness and romance of the watery wastes that encircle continents,

none has told of those “vast unsalted seas” which mean more to

eighty-five millions of Americans than any one of the five oceans.

What has been written has been for those who find their commerce upon

them; for the owners of ships and the masters of men; for the kings of

ore and grain--a little statistical matter here and a little there,

but nothing for the millions who are not at hand to feel the pulse of

traffic or to see the great commercial pageant as it passes before

their eyes. Even of those who live in the States bordering the Great

Lakes but few know that these fresh-water highways of traffic possess

the greatest shipping port in the world, that upon them floats the

largest single fleet of freighters in existence, that in their great

construction yards shipbuilding has been reduced to a science as

nowhere else on earth, and that in their life the elements of romance

and tragedy play their parts even as on the big oceans that divide

hemispheres.

In a small way the general lack of knowledge of the Great Lakes is

excusable, for their development has been so rapid and so stupendous

that people have not yet grasped its significance. Within the last

quarter of a century or less they have become the industrial magnets

of the nation. Along their shores have sprung up our greatest cities,

with populations increasing more rapidly than those of New York,

Boston, Philadelphia, or San Francisco. In the eight States which have

ports on them is more than one third of the total population of the

North American continent. Along their three thousand three hundred and

eighty-five miles of United States shore line will be built this year

more than one half of the tonnage constructed in America, and over

their highways will travel at least six times as much freight as all

the nations of the world carried through the Suez Canal in 1908.

Just what this means it is hard for one to conceive when told only in

figures. Perhaps in no better way can the immensity and importance of

their traffic be described than by showing briefly one of the ways in

which they earned a “dividend” of six dollars for every person living

in the United States in 1907. This immense “dividend” did not go into

the coffers of corporations, but actually, though indirectly, into the

pockets of the people.

[Illustration: Second Step--Laying the Keel, or Bottom of the Ship, on

the “Keel Blocks.”]

It is only fair to the Lakes and the vast interests upon them to use

the figures of 1907 instead of those of 1908. In the following pages

it is the author’s intention to paint conditions as they actually

exist upon our Inland Seas _under normal conditions_. During 1908,

the financial depression that swept over the entire country produced

conditions upon the Lakes which, in the author’s opinion, will not

be seen again for a great many years to come. “Panic figures” give a

wrong impression. Those of 1908 would show a falling off of business in

various branches of Lake traffic of from twenty to sixty per cent. As

one of the best known vessel-men in Duluth said to me recently, “We can

count that the Lakes have lost just one year of progress because of the

panic.” In other words, it is highly probable that the business of the

Lakes will in this year of 1909 be just about what it should have been

under normal conditions in 1908, and there are many who believe that

within the next two years the loss of the “panic year” will be more

than discounted.

For this reason, in order to show how the Lakes earn their tremendous

dividend for the people of the United States, we use the figures of

1907, when traffic was normal. In that year, for instance, it cost a

little over ten cents to ship a bushel of grain from Chicago to New

York by rail, and only five and one half cents by way of the Lakes and

the Erie Canal. This saving on transportation of five cents a bushel

is divided between the producing farmer and the consuming public.

It is a “nickel on which no trust can place its hands”--and this

nickel, when multiplied by the number of bushels of grain produced in

Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan, reaches the

stupendous figure of ninety-eight million dollars! In the matter of

iron ore the saving is still greater. Were it not for this saving all

steel necessities, from rails to common kitchen forks, would advance

tremendously in price, and the United States would not be able to

control the steel markets of the world. To-day you can ship a ton of

ore from Duluth to Ashtabula, Conneaut, or Cleveland, a distance of

nearly one thousand miles, for less than you can send by rail that

same ton from one of these ports to Pittsburg, a distance of only one

hundred and thirty miles. In other words, while it costs about eighty

cents to send a ton of ore from the vast ranges of the North to an Erie

port by ship, the rail rate is seven times greater, which means that

the vessels of the Great Lakes saved in 1907 on ore alone no less than

one hundred and seventy-three million dollars!

[Illustration: The Growing Ship.]

In another way than in this annual saving in cost of transportation

are the Lakes fighting a great and almost unappreciated battle for

the people. They are to-day the country’s greatest safeguard against

excessive railroad charges. They are the governors of the nation’s

internal commerce, and will be for all time to come. There is not a

State north of the Ohio River and east of the Rocky Mountains which

is not affected by their cheap transportation, and the day is not

distant when hundreds of millions of bushels of grain raised in the

Canadian west will go to the seaboard by way of the lake and canal

route. At the present time there are about two hundred and forty

thousand miles of railroad in the United States, constructed and

equipped at a cost of more than thirteen billion dollars; yet, on the

basis of ton miles, the traffic on the Lakes will in 1909 be one sixth

as great as on all the roads in the country.

These facts are given here to show in a small way the gigantic part

the Great Lakes are playing to-day in the industrial progress of the

nation. Yet, as paradoxical as it may seem, the nation itself has

hardly recognised the truth. The “helping” hand that the Government

has reached out has been pathetically weak. In history to come it must

be recorded that great men--men of brain and brawn and courage--have

“built up” the Lakes, and not the Government. And these men, scores and

hundreds of them, are continuing the work to-day. Since the dawn of

independence to the present time, the United States has expended for

all harbours and waterways on the Great Lakes above the Niagara Falls

less than ninety million dollars, yet each year this same Government

hands out one hundred and forty million dollars to the army and navy

and one hundred and twenty-seven million dollars to the postal service!

In the face of this is the astonishing fact that, in 1907, the saving

in freight rates on Lake Superior commerce alone exceeded by a million

dollars the total sum expended by the Government on the Inland Seas

since the day the first ship was launched upon them!

In this building of the “greater empire” of the Lake country there

is now no rest. Wherever ships are built the stocks are filled. From

the uttermost end of Erie to the shipyards of the north--in Buffalo,

Lorain, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, West Superior, Chicago, and

Manitowoc--the making of American ships is being rushed as never

before. In the larger yards powerful arc-light systems allow of work

by night as well as by day. The roaring of forges, the hammering of

steel, the tumult of labouring men, and the rumbling of giant cranes

are seldom stilled. With almost magical quickness a ten-thousand-ton

monster of steel rises on the stocks--and is gone. Another takes its

place, and even as they follow one another into the sea, racing to fill

demands, there still comes the cry: “Ships--ships--we want more ships!”

[Illustration: Vessel Almost Ready for Launching.]

In the year 1908, it is estimated that very nearly three fifths of

the total ship tonnage built in the United States was constructed in

these busy yards of the Great Lakes. As early as January they were

choked with orders for 1908 delivery, and even that early a number of

them had orders running well into 1909. A brief glance at the vessel

construction of the Lakes during the six years up to and including

1907 will give a good idea of the rapid growth of this industry along

the Inland Seas. In 1902, the product was forty-two vessels, thirty-two

of them being bulk freighters. In 1903, forty-two of the fifty vessels

built were bulk freight steamers, with a carrying capacity of 213,250

tons. In 1904, the output was only thirteen vessels, but in 1905

twenty-nine bulk freighters with a carrying capacity of 260,000 tons

were built. In 1906, there were turned out from the Great Lakes yards

forty-seven vessels, of which forty were bulk freighters, and in 1907,

the total was fifty-six vessels, including forty bulk freighters, three

package freighters, and one passenger steamer. The early months of

1908 saw contracts in force for the construction of twenty-five bulk

freighters for delivery before 1909.

Taking the forty bulk freighters built in 1907, one gets a fair idea

of the immensity of Lake traffic. They are but a drop in the bucket--a

single year’s contribution to the great argosies of the Inland Seas;

yet these forty ships have a carrying capacity of three hundred and

sixty thousand tons. In other words, within four days after loading at

Duluth they could be discharging this mountain of ore at Erie ports. To

carry this same “cargo” by rail would require over three hundred trains

of thirty cars each, or a single train seventy miles in length!

But this is not particularly astonishing when one is studying the

commerce of the Great Lakes. True, it represents considerably over a

half of the tonnage built in the United States during 1907, but even

at that it “isn’t much to shout about,” as one builder of ships said

to me. These men of the Lakes never express surprise at the wonders

of the Inland Seas. They are used to them. They meet with them every

day of their lives. On either coast these same “wonders” would be

made much of. But the Lake breed is not the breed that boasts--unless

you drag opinions from them. Why, over in Cleveland there is one man

who directs the destinies of twice as many ships as the forty-eight

mentioned above--a single commercial navy that can move six hundred and

forty-eight thousand tons of ore in one trip, or enough to “make up” a

train of sixteen thousand two hundred cars, which train would be one

hundred and twenty miles in length! This man’s name is Coulby--Harry

Coulby, President and General Manager of the Pittsburg Steamship

Company, Lake arm of the United States Steel Corporation. There was

a time when Coulby was a poor mechanic, working his ten hours a day.

Then he developed “talent” and went into a shipyard draughting-room.

Now he is undeniably the king of Lake shipping. His word is law in the

directing of more than a hundred vessels, the greatest fleet in the

world; and it is law in other ways, for it is common talk in marine

circles that he (with the trust behind him) is responsible for nearly

every important move on the Great Lakes. He is the eye and the ear

and the mouth of the trust, and it is the trust that practically fixes

the ore rates for each season, and does other things of interest. If

these ships of Coulby’s were placed end to end they would reach a

distance of eight miles! During the eight months of Lake navigation

they can transport as much freight over the “thousand-mile highway”

as the combined fleets of all nations take through the Suez Canal in

twelve! Yet who has heard of Coulby? How many know of the gigantic

fleet he controls? A few thousand Lake people, and that is all. A

magnificent illustration is this of the national ignorance concerning

the Great Lakes.

[Illustration: A Monster of Steel and Iron Ready to be Launched.

Weight 9,500,000 lbs.]

And Coulby is only one of many. The fleet he controls is only one of

many. The Lakes breed great men--and they breed great fleets. How

many of our millions have heard of J. C. Gilchrist and the Gilchrist

fleet?--a man in one way unique in the marine history of the world, and

a fleet which, if plying between New York and Liverpool, would be one

of the present-day sensations. Gilchrist, like Coulby, “worked up from

the depths,” and to-day, as the head of the Gilchrist Transportation

Company, he holds down seventy-five distinct jobs! Seventy-five owners

have placed seventy-five ships under his generalship, and from each

he receives a salary of one thousand dollars a season, or a total of

seventy-five thousand dollars. He is one of the Napoleons of the Lakes.

He handles ships and men like a magician; his holds are never empty;

his dividends are always large. There was a day when one thousand

dollars looked like a fortune to Gilchrist, and when eight dollars a

week was an income of which he was mightily proud. That was when, from

away down in Michigan, he turned his face northward toward the Lakes,

filled with big ambition and a desire for adventure, but with little

more than what he carried on his back. He got work as a sailor before

the mast at forty dollars a month and board. From there he graduated

to “bell hop” on a passenger steamer, and continued to graduate until

the owners of great ships began to see in him those things which they

themselves did not possess, and so handed over to him the destiny of

the second greatest fleet of freight carriers in the world.

Such men as Coulby and Gilchrist and the ships they have would make the

fame of any nation on the high seas. They and men like Captain John

Mitchell, who is the head of a fleet of twenty ships, J. H. Sheadle, G.

