CHAPTER XXV

THREE GREAT INDUSTRIES OF THE LAKES

No part of the story of the Great Lakes is more significant than the tale of the building up of the large enterprises that have made that region one of the leading centres of production and consumption in the United States and the world. The heroes of exploration and of adventure were the forerunners of commerce, and the founders of cities were the leaders of industry. Two of the three great industries of the early days have persisted to the present time; all three of them have contributed largely to exploration and occupation and deserve to be treated somewhat in detail.

Washington Irving has well said that two leading objects of commercial gain have given birth to wide and daring enterprise in the early history of America. The precious metals led the Spaniard to Mexico and Peru, while, as he puts it, the “adroit and buoyant Frenchman” and the “cool and calculating Briton” pursued the “less splendid, but no less lucrative traffic in the rich peltries of the north.” The pioneer fur traders were followed only after many, many years, by what Irving has characterized as “the slow and pausing steps of agriculture.”

Apart from the land which agriculture might in times of settled peace make profitable, the white man found three great natural sources of wealth. These were animals bearing fur of great value, enormous deposits of copper and iron, and primeval forests filled with trees suited to the uses of civilized man. Profits from these financed many an enterprise, from the earliest voyages and the building of the _Griffon_ to the days of the railroad and the “Soo” Canal. For two centuries, from 1634 to 1834, the fur trade was the leading interest and source of profit of the Great Lakes.

During Champlain’s governorship the French, through Nicolet, first opened an active system of trade and barter with the Indians of the lakes, and the history of French control thereafter is the history of the fur trade. It paid the bills of many of the voyages we have chronicled. In 1660 Radisson and Groseilliers returned to Quebec from their Lake Superior voyage with sixty canoes loaded with furs valued at two hundred thousand pounds, in return for which they had distributed among the Indians kettles, graters, awls, needles, tin looking-glasses, ivory combs, and knives. Even the official expedition of Saint Lusson to take possession of the Northwest for France was to be paid for by gifts to the Indians and return offerings of fur.

The fur trade of the Great Lakes supported not only those who took up their dwelling on these shores, but the struggling settlements of Canada as well. It kept up home interest in the support of these colonies by the rich profit that it brought across the seas. In 1703 La Hontan wrote that Canada subsisted only on the trade of skins and furs. The profits and the fascination of this pursuit robbed Canada of its young men while it supplied it with money. An official reported, in 1680, that eight hundred men out of a population of ten thousand had vanished from sight into the wilderness, and that there was not a family of any condition or quality that had not children, brothers, uncles, or nephews among the traders. There came to be in the woods a distinct class of men known as coureurs de bois, or rangers of the forest, who had escaped from the restraints of civilized life and reported themselves only once or twice a year at the trading posts.

The government tried to stem the rush of young men into the wilderness by requiring licenses for trading with the Indians and limiting the number to seventy-five a year; but the country was too large and remote and the government too feeble to carry out any such policy. In the end the rulers turned their attention instead to providing fortified trading posts for these wanderers, first to afford defence against the Indians, and more especially to concentrate and monopolize the trade, protecting it from the rival Englishmen. These forts also made a claim of possession in the regions which they commanded. Thus Mackinac, Detroit, Niagara, Green Bay, Oswego, and a dozen minor posts sprang up.