Ashley Tomlinson, and G. L. Douglas, are of the kind that are choking

the Great Lakes shipyards with orders, while along the ocean seaboards

stocks are rotting and builders of ocean marine are starving. Cleveland

claims the headquarters of both of these immense fleets--and Cleveland

is fortunate in many other things. She counts her strong men of the

Lakes by the score. She is a great owner of ships, a great buyer of

ships, and a great builder.

[Illustration: The Launching.]

But when it comes to the production of “bottoms,” Cleveland and

all other Lake cities must give way to Detroit. There was a day when

Detroit was one of the important ports of the Lakes, but that day is

long past. Now she is the centre of shipbuilding. In 1907, there was

built at Detroit more tonnage than in any other city in the United

States. Of the vessels launched, twenty-one of the largest took their

first dip in or very near Detroit. The tonnage of these vessels

aggregated over one half of the total tonnage of the forty freighters

constructed for the season’s delivery.

It has been said that Detroit is a great shipbuilding city by accident,

and there is a good deal of truth in the assertion. Six years ago the

American Shipbuilding Company, the greatest trust of its kind in the

world, held undisputed sway over the Lakes. It knew no competition. No

combination of capital had dared to grapple with it. With eleven huge

construction yards strung along the Lakes between Buffalo, Duluth, and

Chicago, it held a monopoly of the shipbuilding industry. It was at

this time that one of the country’s great industrial generals sprang up

in Detroit. Then he was practically unknown; now as a leader and master

of men, he is known in every city of this country where iron and steel

are used. His name is Antonio C. Pessano. Detroit must always be proud

of this man. He must count in the history of her future greatness, and

always her citizens should be thankful that he and his indomitable

courage did not first appear in Buffalo, Cleveland, or some other Lake

city. Mr. Pessano’s ambition was to build at Detroit the most modern

shipbuilding plant in the world. Some people laughed at him. Others

pitied him. The trust twiddled its fingers, so to speak, and smiled. In

the face of it all Mr. Pessano won the confidence of such Gibraltars of

industrial finance as George H. Russel, Colonel Frank J. Hecker, Joseph

Boyer, William G. Mather, Henry B. Ledyard, and others--won it to the

extent of raising one million five hundred thousand dollars, with which

he built the greatest shipbuilding yards on the Lakes and which have

developed since then into the greatest in America, employing more than

three thousand men.

Mr. Pessano’s shipbuilding rival is the president of the trust. His

name is Wallace, “son of Bob Wallace, the elder,” Lake men will tell

you, for Robert Wallace, the father, was a shipbuilder himself for a

great many years. He is very proud of his boy.

“I had three boys,” said he. “Two of ’em went to college, but Jim _he_

wanted an education, so he didn’t take much stock in books, but got out

among men. That was what made Jim!”

[Illustration: The “Thomas F. Cole,” 11,200 Tons, Being Fitted with

Engines and Boilers after her Launching.

The “Cole” is the largest ship on the Lakes. Length, 605 feet 5 inches.]

To-day it is “Jim,” or James C. Wallace, of Cleveland, as he is better

known, who is the champion shipbuilder of the world. He is President

of the American Shipbuilding Company. Probably in no other part of the

world is the romantic more largely associated with modern progress than

on the Great Lakes, and in these two men--Wallace and Pessano--it is

revealed in a singular way. Together they govern shipbuilding on the

Inland Seas. Both of these great men began in the dinner-pail brigade.

They worked in overalls and grease, not for “experience,” but because

they had to; they pulled and heaved with common labourers; they rose,

step by step, from the lowest ranks--and to-day, monuments to courage

and ambition, they are the earth’s two greatest builders of ships. In

a novel such characters would be declared almost impossible. But the

Lakes breed such as these. There are others whose careers have been

even more remarkable, and I will tell of these later--men whose rise

from poverty to wealth and power rivals in romance and adventure the

most glowing stories of the Goulds and Astors.

Mr. Pessano, “the independent,” does not entirely monopolise Detroit

shipbuilding, for Wallace was there ahead of him with one of the

trust’s big yards, which is known under the name of the Detroit

Shipbuilding Company. It materially assists in the city’s greatness,

and will continue to do so more and more each year. During 1907, it

launched six big freighters in Detroit, and that city, together with

eight other Lake cities, heaps blessings on the trust. For the trust

is most generous and unprejudiced in its distribution of yards. It

builds ships in one huge yard at Superior, in two at Chicago, two

at Cleveland, and in one at Lorain, Buffalo, Wyandotte, Detroit,

and Milwaukee. Among these cities it has distributed over fifteen

million dollars in capital, and it is estimated that it affords a

livelihood for between fifty and sixty thousand people. In 1907,

the different yards built twice the tonnage of the next two largest

shipbuilding concerns in the world combined--those of Doxford and Sons,

of Sunderland, and Harland and Wolff, of Belfast, whose aggregate

tonnage was not over one hundred and fifty thousand. The astonishing

rate at which Lake shipbuilding is increasing is shown in the fact

that the trust’s production for 1907 was twice that of 1905, which

was 117,482 tons, divided among twenty vessels. A new factor has come

into Lake shipbuilding which will count considerably in the future.

This is the Toledo Shipbuilding Company, which purchased the Craig

yards in 1906, and which has expended a great deal of money since that

time in perfecting its plant, until now it has one of the most modern

construction yards on the Lakes.

[Illustration: Her First Trip--Off for the Ore Regions of the North.]

It would seem that this activity in Lake shipyards must soon supply

demands, but such will not be the case for many years to come. While

the depression of 1908 has cast its gloom, Lake men cannot see the end

of their prosperity. They are in the midst of fortune-making days on

the Inland Seas. To-day one of the steel ships of the Lakes is as good

as a gold mine, and will continue to be so for a quarter of a century

to come. The shipyards are growing each year, but the increase of

tonnage is outstripping them, and until cargo and ships are more evenly

balanced the owners of vessels on the Great Lakes must be counted

among the most fortunate men in the world.

It is only natural that these conditions should have developed

shipbuilding on the Lakes to a science unparalleled in any other part

of the earth. I once had the good fortune to talk with a shipbuilder

from the Clyde. He had heard much of the Lakes. He had built ships for

them. He had heard of the wonders of shipbuilding in their cities. So

he had come across to see for himself.

“I had thought that your ships would not compare with ours,” he said.

“You build them so quickly that I thought they would surely be inferior

to those of the Clyde. But they are the best in the world; I will say

that--the best in the world, and you build them like magicians! You lay

their keels to-day--to-morrow they are gone!”

This is almost true. A ten-thousand-ton leviathan of the Lakes can

now be built almost as quickly as carpenters can put up an eight-room

house. Any one of several shipyards can get out one of these monsters

of marine commerce within ninety days, and the record stands with a

ten-thousand-ton vessel that was launched fifty-three days after her

keel was laid! One hardly realises what this means until he knows of

a few of the things that go into the construction of such a vessel.

Take the steamer _Thomas F. Cole_, for instance, launched early in 1907

by the Great Lakes Engineering Works. This vessel is the giant of the

Lakes, and is six hundred and five feet and five inches long. She is

fifty-eight feet beam and thirty-two feet deep, and in a single trip

can carry as great a load as three hundred freight cars, or twelve

thousand tons. In her are nine million five hundred thousand pounds of

iron and steel! What does this mean? It means that if every man, woman,

and child in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were to join

in carrying this material to a certain place, each person would have

to transport one pound. In the mass would be eight hundred thousand

rivets, ranging in size from five eighths of an inch to one and one

eighth inches in diameter.

One who is investigating Lake shipbuilding for the first time will

be astonished to discover that the modern freighter is in many ways

a huge private yacht. They are almost without exception owned by men

of wealth, and their cabins are fitted out even more luxuriously than

those of passenger boats, for while these latter are intended for the

use of the public, the passenger accommodations of freighters are

planned for the friends and families of the owners. So above the deck

which conceals ten thousand tons of ore the vessel may be a floating

palace. The keenest rivalry exists between owners as to who shall

possess the finest ships, and fortunes are expended in the fittings of

cabins alone. Nothing that money can secure is omitted. In the words of

a builder: “The modern freighter is like a modern hotel--only much more

luxuriously furnished.” There is an electric light system throughout

the ship; the cabins are equipped with telephones; there is steam heat;

there are kitchens with the latest cooking devices, elegantly appointed

dining-rooms; there are state-rooms which are like the apartments in a

palace, and other things which one would not expect to see beyond the

black and forbidding steel walls of these fortune-makers of the Lakes.

With the first peep into modern methods one realises that the romantic

shipbuilding days of old are gone. No longer does the shape, beauty,

and speed of a vessel depend upon the eyes and hands of the men who are

actually putting it together. For the ship of to-day is built in the

engineering offices. In the draughting-room skilled men lay out the

plans and make the models for a ship just as an architect does for a

house, and when these plans are done they go to a great building which

reminds one of a vast dance hall, and which is known as the “mould

loft.” Seemingly the place is not used. Yet at the very moment you are

looking about, wondering what this vacancy has to do with shipbuilding,

you are walking on the decks of a ship. All about upon the floor, if

you notice carefully, you will see hundreds and thousands of lines,

and every one of these lines represents a line of the freighter which

within three or four months will be taking her trial trip. Here upon

the floor is drawn the “line ship” in exactly the same size as the

vessel which is to be built. Over certain sections of this “line ship”

men place very thin pieces of basswood, which they frame together

in the identical size and shape of the ship’s plates. By the use of

these moulds, or templates, the workman can see just where the rivet

holes should be, and wherever a rivet is to go he puts a little spot

of paint. These model plates are then numbered and sent to the “plate

department,” where the real sheets of steel are made to conform with

them and where the one million five hundred thousand or more rivet

holes are punched. With the plates ready, the real ship quickly takes

size and form.

Some morning a little army of men begins work where to the ordinary

observer there is nothing but piles of steel and big timbers. From a

distance the scene reminds one of a partly depleted lumber yard. On one

side of this, and within a few yards of the water of a slip, are first

set up with mathematical accuracy a number of square timbers called

“keel blocks.” Upon these blocks will rest the bottom of the ship, and

from them to the water’s edge run long shelving timbers, or “ways,”

down which she will slide when ready for launching.

[Illustration: This Shows Some of the 800,000 Rivets that Go to the

Making of a 10,000-Ton Leviathan of the Inland Seas.]

Children frequently play with blocks which, when placed together

according to the numbers on them, form a map of the United States.

This is modern shipbuilding--in a way. It is on the same idea. There

is a proper place for every steel plate in the yards, and the numbers

on them are what locate them in the ship. A giant crane runs overhead,

reaches down, seizes a certain plate, rumbles back, to hover for

a moment over the growing “floor,” lowers its burden--and the iron

workers do the rest. Within a few days work has reached a point where

you begin to wonder, and for the first time, perhaps, you realise what

an intricate affair a great ship really is, and what precautions are

taken to keep it from sinking in collision or storm. You begin to see

that a Lake freighter is what might be described as two ships, one

built within the other. As the vessel increases in size, as the sides

of it, as well as the bottom, are put together, there are two little

armies of men at work--one on the outer ship and one on the inner.

From the bottom and sides of the first steel shell of the ship there

extend upward and inward heavy steel supports, upon which are laid the

plates of the “inner ship.” In the space between these two walls will

be carried water ballast. The chambers into which it is divided are the

life-preservers of the vessel. A dozen holes may be punched into her,

but just as long as only this outer and protecting ship suffers, and

the inner ship is not perforated, the carrier and her ten-thousand-ton

cargo will keep afloat.

When the construction of the vessel has reached a point where men

can work on the inner as well as the outer hull, it is not uncommon

for six hundred to eight hundred workmen to be engaged on her at one

time. Frequently as high as one hundred gangs of riveters, of four men

each, are at work simultaneously, and at such times the pounding of

the automatic riveting machines sounds at the distance of half a mile

like a battery of Gatling guns in action. So the work continues until

every plate is in place and the vessel is ready for launching, which

is the most exciting moment in the career of the ship--unless at some

future day she meets a tragic end at sea. One by one the blocks which

have been placed under her bottom are removed, until only two remain,

one at each end. Then, at the last moment, these two are pulled away

simultaneously, and the steel monster slides sidewise down the greased

ways until, with a thunderous crash of water, she plunges into her

native element.

Thus ends the building of the ship, with the exception of what is known

as her “deck work,” the fitting of her luxurious cabins, the placing

of her engines, and a score of other things which are done after she

is afloat. She is now a “carrier” of the Lakes. A little longer and

captain and crew take possession of her, clouds of bituminous smoke

rise from her funnels, and with flying pennants and screaming whistles

she turns her nose into the great highway that leads a thousand miles

into the North--to the land of the ore kings.

II

What the Ships Carry--Ore

Picture a train of forty-ton freight cars loaded to capacity, the

engine and caboose both in New York City, yet extending in an unbroken

line entirely around the earth--a train reaching along a parallel from

New York to San Francisco, across the Pacific, the Chinese Empire,

Turkestan, Persia, the Mediterranean, mid the Atlantic--and you have

an idea of what the ships of the Great Lakes carry during a single

eight months’ season of navigation. At least you have the part of an

idea. For were such a train conceivable, it would not only completely

engirdle the earth along the fortieth degree of north latitude, but

there would still be something like two thousand miles of it left over.

In it would be two million five hundred thousand cars, and it would

carry one hundred million tons of freight! Were this train to pass you

at a given point at the rate of twenty miles an hour, you would have to

stand there forty days and forty nights to see the end of it.

Only by allowing the imagination to paint such a picture as this can

one conceive to any degree at all the immensity of the freight traffic

on our Inland Seas.

“A hundred million tons,” repeated the mayor of one of our Lake ports

when I told him about it recently. “A hundred million tons! That’s

quite a lot of stuff, isn’t it?”

Quite a lot of stuff! It might have been a hundred million bushels and

he would have been equally surprised. His lack of enthusiasm does not

discredit him. He does not own ships; neither does he fill them. He

is like the vast majority of our millions, who have never given more

than a passing thought to that gigantic inland water commerce which

has largely been the making of the nation. It did not dawn on him that

it meant more than a ton for every man, woman, and child on this North

American continent; that in dollars it counted billions; that on it

depended the existence of cities; that largely because of it foreign

nations acknowledged our commercial prestige.

[Illustration: Ice-Bound. Thirty-two Boats Tied up in the Ice at the

Soo.

From a Photograph by Lord & Thomas, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.

]

No other hundred million tons of freight in all the world is as

important to Americans as this annual traffic of the Great Lakes. To

move it requires the services of nearly three thousand vessels of all

kinds, employing twenty-five thousand men at an aggregate wage of

thirteen million dollars a year. A million working people are fed and

clothed and housed because of the cargoes this huge argosy carries from

port to port.

It is impossible to say with accuracy how this hundred million tons of

freight is distributed and of what it consists. Only at the Soo and

at Detroit are records kept of passing tonnage, so the figures which

are given showing the tremendous commerce that passes these places do

not include the enormous tonnage which is loaded and emptied without

passing through the Detroit River or the Sault Ste. Marie canals.

The Detroit River is the greatest waterway of commerce in the world,

and in 1906 there passed through it over sixty million tons, or more

than three fifths of the total tonnage of the Lakes. Of this about a

quarter moved in a northerly direction and three quarters toward the

cities of the East. The principal item of the up-bound traffic was

14,000,000 tons of coal, of the south-bound 37,513,600 tons of iron

ore, 110,598,927 bushels of grain, 1,159,757 tons of flour, 14,888,927

bushels of flaxseed, and over 1,000,000,000 feet of lumber. In 1907,

there was a big increase, the commerce passing through the Detroit

River being over 75,000,000 tons.

“And when you are figuring out what the ships carry, be sure and don’t

leave out the smoke!” said the captain of an ore carrier, pointing over

our port to a black trail half a mile long. “Never thought of it, did

you? Well, last year our Lake ships burned three million tons of coal.

Think of it! Three million tons--enough to heat every home in Chicago

for two years!”

[Illustration: A Network of Tracks Running through the Ore Lands.]

But in this chapter I am not going to deal with smoke; neither with the

grain that feeds nations, nor the lumber that builds their homes. They

will be described in their time. The backbone of American manufacturing

industry--the mainspring of our commercial prestige abroad--is iron;

and it is this iron, gathered in the one-time wildernesses of the

Northland and brought down a thousand miles by ship, that stands

largely for the greatness of the Lakes to-day. “Gold is precious, but

iron is priceless,” said Andrew Carnegie. “The wheels of progress may

run without the gleam of yellow metal, but never without our ugly ore.”

And the Lake country, or three little patches of it, produce each year

nearly a half of the earth’s total supply of iron. Farmers in the wake

of their ploughshares, our millions of workers in metal, and our other

millions whose fingers daily touch the chill of iron have never dreamed

of this. Few of them know that eight hundred great vessels are engaged

solely in the iron ore traffic; that in a single trip this immense

fleet can transport more than three million tons, and that in 1907,

they brought to the foundries of the East and South over forty-one

million tons. If every man, woman, and child, savage or civilised,

that inhabits this earth of ours were to receive equal portions of

this one product carried by Lake vessels in 1907, each person’s share

would be forty pounds! And still the world is crying for iron. There is

not enough to supply the demand, and there never will be. The iron

ore traffic of the Lakes has doubled during the last six years; it

will double again during the next ten--and iron will still be the most

precious thing on earth.

If the iron ore mines of the North were to go out of existence

to-morrow nearly half of the commerce of the Inland Seas would cease

to be. With it would go the strongest men of the Lakes. For our iron

has made iron men. In that Northland, along the Mesaba, Goebic, and

Vermilion ranges, from Duluth’s back door to the pine barrens of

northern Michigan and Wisconsin, they have practically made themselves

rulers of the world’s commerce in steel and iron. To follow the great

ships of the Lakes over their northward trail into this country is to

enter into realms of past romance and adventure which would furnish

material for a hundred novels. But people do not know this. The

picturesque days of ’49, the Australian fever, and the Klondike rush

are as of yesterday in memory--but what of this Northland, where they

load dirty ore into dirty ships and carry it to the dirty foundries

of the East? Ask Captain Joseph Sellwood; ask the “three Merritts,”

Alfred, Leonidas, and N. B.; or John Uno Sebenius, David T. Adams,

and Martin Pattison; ask any one of a score of others who are living,

and who will tell you of the days not so very long ago when the iron

prospectors went out with packs on their backs and guns in their hands

to seek the “ugly wealth.” These are of the old generation of “iron

men”--the men who suffered in the days of exploration and development

in the wilderness, who starved and froze, who survived while companions

died, who suffered adventures and hardships in the death-like grip of

Northland winters that rival any of those in Klondike history. And

the new generation that has followed is like them in “the strength of

man” that is in them. They are a powerful breed, these iron kings,

down to the newest among them; men like Thomas F. Cole, who rose from

nothing to a position of power and wealth, and W. P. Snyder, the

poverty-stricken Methodist minister’s son, who has fought the Steel

Corporation to a standstill and who is talked of as its president of

the future.

[Illustration: Captains of the Vessels of the Pittsburg Steamship

Company.]

It will be a great “coming together” for the iron and steel industry,

this winning of William Penn Snyder. To-day he is the king of pig

iron. When he refused to deal with those who formed the United States

Steel Corporation, his friends said that he was ruined. But he stood

on his feet alone--and fought. He got a neck hold on the corporation.

He cornered pig iron and because of him at the present time the

corporation is paying very heavy prices for its outside product. Snyder

is worth fifteen million dollars. In 1906, he cleaned up one million

five hundred thousand dollars on pig iron alone, and there is no reason

for doubting that his 1907 earnings were greater still. He is a

powerful enemy to have as a friend--and the corporation wants him, and

will probably get him.

If you are going into the North to study the ore traffic at close

range, the first man you will probably hear of after leaving your ship

is Thomas F. Cole, of Duluth. You must know Cole before you go deeper

into the subject of the forty or fifty million tons of ore which the

ships will carry during the present year of 1909. The United States

Steel Corporation will use about thirty million tons of the total

output of the ore regions this year, and Cole is the United States

Steel Corporation in this big Northland. He is the head of the finest

and most delicate industrial mechanism in the world. This mechanism,

in a way, is so fine that it may be said to be almost non-existent.

It is simply an “organized and capitalized intelligence.” The Steel

Corporation will mine some eighteen or twenty million tons of ore in

Minnesota alone this year. Yet it owns not a dollar’s worth of property

in the State. As a corporation it does no business in the State. It

might be described as a huge octopus, and each arm of this octopus,

representing a big mining interest, works independently of all other

arms and of the body of the octopus itself. Through these arms the

corporation accomplishes its aims. Each huge mine has its own executive

organisation, is responsible for its own acts--but it must obtain

results. The “central intelligence,” or body of the corporation, is

there to judge results, and Cole is the power that watches over all.

Officially he is known as the president of the Oliver Mining Company,

the greatest organisation of its kind in existence, which attends not

only to the Steel Corporation’s interests in Minnesota, but in Michigan

and Wisconsin as well. As the great eye of the world’s largest trust he

guards the interests of thirty-one mines, employs fifteen thousand men,

and gives subsistence to sixty thousand people.

[Illustration: The “Montezuma.”

The largest wooden ship on fresh water being towed out of the Maumee

River, Toledo.]

Because of the transportation of this mighty product Cole is as closely

associated with the Lakes and their ships as with the ranges and their

mines. It has been said that he was “born between ships and mines,” and

he has always remained between them. He is one of the most remarkable

characters of the Inland Seas. Cole is only forty-seven years old,

and for thirty-nine years he has earned his own livelihood, and more.

When six years old, his father was killed in an accident in the Phœnix

Mine. Baby Tom was the oldest of the widowed mother’s little brood,

and he rose to the occasion. At the age of eight he became a washboy

in the Cliff stamp mill. He had hardly mastered his alphabet; he could

barely read the simplest lines; never in this civilised world did a

youngster begin life’s battle with greater odds against him. But even

in these days the great ambition was born in him, as it was born in

Abraham Lincoln; and like Lincoln, in his little wilderness home of

poverty and sorrow, he began educating himself. It took years. But he

succeeded.