Travellers of the eighteenth century were likely to meet on any one of the lakes fleets of fifty or sixty canoes, heavily laden with beaver, otter, mink, and marten skins, and paddled by Indians in their paint and feathers, or by hardly less picturesque coureurs de bois in their blanket coats, leathern moccasins and leggings, and scarlet sash and cap. These men were no mere traders whose knowledge was limited to prices and profits. They were experts not only in the science of the woods but also in the arts of diplomacy. The success of the trade depended on the maintenance of peace between the various Indian tribes and groups of tribes; and the life of the individual trader, as well as his earnings, depended on his own adaptability. There came in time to be leaders to whom the most difficult negotiations with the Indians were left. Daniel de Greyselon Du Luth, a prince among coureurs de bois, was the chief hero of the early French period in the upper country. In the summer of 1679 he made a tour of Minnesota, planting with all ceremony the arms of France in the leading Indian villages, many of which he was the first Frenchman to visit. At the end of the summer he held on the shores of Lake Superior, near the site of the present city of Duluth, a great Indian council of chiefs from all these villages, and negotiated a treaty of peace. The city that bears his name may well be proud of the fact that after ten years among the Indians he entered a written protest, still preserved in the archives of Canada, with his disapproval of the sale of whiskey and brandy to the natives. These leaders were very important to the success of the administration in Canada and were relied on and treated with all respect. Their names were even sent across the ocean, as we see in the laconic but warm commendation of Du Luth sent by the Governor of Canada in his colonial report of 1710: “Captain Du Luth died this winter; he was a very honest man.”

After the fall of New France, a time of chaos followed in the wilderness. With the restraint of the strictly enforced code of French rule removed, with a host of French traders in the woods who did not yield to British control, and with an opportunity for rivalry and ill-feeling between every two traders, Indians as well as white men became demoralized and the profits decreased greatly. Then twenty-three merchants of Montreal formed the Northwest Fur Company (1783) and took into their employ two thousand French and other fur traders. They traded with the Indians of the Northwest, with Mackinac as a centre. A rival company soon started competition in the southern region of Wisconsin, Illinois, and the Mississippi Valley. A careful statement concerning the British trade was sent to the authorities in Canada in 1790, when the possible future evacuation of the southern shores of the lakes was beginning to be considered. By this estimate the average produce of furs and skins amounted for ten years to two hundred thousand pounds a year. How this was distributed among the various lake posts is shown in the following table:--

_Statement concerning Trade at Detroit and Other Posts_

POUNDS The whole Country & Posts below Montreal 30,000 The Grand River, the North Side of the Lakes Ontario, Huron, & Superior 30,000 In the Country generally called the North West 40,000 In the Countries to the Southward of the Lakes, the Trade of which is principally brought to the posts of Detroit and Michillimackinac, there being very little Indian Trade at Niagara 100,000 ------------------------------------------------------- As above £200,000

Dividing this general estimate into smaller districts, the estimate was as follows:--

In the District of the Garrison of Detroit PACKS The Fort of Detroit, Sagana & the South Side of Lake Huron 1000 Miamis & Wabash Country 2000 Sandusky 400 ----------------------------------------------------------- Say 3400 packs of Furrs estimated at 12£ each is £40,800

In the District of Michillimackinac: On Lake Michigan PACKS The Grand River 100 St. Josephs 300 Checago 100 Milwaki 120 La Bay or Green Bay, including the upper ports of the Mississippi, the South Side of Lake Superior 300 The Illinois Country 600 ------------------------------------------------------------- Say 3220 packs of Furrs estimated at £20 each £60,400 ------------------------------------------------------------- Total of the two Districts £101,200

This estimate was sent to the colonial office to show that if the lake posts were ceded to America, at least half if not seven-tenths of the Indian trade would be lost.

The Americans were not ignorant of this great opportunity for trade. When the lake posts were evacuated by the British in 1796, they began to take a hand in the competition. The United States government sent out agents, and John Jacob Astor found a field for his business enterprise. In 1809 he organized the American Fur Company, and two years later he bought out the Mackinaw Company and the Northwest Company south of the boundary line. His plan to unite the Pacific and the Great Lakes failed for the time being, and the War of 1812 interfered with his schemes; but his organization of the lake trade did its work in turning the stream of profits southward of the border and Americanizing Lake Superior.

The settlements built up by the fur trade were unique and amazing when we consider their isolation in the midst of the wilderness. With Mackinac under French rule we are somewhat familiar, having visited it with La Salle and Saint Lusson. At Fort William, at the western end of Lake Superior, the British merchants built an establishment that reminds one of the feudal castles of the Old World. In 1805 the Canadian companies awoke to the fact that the old Grand Portage, the former gateway of the North, was on territory claimed by the American government. They promptly demolished their old fort there, and built Fort William, forty-five miles north of the portage. There they established a village surrounded by a high palisade, within which stood a big central building, a counting-house, a doctor’s residence, stores for merchandise and depots for furs, workshops for mechanics,--carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, and canoe builders,--boarding-houses for traders, a powder-house and guard-house, and not the least necessary of the many buildings, a jail. Outside the palisade was a long wharf, a ship-building yard, a cemetery, and a considerable line of log houses and Indian wigwams.