This is the man whose name you will hear first when you enter the

mining country. To chronicle his rise from a dusty Calumet office of

long ago to his present kingdom of iron would be to write a book of

romance. And there are others of the iron barons of the North whose

histories would be almost as interesting, even though fortune may have

smiled on them less kindly.

From the immensity of the interests which Cole superintends one might

be led to believe that the iron ore industry is almost entirely in the

hands of the trust. This, however, is not so. For every ship that goes

down into the South for the trust another leaves for an independent.

Nearly every maker of steel owns a mine or two in the ranges of

Minnesota, Michigan, or Wisconsin. There are five of these ranges.

The Mesaba and Vermilion ranges, both in Minnesota, produce about two

thirds of the total product carried by the ships of the Lakes; the

Goebic, Menominee, and Marquette ranges are in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Somehow it is true that nearly every great thing associated with the

Lakes is unusual in some way--unusual to an astonishing degree, and

the iron ore industry is not an exception. Probably not one person in

ten thousand knows that one lone county in this great continent is the

very backbone of the steel industry in the United States. This county

is in Minnesota. It is the county of St. Louis, and is about as big

as the State of Massachusetts. Not much more than twenty years ago it

was a howling wilderness. Even a dozen years ago the Mesaba bore but

little evidence of the presence of man. Now this country is alive with

industry. Buried in the wilderness which still exists are thriving

towns; where a short time ago deer and bear wandered unmolested, is

now the din of innumerable locomotives, the rumbling of thousands of

trains, the screeching of whistles, and the constant groaning of steam

shovels. There is not a richer county on the face of the earth. In it

are over one hundred mines, from which one hundred and twenty-three

million tons of ore have been taken since Charlemagne Tower, now

Ambassador to Germany, brought down the first carload to Duluth in

1884. These mines afford livelihood for more than two hundred thousand

people, and because of them St. Louis County possesses the greatest

freight traffic road in existence--the Duluth, Mesaba, and Northern

Railway--which, in 1907, carried about fourteen million tons of ore

from the mines to the docks.

[Illustration: A Coal Dock at Superior, Wisconsin.

The pile of coal is 1400 feet long and 30 feet high.]

This comparatively little corner of Minnesota practically runs the

whole State in so far as expenses are concerned. To administer the

affairs of the State, including all of its activities, costs about two

million six hundred thousand dollars, and, as inconceivable as it may

seem, the three railroads in the ore region pay in taxes one fifth of

this sum. They pay one third of the total railroad tax of the State,

notwithstanding the fact that some of the greatest lines in the country

centre at Minneapolis and St. Paul. To this must be added about seven

hundred thousand dollars paid in direct taxes by the mines themselves,

so that the iron ore which the ships of the Lakes bring down to Eastern

ports each season pays almost half of the total expense of running the

State of Minnesota!

And these mines will add more and more to the State exchequer each

year, as will also the mines of the three ranges in Michigan and

Wisconsin. For in no part of the world has mining been undertaken on a

scale so gigantic as that of the Superior region, and every contrivance

known to mining science is being used to increase month by month the

mountains of ore which ever fail to satisfy the hungry furnaces of the

East. It is predicted by Captain Joseph Sellwood, of Duluth, one of the

oldest and greatest of the iron barons, that the time is not distant

when the Mesaba range alone will be producing forty million tons of ore

a year--as much as all five ranges are producing now.

“It will cost over a billion dollars to get this ore to the docks,”

said he. “And seven hundred and fifty million dollars more to land

it in Lake Erie ports.”--Nearly a two-billion-dollar mining and

transportation business for the people of the Lakes to look forward to,

and this from a single range!

“But will not this tremendous activity exhaust your mines?” I asked of

several of these iron barons. “The ore doesn’t go down to China, and it

doesn’t extend all over the State. What is the future?”

The future! Few have thought of this. There are just at present too

many millions of dollars in the making to give one time or inclination

to picture the days when only black and silent scars will remain to

give evidence of the time when this Northland was one of the treasure

houses of the earth. But that time must come. Old mining men say so if

you can get them to talk about it, and scientific computations, as far

as they go, are proof of it. These computations differ, but they agree

pretty generally that there are still between a billion and a half

and two billion tons of ore in the Superior district. Within the next

five years the ships will be bringing down fifty million tons a year,

and there is no reason for believing that this will be the maximum. So

it is obvious that the ore of the Lake Superior regions will not last

beyond the year 1950 unless new deposits are discovered, or methods are

found for the utilisation of immense deposits that cannot now be used.

[Illustration: The Record Load Hauled by One Team out of the Michigan

Woods, 20,000 Feet.]

“Will this event not prove ruinous to a large extent to shipping

interests?” I asked G. Ashley Tomlinson, of Duluth, and others closely

associated with iron and vessel interests. “To-day nearly half of the

total tonnage of the Lakes is from the mines. If this industry becomes

practically extinct what will become of the hundreds of ships engaged

in the traffic?”

Mr. Tomlinson’s answer struck me as extremely logical. “The production

of ore will probably reach its maximum within the next ten years,” he

said. “It will then begin to decline. But the decrease will be gradual,

and meanwhile other freight traffic on the Lakes will be increasing

so rapidly that each year ships that were intended originally for

the ore trade will carry other business. There will be no loss for

the ships. The development of our own and the Canadian West has only

begun, and the Lakes are the great links of commerce between their vast

enterprises of the future and the East. The grain trade of the Canadian

West alone will in the not distant future be something tremendous.”

But whatever the future of the ore regions of the North may be, their

present is one of great interest and importance to the world at large.

Mining, like shipbuilding, has been reduced to a science on the Lakes.

A stranger visiting for the first time any one of the five ranges is

filled with astonishment. I will never forget the sensations with

which I first saw mining on the Mesaba range. We had come up over a

forest-clad hill and stood on the very edge of the mine before I had

been made aware of its nearness. Below me there stretched a mile of

deep, huge scars in the bottom of what seemed to be a great hole dug

into the earth. One of these pits, half a mile in diameter, and, as I

afterward discovered, nearly two hundred feet in depth, was almost at

my feet.

“That’s iron ore,” said my companion. “And right there it goes one

hundred feet deeper down.”

This was one of the great “open pits” of the Mesaba range. There

are many others like it in the Superior regions. They are the most

wonderful mines in the world. Imagine that you take a barrel of salt,

dig a hole, pour the salt into this hole, and cover it with a few

inches of earth. This gives you an idea of one of these ore mines.

After the earth has been “stripped” from the top the ore is reached and

it is found in much the same way that the salt would be found. In the

words of one superintendent, it is “all together.” It is as if Nature,

like a pirate, had dug holes here and there in which she had hidden her

treasure, covering it over for concealment with a few feet of earth.

[Illustration: One Steam Shovel Keeps Three Locomotives and Trains

Busy.]

Down into these pits and along their edges run the tracks of the ore

cars. There is here but little of the shovelling and “picking” of men.

Steam shovels, weighing from sixty to seventy-five tons each, do the

work. Like a great hand one of these shovels dips down into the soft

mass of ore, buries its great dipper until it holds from four to eight

tons, and then, groaning and rumbling, slowly lifts its burden aloft,

swings it over a car, and the actual work of mining is done. A thousand

times a day it will repeat this operation, lifting from three thousand

to eight thousand tons of ore. This one shovel keeps busy three

locomotives and as many trains of dump cars. And there are nearly two

hundred of these shovels in use on the Mesaba range alone. It costs

only about six cents a ton to mine in this way, after the “stripping”

has been done, or, in other words, after the ore has been laid bare.

There are two other processes on the ranges where the ore is not so

soft or so closely laid. One of these is the milling process, and the

other is the blasting out of hard ore. Milling costs about thirty-five

cents per ton, and the blasting process from one dollar to one dollar

and twenty-five cents.

Why it has for some time been impossible to build ships too fast

for the demand may most graphically be shown, perhaps, by quoting

a few figures which demonstrate the tremendous energy now being

exerted in the ore regions of the North. Figures as a usual thing are

uninteresting, but these enter so vitally into the welfare of every

American citizen that they should be regarded with more than ordinary

respect. As stated before, we are now making nearly half of all the

iron and steel produced on earth. In 1880, we made only 1,240,000 tons

of steel; in 1890, this had increased to over 4,000,000; in 1900, to

10,188,000 tons, and in 1905, to 20,023,000 tons. Lake ships and Lake

mines had to supply this. And now we come to mine figures which almost

stagger belief. In 1904, the Mesaba range, for instance, yielded only a

little over 12,000,000 tons. In the following year the production was

nearly doubled, the ore carriers bringing down 20,153,699 tons, which

in 1906 was increased to almost 24,000,000!

This enormous annual tonnage of the Mesaba range, together with that

of the other four ranges of the Superior region, is carried by rail

directly from the mines to the great ore docks of Lake ports. The

product of the Mesaba and Vermilion ranges, in Minnesota, is shipped

from Duluth and Two Harbors; the eight million tons of the Goebic and

Marquette ranges, in Michigan, from Escanaba and Marquette; and the

five million tons of the Menominee range, in Wisconsin, from Ashland

and Superior.

To these six ports of the Northland come the vikings of the Lakes

and their immense fleets. Four of these ports are within a radius of

seventy-five miles, and the two others, in Michigan, are about one

hundred and fifty miles farther east and south. No other area of lake

or ocean in the world is as much travelled by shipping as that along

which these ore harbours are situated. The people of Duluth have

witnessed blockades of vessels such as have never been seen in the

greatest ocean ports. Over this part of Superior there is a constant

trail of smoke from the funnels of ships. During one month there were

1221 arrivals and clearances from Duluth alone, an average of forty a

day.

[Illustration: Steamers at a Modern Ore Unloading Plant at Conneaut.]

Behind these great ships, which rest never a day nor an hour for eight

months of the year, are the kings of Lake commerce--such men as J. C.

Gilchrist, James Davidson, Captain Mitchell, William Livingstone, Harry

Coulby, W. C. Richardson, A. B. Wolvin, G. Ashley Tomlinson, and

scores of others. To write of these would be to chronicle a history of

men who have fought their way to the top through sheer force of the

“breed that is in them.”

Take G. Ashley Tomlinson, of Duluth, for instance, whose ships carry

a couple of million tons of ore a year. “Not a great record,” as Mr.

Tomlinson modestly says, but still enough to supply every man, woman,

and child in the United States with a little matter of fifty pounds

each twelvemonth! In a novel Tomlinson would make an ideal soldier of

fortune; in plain, matter-of-fact life he represents those elements

which make the great men of the Lakes. He is forty years old. He has

sixteen ships. His income is over one hundred and fifty thousand

dollars a year.

Yet Tomlinson began, as did many other Great Lake men of to-day, with

just two assets--the clothes on his back and a huge ambition. He

started his career as a messenger boy in the State treasurer’s office

at Lansing, Michigan. But there was not enough of the strenuous life in

this for him, so he went West to become a cowboy. He succeeded, much to

his regret; for soon after he had mastered the broncho and could handle

a lasso there came the war between the cowboys and the White River

Utes. In one of the fights Tomlinson was wounded and afterward captured

by the redskins. During the whole of one night he was subjected to

torture, and at dawn of the following day, when almost at the point of

death, he was delivered by a party of ranchmen. Tomlinson was not one

to display the white feather--but he had had enough of Western life,

and as soon as possible he worked himself from Rawlins, Wyoming, to

Chicago on a cattle train. After a time he came to Michigan, and with

his savings attended the University of Michigan for about a year. This

was enough of “higher education” for him, so he sold his text-books

and went to work on the Detroit _Journal_ at the munificent salary of

six dollars a week. Newspaper work was all right until Buffalo Bill

came along. Tomlinson joined the show, rode a bucking broncho for a

year, then “developed” a voice and cast his fortunes with the Mapleson

Opera Company. In 1889, he went to New York as a reporter on the _Sun_,

returned the following year to become night editor of the Detroit

_Tribune_, and in 1893 moved to Duluth.

[Illustration: The Main Slip in the Harbour of Conneaut.

Conneaut is the second largest ore-receiving port on the Lakes.]

The Lakes began to hold a peculiar fascination for him. He went into

the vessel brokerage business mostly on his nerve; but nerve made him

money, and his capital began to grow. How fast it has grown during

the past dozen years one must judge by his ships and his income. He

is president of five steamship companies, vice-president of another,

secretary to three more, and a director in the American Exchange

Bank, of Duluth, and the Cananea Central Copper Company. He has

developed from a typical adventurer of fortune into one of the great

men of the Lakes. His romantic career is described here because

it is illustrative of the fact that brain and brawn, not “pull” and

money, have made the vikings and iron barons of the Inland Seas.

No millionaires’ sons here, living on their fathers’ prestige--no

blue-blooded drones in these regions of the five little seas, where

only red blood counts!

When the first ships of the season come up from the South in April or

May nearly a million and a half tons of ore are awaiting them in the

docks of the ore-shipping ports. There are twenty-six of these ore

docks, one of which, at Duluth, has a storage capacity of ninety-six

thousand tons. From a distance these docks look like great trestles,

from fifty to one hundred feet above the water, some of them running

for nearly half a mile out into the lake. Out upon these docks run

the cars from the mines. From these cars the ore is dropped into

huge pockets, from which run downward long chutes, or spouts. A

ten-thousand-ton carrier runs alongside. Her hatches are opened. Into

each hatch runs a chute. The chute “doors” are opened, and with a dull,

rumbling, rushing sound the ore pours down by force of gravity from the

huge pockets above. At dock No. 4, Duluth, 9277 tons were put aboard

the steamer _E. J. Earling_ in seventy minutes, being at the rate of

7988 tons an hour. The rapidity with which Lake transportation is

carried on is shown in the fact that upon this occasion the _Earling_

was in port only two hours and fifteen minutes before she began her

thousand-mile return trip eastward.

And now comes the last important phase. One viewing the continuous

activity at the mines, the building up of cities on the ranges, and the

tremendous interests represented in the great shipping ports may forget

that this is but one end of the gigantic industry which makes the

United States the steel-maker for the world. At the other end of the

fresh-water highways is seen the other half of the picture. Down into

Erie come the ships from the North. A few of them go to Chicago, but

only a few. Out of a total movement of thirty-seven million tons, in

1906, thirty-two million tons were received at Lake Erie ports. There

are eleven of these “receiving ports”--Toledo, Sandusky, Huron, Lorain,

Cleveland, Fairport, Ashtabula, Conneaut, Erie, Buffalo, and Tonawanda.

[Illustration: One of the Huge Open Pits of the Mesaba Range.]

Between these cities there is a constant battle for prestige. Now

one leads in tonnage received, now another. At the present time the

bitterest rivalry exists between Cleveland, Ashtabula, and Conneaut,

the three greatest ore ports in the world. In 1901, Ashtabula led. In

1902, Cleveland bore away the “pennant,” with Ashtabula and Conneaut

second and third. Cleveland was still ahead in 1903, but in 1904,

Conneaut became the greatest ore-receiving port in the world. In 1905,

Ashtabula had again won the ascendency, and in 1906, she maintained

her prestige, receiving in that year 6,833,352 tons; Cleveland was

second, and Conneaut third. Lorain, Fairport, Ashtabula, Conneaut, and

Erie practically exist because of the ore which comes down from the

northern mines. Seven million dollars are now being expended in the

improvement of Ashtabula harbour by the Lake Shore and Pennsylvania

railroad companies, and the capacity of the harbour has been doubled

since 1905. With the improvement of that harbour Conneaut’s greatest

advantage will be gone, for until a comparatively recent date nearly

all of the largest vessels went to that port. The tremendous activity

in Ashtabula must be seen to be fully appreciated. In one day lately

almost four thousand ore and coal cars were moved between that port and

Youngstown.

At this end of the great ore industry the wonderful mechanism for

the handling of cargoes is even more astonishing than that of the

Northland. The ore carrier is run under a huge unloading machine which

thrusts steel arms down into the score or more hatches of the vessel,

and without the assistance of human hands the cargo is emptied so

quickly that the uninitiated observer stands mute with astonishment.

How quickly this work is done is shown in the record of the _George W.

Perkins_, which discharged 10,346 tons at Conneaut in four hours and

ten minutes.

Once more, after this unloading, the steel monster of the Lakes is all

but ready for her long journey into the North. Within a few hours she

is reloaded, with a few sonorous blasts of her whistle she bids a last

adieu, and again she is off on the long trail that leads to the “ugly

wealth” in the ore ranges of Superior.

III

What the Ships Carry--Other Cargoes

Not long ago I went to see William Livingstone, President of the

Lake Carriers’ Association--Great Admiral, in a way, of the world’s

mightiest fleet of steel--an enrolled navy of 593 ships and a tonnage

of nearly one million nine hundred thousand. Unconsciously I had come

to call this man the Grey Man and the Man who Knows. Both titles fit,

as they will tell you from the twin Tonawandas to Duluth. For six

consecutive years president of the greatest organisation of its kind on

earth, an association of ships made up, if weighed, of half of the iron

and steel floating on the Inland Seas, he has become a part of Lake

history. I sought him for an idea. I found it.

The Grey Man was at his desk studying over the expenditure of a matter

of several millions of dollars for a new canal at the “Soo.” He turned

slowly--grey suit, grey tie, grey eyes, grey beard, grey hair--all

beautifully blended. He seldom speaks first. He is always fighting to

be courteous, yet the days are ten hours too short for him.

“I want a new idea,” I opened bluntly. “I want something new in

marine--something that will make people sit up and take notice, as it

were. Can you help me?”

He swung slowly about in his chair until his eyes rested upon a picture

on the wall. It was a picture of the old days on the Lakes. My eyes,

too, rested on the old picture. It reminded me of things, and I kept

pace with the thoughts that might be his. I saw him, more than half a

century before, the stripling son of a ship’s carpenter, swimming in

the shadows of the big fore-’n’-afters that were monarchs before steam

came--glorious days when ninety-eight per cent. of vessels carried

sail, and sailors dispensed law with their fists and bore dirks in

their bootlegs. Later I saw the proud moment of his first trip to

“sea”--and then, quickly, I noted his rise: his saving dollar by dollar

until he bought an interest in a tug, his monopolisation of it later,

his climb--up--up--until----

“I’m busy, very busy!” he broke in quietly. “But say, did you ever

think of this? Did you ever build a city of the lumber we carry each

year, populate that city, feed it with the grain we carry, and warm it

with our coal? You can do it on paper and you will be surprised at what

you find. It will show you more graphically than anything else just

what the ships carry. Try it. You’ll be interested.”

I have kept that idea warm. Now I am going to use it. For probably in

no better way can the immensity of the lumber, grain, coal, flour, and

package freight traffic of the Great Lakes be given. Imagine, then,

this “City of the Five Great Lakes.” We will build it, we will people

it, feed it, and heat it--and our only material, with the exception

of its inhabitants, will be the cargoes of the Lake carriers for a

single season. And these carriers? If you should stand at the Lime Kiln

Crossing, in the Detroit River, one would pass you on an average every

twelve minutes, day and night, during the eight months of navigation;

and when you saw their number and size you would wonder where they

could possibly get all of their cargoes. The cargoes with which we will

deal in this article will be of lumber, grain, flour and coal, for

these, with iron ore, constitute over ninety per cent. of the commerce

of the Inland Seas.

[Illustration: A Raft of Five Million Pulp Logs on the North Shore of

Lake Michigan.]

To build our city we first require lumber. During the 1909 season of

navigation about 1,500,000,000 feet of this material will be carried by

Lake ships. What this means it is hard to conceive until it is turned

into houses. To build a comfortable eight-room dwelling, modern in

every respect, requires about 20,000 feet of lumber, and when we divide

a billion and a half by this figure we have 75,000 homes, capable of

accommodating a population of about 400,000 people. With the thousands

of tons of building stone transported by lake each year, the millions

of barrels of cement, the cargoes of shingles, sand, and brick, our

“City of the Lakes” for 1909 would be as large as Buffalo, Cleveland,

or Detroit.

But one does not begin fully to comprehend the significance of the

enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, and what it means not only to

this country but to half of the civilised world, until he begins

to figure how long the grain which will be carried by ships during

the present year would support this imaginary city of 400,000 adult

people. There will pass through the “Soo” canals this year at least

90,000,000 bushels of wheat and 60,000,000 bushels of other grain,

besides 7,500,000 barrels of flour, all of which represents the “bread

stuff” that is shipped from Lake Superior ports alone. There will, in

addition, be shipped by lake at least 50,000,000 bushels from Chicago,

Milwaukee, and other ports whose eastbound commerce is not reported

at the “Soo.” In short, estimating conservatively from the past four

years, it is safe to say that at least 200,000,000 bushels of grain and

11,000,000 barrels of flour will have been transported by the Great

Lakes marine by the end of this year’s season of navigation.

But what do these figures mean? They seem top-heavy, unwieldly,

valuable perhaps to the scientific economist, but of small interest

to the ordinary everyday eater of bread. Let us reduce this grain to

flour. It takes from four and a half to five bushels of grain for a

barrel of flour and dividing by the larger figure our grain would give

us 40,000,000 barrels, which, plus the 11,000,000, would make a total

of 51,000,000 barrels. Now we come right down to dinner-table facts.

At least 250 one-pound loaves of bread can be made from each 196-pound

barrel of flour, or a total of 12,750,000,000 from the whole, which

would mean at least five loaves for every man, woman, and child of the

two and one half billion people who inhabit this globe! In other words,

figuring from the reports of food specialists, the grain and flour

carried by the ships of the Lakes for one year would give the total

population of the earth a food supply sufficient to keep it in life and

health for a period of two weeks!

This enormous supply of the staff of life would give each of the

400,000 bread-eating people in our “City of the Lakes” a half-pound

a day for one hundred and seventy-five years, or it would supply a

city of the size of Chicago with bread for fifty years! To each of

the 60,000,000 bread-eaters in the United States it would give 212

one-pound loaves, or, with an allowance of half a pound for each person

per day, it would feed the nation for one year and two months!

Now, having built our city, peopled it, and supplied it with food, we

come to the point of heating it. In 1907, there were transported by

Lake nearly 15,000,000 tons of coal, and this year another million

will probably be added to that figure. Here again mere figures fail

to tell the story. But when we come to divide this coal among the

homes of a city like Cleveland, Detroit, or Buffalo, which rank

with our 75,000-home “City of the Lakes,” we again come to an easy

understanding. Each of these 75,000 home-owners would receive as his

share over 213 tons of coal, and if he burned six tons each winter this

would last him for thirty-five years!

In a nutshell, there is enough lumber and other material carried

by Lake ships each year to build a city the size of Detroit; there

is enough grain transported to supply its 400,000 inhabitants with

bread-stuffs for a period of one hundred and seventy-five years,

conceding the total population of the city to be adults; and enough

coal is shipped from Erie ports into the North to heat the homes in

this city for thirty-five years!

When one knows these facts, when perhaps for the first time in his

life he is brought to a realisation of the enormous proportions of the

commerce of the Inland Seas, he may, and with excellent excuse, believe

that he has reached the limit of its interest. But as a matter of fact

he has only begun to enter upon its wonders, and the farther he goes

the more he sees that economic questions which have long been mysteries

to him are being unravelled by the Great Lakes of the vast country in

which he lives.

“Because of the ships of our Inland Seas,” James A. Calbick, late

President of the Lumber Carriers’ Association, said to me, “the people

of the United States, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains,

and as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee, have been able to build

the cheapest homes in the world--and the best,” and this assertion,

which can be proved in several different ways, brings us at once to the

lumber traffic as it exists on the Lakes to-day.

Going through almost any one of the Eastern and Central States one will

find thousands of old sheds and barns, travelling the road to ruin

through age alone, though built of the best of pine and oak--materials

of a quality which cannot be found in the best of modern homes in

this year of 1909. For ten years past the price of lumber has been

steadily climbing, and since 1900 the increase in the cost of building

construction has brought lumber to a par with brick. While the commerce

of the Lakes is increasing by tremendous bounds in other ways, people

are now, perhaps unknowingly, witnessing the rapid extinction of one

of their oldest and most romantic branches of traffic--the lumber

industry; and each year, as this industry comes nearer and nearer to

its end, the price of lumber climbs higher and higher, home-owners

become fewer in comparison with other years, and fleets and lumber

companies go out of existence or direct their energies into other

channels.

[Illustration: Scooping up Ore from the Mahoning Mine at Hibbing.

The largest open pit mine in the world.]

To Lake people it is pathetic, this death of the lumber fleets of the

Inland Seas. An old soldier who had sailed on a lumber hooker since the

days of the Civil War once said to me, “They’re the Grand Army of the

Lakes--are those old barges and schooners, and they’re passing away

as fast as we old fellows of the days of ’61.” To-day no vessels are

built along the Lakes for the carrying of lumber. Scores of ancient

“hookers” and picturesque schooners of the romantic days of old are

rotting at their moorings, and when a great steel leviathan of ten

thousand tons passes one of these veterans the eyes of her crew will

follow it until only her canvas remains above the horizon.

Yet from the enormous quantity of lumber which will be transported by

Lake during the present year, one would not guess that the great fleet

which will carry it is fast nearing the end of its usefulness in this

way. In every lumbering camp along the Lakes, in the great forests

of Minnesota, and in the wilderness regions of Canada, unprecedented

effort has been expended in securing “material” because of the high

prices offered, and the result has been something beyond description.

Recently I passed through the once great lumbering regions of the Lakes

to see for myself what I had been told. Michigan is stripped; the

“forest” regions of Georgian Bay are scrub and underbrush; for hundreds

of square miles around Duluth the axe and the saw have been ceaselessly

at work, though there is still a great deal of timber land in the

northern part of the State. In the vast lumber regions of a decade

ago, once lively and prosperous towns have become almost depopulated.

Scores of lumbering camps are going to rot and ruin; saw-mills are

abandoned to the elements, and in places where lumbering is still

going on, timber is greedily accepted which a few years ago would have

been passed by as practically worthless. A few years more and the

picture of ruin will be complete. Then the lumber traffic on the Great

Lakes will virtually have ceased to be, the old ships will be gone, and

past forever will be the picturesque life of the lumberjack and those

weather-beaten old patriarchs who, since the days of their youth, have

been “goin’ up f’r cedar ’n’ pine.”

[Illustration: A Mining Town on the Mesaba Range, where a Few Years ago

the Deer and Bear Roamed Undisturbed.]

But even in these last days of the lumber industry on the Lakes the

figures are big enough to create astonishment and wonder, and give some

idea of what that industry has been in years past. Take the Tonawandas,

for instance--those two beautiful little cities at the foot of Lake

Erie, a few miles from Buffalo. Lumber has made these towns, as it has

made scores of others along the Lakes. They are the greatest “lumber

towns” in the world, and estimating from the business of former years

there will be carried to them by ship in 1909 between 300,000,000 and

400,000,000 feet of lumber. In 1890, there entered the Tonawandas

718,000,000 feet, which shows how the lumber traffic has fallen during

the last nineteen years. It is figured that about 10,000,000 feet of

lumber, valued at $200,000, is lost each year from aboard vessels bound

for the “Twin Cities.” In 1905, the vessels running to the Tonawandas

numbered 300; this year their number will not exceed 250--another

proof of the rapidly failing lumber supply along America’s great inland

waterways.

“This talk of a lumber famine is all bosh,” I was informed with great

candour a short time ago. “Look at the great forests of Washington and

Oregon! Think of the almost limitless supply of timber in some of the

Southern States! Why, the stripping of the Lake States ought not to

make any difference at all!”

There are probably several million people in this country of ours

who are, just at the present moment, of the above opinion. They have

never looked into what I might call the “economy of the Lakes.” A few

words will show what part the Lakes have played in the building of

millions of American homes. At this writing it cost $2.50 to bring a

thousand feet of lumber from Duluth to Detroit aboard a ship. It costs

$5.50 to bring that same lumber by rail! Conceding that this year’s

billion and a half feet of lumber will be transported a distance of

seven hundred miles, the cost of Lake transportation for the whole

will be about $3,750,000. The cost of transportation by rail of this

same lumber would be at least $7,500,000, or as much again! Now what

if you, my dear sir, who live in New York, had to have the lumber for

your house carried fourteen hundred miles instead of seven, or three

thousand miles, from Washington State? To-day your lumber can be

brought a thousand miles by water for $3 per thousand feet; by rail

it would cost you $7! And this, with competition playing a tremendous

part in the game. When lumber is gone from the Lake regions, will our

philanthropic railroads carry this material as cheaply as now, when

for eight months of the year they face the bitter rivalry of our Great

Lakes marine?

“When the time comes that there is no more lumber along the Lakes, what

will be the result?” I asked Mr. Calbick, the late President of the

Lumber Carriers’ Association. He replied:

“Lumber will advance in price as never before. No longer will the frame

cottage be the sign of the poor man’s home; no longer will the brick

mansion be the manifestation of wealth. It will then cost much more to

build a dwelling of wood than of brick or stone. The frame house will

in time become the sign of aristocracy and means. It will pass beyond

the poor man’s pocket-book, and while this poor man may live in a house

of brick it will not be his fortune to live in a house of wood. That is

what will happen when the lumber industry ceases along the Great Lakes.”

[Illustration: Harbour View at Conneaut, Ohio, Showing Docks and

Machinery.]

Then this great lumberman went on to say:

“People are beginning to see, and each year they will see more plainly,

how absolutely idiotic our State and National governments have been

in not compelling forest preservation. For all the centuries to come

Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota should be made to supply the nation

with timber. In these three Lake States there are millions of acres of

ideal forest land which is good for nothing else. Yet for at least half

a century must these millions of acres now remain worthless. Nothing

has been left upon them. They are “barrens” in the true sense of the

word, and before forests are regrown upon them fifty or a hundred years

hence, the greatest timber famine the world has ever seen will have

been upon us for generations.”

Hardly could the significance of the passing of the lumber industry

along our Inland Seas be appreciated without taking a brief glance into

the past, to see what it has already done for the nation. There is now

practically no white pine left in the State of Michigan--once the home

of the greatest pine regions in the whole world. Michigan’s tribute

to the nation has been enormous. For twenty years she was the leading

lumber-producing State of the Union. As nearly as can be estimated,

her forests have yielded 160,000,000,000 feet of pine, more than one

hundred times the total amount of lumber that will be transported on

the Lakes this year. These are figures which pass comprehension until

they are translated into more familiar terms. This enormous production

would build a board walk five feet wide, two inches thick, and three

million miles long--a walk that would reach one hundred and twenty

times around the earth at the equator; or it would make a plank way

one mile wide and two inches thick that would stretch across the

continent from New York to San Francisco! In other words, Michigan’s

total contribution of pine would build ten million six-room dwellings

capable of housing over half the present population of the United

States.

As a consequence of this absolute spoliation of the forest lands, a

large part of Michigan is now practically worthless. First, the lands

were bought by lumbering companies; the timber was stripped--then came

the tax-collector! But why pay taxes on worthless barrens, with only

stumps and brush and desert sand to claim? So people forgot they owned

them, and as a result one seventh of the State of Michigan is to-day on

the delinquent tax list.

Minnesota is going the way of Michigan. In 1906, there was cut in the

Duluth district a total of 828,000,000 feet of white pine; but each

year this production will become smaller, until in the not distant

future there will be nothing for the lumber ships of the Lakes to

carry. What this will mean to the home-builders of the nation can be

shown in a few words. Previous to 1860, the Chicago man could buy 1000

feet of the best white pine for $14. To-day it costs him $80! What will

it cost ten years hence?

[Illustration: A Steam Shovel at Work.

This removes from 4000 to 8000 tons of ore a day.]

Already the centre of lumber production has swung from the North to

the South. The yellow pine of Louisiana is now taking the place once

filled by white pine, and at the rate it is being cut another decade

will see that State stripped as clean as Michigan now is, and then the

country’s last resort will be to turn to the Pacific coast with its

forests of Douglas fir. And still, as though blindfolded to all sense

and reason, almost every State government continues to look upon the

fatal destruction without a thought for the future, though before us

are facts which show that Americans are using nearly eight times as

much lumber per capita as is used in Europe, and that the nation is

consuming four times as much wood annually as is produced by growth in

our forests.

Ten years more and the last of the romantic old lumber ships of the

Inland Seas will have passed away; gone forever will be the picturesque

life of those who have clung thus long to the fate of canvas and the

four winds of heaven; and with it, too, will pass the remaining few of

those old lumber kings who have taken from Michigan forests alone fifty

per cent. more wealth than has been produced by all the gold mines of

California since their discovery in 1849.

But in the place of this passing industry is rapidly growing another,

the effect of which is already being felt over half of the civilised

world, and which in a very few years from now will be counted the

greatest and most important commerce in existence. The iron mines of

the North may become exhausted, the little remaining forest of the Lake

regions will fade away; but the grain trade will go on forever. Just

as the Superior mines have produced cheap iron and steel, just as the

Inland Seas have been the means of giving the nation cheap lumber, so

will they for all time to come supply unnumbered millions with cheap

bread. Like great links, they connect the vast grain-producing West

with the millions of the bread-consuming East. And not only do they

control the grain traffic of the United States. To-day western Canada

is spoken of as the future “Bread Basket of the World,” and over the

Lakes will travel the bulk of its grain. Looking ahead for a dozen

centuries, one cannot see where there can be a monopoly of grain

transportation, either by railroad or ship. The water highways are

every man’s property; a few thousand dollars--a ship--and you are your

own master, to go where you please, carry what you please, and at any

price you please. For all time, in the carrying of grain from field to

mouth, the Great Lakes will prove themselves the poor man’s friend. To

bring this poor man’s bushel of wheat over the one thousand miles from

Duluth to Buffalo by Lake now costs only two cents.

And according to the predictions of some of the oldest ship-owners

of the Lakes, the tremendous saving to the poor man because of the

cheapness of Lake freightage is bound to increase in the not distant

future. It must be remembered that at the present time ships are not

built too fast for Lake demand, and as a consequence transportation

rates, while exceedingly low when compared with rail rates, are such

as to make fortunes each year for the owners of ships. Take the cargo

of the _B. F. Jones_, for instance, delivered at Buffalo in October

of 1906. She had on board 370,273 bushels of wheat which she had

brought from Duluth at two and three fourths cents a bushel, making

her four-day trip down pay to the tune of $7500! The preceding year

one cargo of 300,000 bushels was brought down for six cents a bushel,

a very extraordinary exception to the regular cheap rate--one of the

exceptions which come during the last week or two of navigation. The

freight paid on this cargo was $18,000. In other words, if this vessel

had made but this one trip during the season the profit on the total

investment of $300,000 represented by the ship would have been six per

cent. There are on the Lakes vessels which pay from twenty to thirty

per cent. a year, and an “ordinary earner” is supposed to run from ten

to twenty.

In viewing these enormous profits, however, the layman has no cause for

complaint, for the vessels that make them do so not to his cost, but

from the rapidity with which they achieve their work. The _W. B. Kerr_

is a vessel that can carry 400,000 bushels of wheat. Figure that she

makes twenty trips a season. If she carried grain continually she would

transport a total of 8,000,000 bushels in a single season, which would

supply Chicago with bread for nearly a year and a half. And it is an

interesting fact, too, that with few exceptions the ships of the Lakes

are not owned by corporations, but by the American people. Their stock

is held, not by thousands, but by hundreds of thousands. Recognised as

among the best and safest investments in the United States, they are

the property of farmers, mechanics, clerks, and other small investors,

as well as of capitalists. Recently one of the largest shipbuilders on

the Lakes said to me, “A third of the farmers in the Lake counties of

Ohio have money invested in shipping.” Which shows that not only in

the way of cheap transportation are the common people of the country

profiting because of the existence of our Inland Seas. It may be

interesting to note at this point that the tonnage shipped and received

at Ohio ports in 1907 exceeded that of all the ports of France.

The rate at which the grain traffic of the Lakes is increasing is

easily seen in the figures of the last few years. In 1905, over

68,000,000 bushels of wheat passed through the “Soo” canals. In 1906,

this increased to more than 84,000,000, showing a growth in one year of

16,000,000 bushels, or 23 per cent. This rate of increase is not only

being maintained, but it is becoming larger; and the grain men of the

Lakes are unanimous in the opinion that even from the big increase of

recent years cannot be figured the future grain business of the Inland

Seas.

“Ten years more will see the American and Canadian Wests feeding the

world,” a grain dealer tells me. “Within that time I look to see the

wheat production of North America not only doubled, but trebled.”

[Illustration: The Old and the New.

A modern freight carrier passing one of the old schooners.]

What western Canada is destined to mean to Lake commerce is already

shown in marine figures. From Port Arthur and Fort William, the “twin

cities” of Thunder Bay, were shipped in 1907 over 60,000,000 bushels

of grain, and it is safe to predict that the shipment of these two

little cities will this year exceed 70,000,000 bushels. The largest

elevator in the world, with a capacity of 7,500,000 bushels, has been

constructed at Port Arthur; and Fort William already has a capacity of

13,000,000 bushels.

And as yet the fertile regions of western Canada have hardly been

touched! These 70,000,000 bushels of 1909 will represent part of the

production, not of a nation, but of a comparatively few pioneers in

what is destined to become the greatest grain-growing country in the

world--a country connected with the East and the waterways to Europe

by the Five Great Lakes. When the task now under way of widening and

deepening the Erie Canal is accomplished, the enormous Lake traffic in

grain may continue without interruption to the Atlantic coast. Even as

it is, the transportation of grain from Buffalo to New York by canal

is showing a phenomenal increase. The value of the freight cleared by

canal from Buffalo in 1907 was nearly $19,000,000, while in 1905 it was

less than $12,000,000.

Like the building of ships the building of elevators is now one of

the chief occupations along the Lakes. The “grain age,” as vessel-men

are already beginning to call it, has begun. In the four chief grain

ports of the Lakes, Chicago, Duluth-Superior, Buffalo, and Port

Arthur-Fort William, there are now 145 elevators with a capacity of

138,000,000 bushels. Chicago leads, with 83 elevators and a capacity

of 63,000,000, although Duluth-Superior with their 27 elevators and

35,000,000-bushel capacity shipped half again as much grain to Buffalo

in 1907 as did Chicago. Buffalo is the great “receiving port” of the

lower Lakes. There vast quantities of grain are made into flour, and

the rest is transhipped eastward. At present the city possesses 28

elevators with a capacity of 23,000,000 bushels.

There is another potent reason why the passing of the lumber traffic

and the future exhaustion of the iron mines do not trouble ship

builders and owners. It has been asserted that when lumber and iron

are gone there will no longer be business for all of the ships of the

Lakes. How wrong this idea is has been shown by the growth of the grain

trade. But grain will be only one item in the enormous commerce of the

future. Each year the coal transportation business is growing, and the

constantly increasing saving to coal consumers because of this commerce

is astonishing. At one end of the Lakes are the vast coal deposits of

the East; at the other is Duluth, the natural distributing point for a

multitude of inland coal markets. Of the 16,000,000 tons of coal to be

shipped by water this year probably 8,000,000 will go to Duluth, and

will be carried a distance of one thousand miles for thirty-five cents

a ton, just about what one would pay to have it shovelled from a waggon

into his basement window! The remaining 8,000,000 tons will be unloaded

at Chicago, Milwaukee, etc.

One of the most interesting sights to be witnessed along the Lakes is

the loading and unloading of a big cargo of coal. The _W. B. Kerr_

holds the record at this writing. She loaded 12,558 tons at Lorain for

Duluth, and took on 400 tons of fuel in addition. Inconceivable as it

may seem, such a cargo under good conditions can be loaded on a ship

in from ten to fifteen hours. The vessel runs alongside the coal dock,

her crew lifts anywhere from a dozen to twenty hatches, and the work

begins. In the yards are hundreds of loaded cars. An engine quickly

pushes one of these up an inclined track to a huge “lift,” or elevator,

to the tracks of which the wheels of the car are automatically clamped.

Then the car, with its forty or fifty tons of coal, scoots skyward, and

when forty feet above the deck of the ship great steel arms reach out

and turn it upside down. With a thunderous roar the coal rushes into a

great chute, one end of which empties into a hatch. Then the car tips

back, is quickly carried down by the elevator, and is “bumped off” by

another loaded car, which goes through the same operation. Four or five

days later, at the other end of the Lakes, powerful arms, high in the

air, reach out over the open hatches of the same vessel. Out upon one

of these arms suddenly darts a huge “clamshell” bucket; for a moment it

poises above a hatch, then suddenly tumbles downward, its huge mouth

agape, and half buries itself in the cargo of coal. As it is pulled up,

the “jaws” of the clam are closed, and with it ascend several tons of

fuel. Three or four of these clam-shells may be at work on a vessel

at the same time, and can unload 10,000 tons in about two days. In

the days of old, it would have taken three weeks and scores of men to

unload such a cargo.

“And in looking into the future we must take another item into

consideration,” said President Livingstone to me. “And that is package

freight. It is almost impossible to estimate the amount that is

carried, but it is enormous, and has already saved the country millions

in transportation.”

There is one other “item” that is carried in the ships of the Inland

Seas--not a very large one, judging by bulk alone, but one which

shows that the possibilities of romance are not yet gone from modern

commerce. Perhaps, sometime in the not distant future, you may have the

fortune to see a Lake ship under way. She is long, and black, and ugly,

you may say; she carries neither guns nor fighting men, nor is she

under convoy of a man-o’-war. Yet it may be she carries a richer prize

than any galleon that ever sailed the Spanish Main. She is a “treasure

ship” of the Inland Seas, bringing down copper from the great Bonanzas

of the North. The steamer _Flagg_ holds the record, carrying down as

she did in 1906 $1,250,000 worth of metal.

[Illustration: A Shaft on One of the Ranges.]

Once a copper ship was lost----

But I will keep that story a little longer, for it properly belongs

in “The Romance and Tragedy of the Inland Seas,” in which I pledge

myself to show that the great salt oceans are not the only treeless and

sandless wastes rich in mysterious, romantic, and tragic happenings.

IV

Passenger Traffic and Summer Life

In a previous article I have shown how the saving to the people of

the United States by reason of Great Lake freight transportation is

more than five hundred million dollars a year, or, in other words,

an indirect “dividend” to the nation of six dollars for every man,

woman, and child in it. Yet in describing how this enormous saving

was accomplished I touched upon but one phase of what I might term

the “saving power” of the Lakes. To this must be added that dividend

of millions of dollars which indirectly goes into the pockets of the

people because of the cheapness of water transportation and because of

the extraordinarily low cost at which one may enjoy, both afloat and

ashore, the summer life of the Lakes. These two phases of Lake life are

among the least known, and have been most neglected.

[Illustration: The “North West.”

One of the finest passenger steamers on the Great Lakes.]

At the same time, considering the health and pleasure as well as the

profit of the nation, they are among the most important. To-day it

is almost unknown outside of Lake cities that one may travel on the

Inland Seas at less cost per mile than on any other waterway in

the civilised world, and that the pleasure-seeker in New York, for

instance, can travel a thousand miles westward, spend a month along

the Lakes, and return to his home no more out of pocket than if he

had indulged in a ten-day or two-week holiday at some seacoast resort

within a hundred miles of his business. This might be accepted with

some hesitancy by many were there not convincing figures behind the

statements, figures which show that the Lakes are primarily the “poor

man’s pleasure grounds” as well as his roads of travel, and that on

them he may ride in company with millionaires and dine with the scions

of luxury and fashion without overreaching himself financially. This

has been called the democracy of the Lakes. And only those who have

travelled on the Inland Seas or summered along their shores know what

the term really means. It is a condition which exists nowhere else in

the world on such a large scale. It means that what President Roosevelt

describes as “the ideal American life” has been achieved on the Lakes;

that the bank clerk is on a level, both socially and financially, for

the time, with the bank president, with the same opportunities for

pleasure and with the same luxuries of public travel within his reach.

The “multi-millionaire” who boards one of the magnificent passenger

steamers at Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, or Chicago, or any other

Lake port, has no promenade decks set apart for himself and others

of his class, as on ocean vessels; there are no first-, second-, and

third-class specifications, no dining-rooms for the especial use of

aristocrats, no privileges that they may enjoy alone. The elect of

fortune and fashion becomes a common American as soon as he touches a

plank of a Lake vessel, rubs elbows with the everyday crowd, smokes his

cigars in company with travelling men, rural merchants, and clerks,

forgets himself in this mingling with people of red blood and working

hands--and enjoys himself in the experience. It is a novel adventure

for the man who has been accustomed to the purchase of exclusiveness

and the service of a prince at sea, but it quickly shows him what life

really is along the five great waterways that form the backbone of the

commerce of the American nation.

This is why the passenger traffic of the Inland Seas is distinctive,

why it is the absolute antithesis of the same traffic on the oceans.

If a $2,000,000 floating palace were to be launched upon the Lakes

to-morrow and its owners announced that social and money distinctions

would be recognised on board, the business of that vessel would

probably be run at a loss that would mean ultimate bankruptcy. It is

an experiment which even the wealthiest and most powerful passenger

corporations on the Lakes have not dared to make, though they have

frequently discussed it. A score of passenger traffic men have told

me this. It is a splendid tribute to the spirit of independence and

equality that exists on these American waters.

[Illustration: The Stop at Tashinoo Park, St. Clair Flats.]

And there is a good reason for this spirit. In 1907, sixteen

million passengers travelled on Lake vessels and of these it is

estimated that less than five hundred thousand were foreign tourists

or pleasure-seekers from large Eastern cities. In other words, over

fifteen million of these travellers were men and women of the Lake and

central Western States, where independence and equality are matters of

habit. Twelve million were carried by vessels of the Eighth District,

which begins at Detroit and ends at Chicago, while only three and a

half million were carried in the Ninth District, including all Lake

ports east of the Detroit River. From these figures one may easily get

an idea of the class of people who travel on the Lakes, and at the same

time realise to what an almost inconceivable extent our Inland Seas

are neglected by the people of many States within short distances of

them. Astonishing as it may seem, nearly eight million passengers were

reported at Detroit in 1907--as many as were reported _at all other

Lake ports combined_, including great cities like Buffalo, Cleveland,

and Chicago. These millions were drawn almost entirely from Michigan

and Ontario, with a small percentage coming from Indiana, Ohio, and

Kentucky. Ninety per cent. of the Chicago traffic of two million was

from Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, while of the three and a half

million carried east of the Detroit River, from Erie and Ontario ports,

fully two thirds were residents of Ohio and Pennsylvania. At Buffalo,

which draws upon the entire State of New York and upon all States

east thereof, there were reported only a million passengers! To sum

up, figures gathered during the year show that fully ninety per cent.

of all travel on the Inland Seas is furnished by the States of Ohio,

Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, western New York,

western Pennsylvania, and northern Kentucky.

[Illustration: The Landing at Mackinac Dock, Michigan.]

Why is this? Why are the most beautiful fresh-water seas in the whole

world neglected by their own people? Why is it that from the single

city of Boston there travel by water two million more people than on

all of the Lakes combined, which number on their shores the second

largest city on the continent and four others well up in the front

rank? I have asked this question of steamship companies in a dozen

ports along the Lakes, and from them all I have received practically

the same reply. There is a man in Detroit who has been in the passenger

traffic business for more than a quarter of a century. I refer to

A. A. Schantz, general manager of the largest passenger business on

the Lakes. He was managing boats at the age of twenty, he has studied

the business for thirty years, and he hits the nail squarely on the

head when he says: “It’s because people _don’t know_ about the Lakes.

For generations newspapers and magazines have talked _ocean_ to them.

They know more about Bermuda and the Caribbean than they do about

Mackinaw and the three thousand islands of Lake Huron. The people of

three States out of four are better acquainted with steamship fares

to London and Liverpool than to Duluth or Chicago; they have been

_taught_ to look to the oceans and ocean resorts, and to-day the five

Great Lakes of America are more foreign, so far as knowledge of them is

concerned, than either the Atlantic or the Pacific.”

This is true. When Admiral Dewey made his triumphal journey through the

Inland Seas even he found himself constantly expressing astonishment at

what he saw and heard. It is so with ninety-nine out of every hundred

strangers who come to them. Think, for instance, of travelling from

Detroit to Buffalo, a distance of two hundred and sixty miles, for

$1.25!--less than _half a cent a mile_! I recently told a Philadelphia

man who has been to Europe half a dozen times about this cheap travel,

and he laughingly asked, “What kind of tubs do you have on the Lakes

that can afford to carry passengers at these ridiculous rates?”

Well, there is one particular “tub” which offers this cheap

transportation once a week, which cost a little over a million and a

quarter dollars! Every bit of woodwork in the parlours, promenades, and

dining-rooms is of Mexican mahogany. It carries with it a collection

of oil paintings which cost twenty-five thousand dollars. Every one of

four hundred state-rooms is equipped with a telephone and there is a

telephone “central,” so that passengers may converse with one another

or with the ship’s officers without leaving their berths. There are

reading-rooms, and music-rooms, and writing-rooms, magnificently

upholstered and furnished; and on more than one of these Lake palaces

passengers may amuse themselves at shuffle-board, quoits, and other

games which fifty millions of Americans believe are characteristic only

of ocean craft. Another of these “tubs”--the _Eastern States_--broke

Lake records in 1907 by berthing and feeding fifteen hundred people on

a single trip; and the new _City of Cleveland_ will accommodate two

thousand without crowding.

Notwithstanding the extreme cheapness of their rates of transportation,

Lake passenger vessels constantly vie with one another in maintaining

a high standard of appearance and comfort. This is illustrated in the

interesting case of the _City of St. Ignace_, which was built a number

of years ago at a cost of $375,000. Since that time, in painting,

decorating, refurnishing, etc., and not including the cost of broken

machinery or expense of crew, nearly $500,000 have been spent in

the maintenance of this vessel, a sum considerably greater than her

original cost. A Government law says that thirty per cent. of the cost

of a vessel must be expended in this kind of maintenance before that

particular boat can change its name. The _City of St. Ignace_ could

have changed her name four times! And the case of the _St. Ignace_ is

only one of many.

[Illustration: Hickory Island at the Mouth of Detroit River.

From a Photograph by Manning Studio, Detroit.

]

I have gone into these facts with some detail for the purpose of

showing that the extreme cheapness of travel and living along the Lakes

does not signify a loss of either comfort or luxury. In few words, it

means that the Lakes, as in all other branches of their industries, are

agents of tremendous saving to the nation at large in this one; and

that, were the pleasure-seekers and travellers of the country to become

better acquainted with them, the annual “dividend” earned in freight

transportation would be doubled by passenger traffic. The figures of

almost any transportation line on the Lakes will verify this. Last

year, for instance, one line carried two hundred thousand people

between Detroit and Cleveland. The day fare between these points is one

dollar, the distance 110 miles. Estimating that four fifths, or one

hundred and sixty thousand, of these passengers travelled by day, their

total expense would be $160,000. By rail the distance is 167 miles, and

the fare $3.35, making a total railway fare of $536,000. These figures

show that one passenger line alone, and between just two cities, saved

the travellers of the country $376,000 in 1908. The saving between

other points is in many instances even greater. Once each week one

may go by water from Detroit to Buffalo, or from Buffalo to Detroit,

a distance of 260 miles, for $1.25, while the rail rate is seven

dollars; and at any time during the week, and on any boat, the fare

is only $2.50. These low rates prevail, not only in localities, but

all over the Lakes. The tourist may board a Mackinaw boat at any time

in Cleveland, for instance, travel across Lake Erie, up the Detroit

River, through Lake St. Clair and Lake Huron, and back again--a round

trip of nearly one thousand miles--at an expense of _ten dollars_.

The round trip from Detroit to Mackinaw, which gives the tourist two

days and two nights aboard ship and a ride of six hundred miles, costs

eight dollars. The rail fare is $11. At a ticket expense of less than

twenty-five dollars one may spend a whole week aboard a floating palace

of the Lakes and make a tour of the Inland Seas that will carry him

over nearly three thousand miles of waterway, his meal service at the

same time being as good and from a third to a half as expensive as that

of a first-class hotel ashore. Excursion rates, which one may take

advantage of during the entire season, are even less, frequently being

not more than half as high as those given above.

When one becomes acquainted with these facts it is easy for him to

understand the truth of Mr. Schantz’s statement that “people _don’t

know_ about the Lakes.” If they did, the annual passenger traffic on

them would be thirty million instead of sixteen; and, instead of an

estimated saving of ten million dollars to the people because of Lake

passenger ships, the “dividend” that thus goes into their pockets would

be twice that amount.

[Illustration: The “City of Erie.”

The fastest steamer on the Lakes, holding a record of 22.93 miles per

hour.]

Foreign shipbuilders as well as Americans along the seacoasts frankly

concede that vessel-building on the Lakes has developed into a science

which is equalled nowhere else in the world, evidence of which I have

offered in a former article. This is true of passenger ships as well as

of freighters, and the strongest proof of this fact lies in the almost

inconceivably small loss of life among travellers on the Lakes. There

was a time when the marine tragedies of the Inland Seas were appalling,

and if all the ships lost upon them were evenly distributed there would

be a sunken hulk every half-mile over the entire thousand-mile waterway

between Buffalo and Duluth. But those days are gone. Lake travel has

not only become the cheapest in the world, but the safest as well. The

figures which show this are of tremendous interest when compared with

other statistics. Of the sixteen million men, women, and children who

travelled on Lake passenger ships in 1907, _only three were lost_, or

one out of every 5,300,000. Two of these were accidentally drowned,

and the third met death by fire. The percentage of ocean casualties

is twelve times as great, and of the eight hundred million people who

travelled on our railroads during 1906 approximately one out of every

sixty thousand was killed or injured.

To the great majority of our many millions of people the summer life

of the Lakes is as little known as the passenger traffic. And, if

possible, it offers even greater inducements, especially to those who

wish to enjoy the pleasures of an ideal summer outing and who can

afford to spend but a very small sum of money. Notwithstanding this

fact, the shores and countless islands of the Great Lakes are taken

advantage of even less than their low transportation rates. Only a few

of the large and widely-advertised resorts receive anything like the

patronage of seacoast pleasure grounds. If a person in the East or

West, for instance, plans to spend a month somewhere along the Lakes,

about the only information that he can easily obtain is on points like

Mackinaw Island: popular resorts which are ideal for the tourist who

wishes to pass most of his time aboard ship, or who, in stopping off at

these more fashionable places, is not especially worried about funds.

It is not of such isolated places as the great resorts that I shall

speak first. They play their part, and an important one, in the summer

life of the Lakes; but it is to another phase of this life, one which

is almost entirely unknown, that I wish to call attention. The man who

does not have to count the contents of his pocket-book when he leaves

home will find his holiday joys without much trouble. But how about the

man who works for a small salary, and who with his restricted means

wishes to give his wife and children the pleasures of a real vacation?

What about the men and women and children who look forward for weeks

and months, and who plan and save and economise, sometimes hopelessly,

that _somewhere_ they may have two weeks together, free from the worry

and care and eternal grind of their daily life? It is to such people as

these, unnumbered thousands of them, that the Lakes should call--and

loudly. And it is to such as these that I wish to describe the

astonishing conditions which now exist along thousands of miles of our

Great Lakes coast line--conditions which, were they generally known,

would attract many million more people to our Inland Seas next year

than will be found there during the present summer.