The great feature of the settlement, however, was the central building. This wooden edifice stood in the middle of a spacious square and had a long balcony, five feet from the ground. In the centre, flanked by rows of apartments, was a great dining hall, sixty feet long by thirty wide, where two hundred agents, partners, clerks, interpreters, guides, and visitors could dine. Across the upper end of the hall was stretched a very large map of the Indian country, with all the Northwest Company’s posts and routes from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay and the Pacific,--probably the only accurate map of that region on the continent, save for its smaller copies in the factories themselves. Along the sides of the room were portraits of various proprietors of the company, a bust of Simon McTavish, a pioneer member of the company and long its head, a full-length portrait of Nelson, and a painting of the battle of the Nile.

To this post came every spring from Montreal two of the directors of the company, with a retinue of cooks, bakers, clerks, and attendants, and in the great hall from the last of May to the end of August there was always high carnival of feasting and merriment. In this room, too, were held the parliaments of the fur trade, when with all solemnity the Scottish chiefs regulated the affairs of the company and shrewdly made their bargains and estimated their earnings. About them gathered a host of traders, coming every day out of the bleak wilderness to enjoy the good cheer of this metropolis of the Northwest and spend their hard-earned gains in the short summer holiday; and with these came a legion of half-breeds, Indians, and hangers-on. It was a picturesque and motley throng. Ross Cox, visiting there in 1817, found natives of every part of the British Isles, of France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and Switzerland, and, in the capacity of servants, of Africa, the Sandwich Islands, and Bengal. “In their features,” he says, “all shades of the human species,--in their dress, all the varied hues of the rainbow.”

If the paddle and moccasin of the fur trader had been the pathfinder for the lake region, the axe of the lumberman and the pick of the miner who followed them opened up and cleared the wilderness. The fur trader had discovered and explored the wilderness. He was driven out by the lumberman and miner, who spoiled his field with such speed that in a decade or two fur trading as a leading industry was banished to more distant regions. The newcomers made a place for their successors, the pioneer farmers and settlers, by clearing and preparing the country. Extensive lumbering and mining operations came only with the Americans. For two hundred years the French and English tried to keep the western part of the lake region a wilderness and preserve for hunting. The French did it by instinct, for they preferred the wild, free life it offered them; the English did it by policy. In the Parliament of Great Britain leading legislators argued for the restriction of immigration, so that the hunting-grounds should not be disturbed. By a royal proclamation of 1763 the valley of the Ohio and the country about the Great Lakes was declared closed to settlement or purchase of land without special leave or license. A forest preserve was created, and the northwest country was designated by the English “the habitation of bears and beavers.” Only with the coming of the Americans was the lake region developed, and the first signs of the approaching civilization were the cutting down of forests and the mining of copper and iron deposits.

Two great divisions are recognized in the forest distribution of the United States,--the Atlantic and the Pacific. These are separated by the great interior plains and prairies of the continent. The line of cleavage between timber land and prairie is nowhere so defined that it does not have inlets of prairie land in the forest region, and stretches of wooded land in the plain, but the Mississippi River is in general the western boundary of the Atlantic forest area, and the states of the Great Lakes are all included in this section. Within this eastern forest there are several belts of different kinds of woods. Two of these are in the lake states. The northern belt, largely of white pine mixed with red or Norway pine, stretches from New England across New York State and northern Pennsylvania to Wisconsin and the eastern part of Minnesota, and is broken only by Lake Erie. This tract has been the chief source of supply for the United States. South of this white pine belt runs a central hardwood section, where are particularly valuable forests of hickory, maple, oak, and walnut. This section extends from Niagara eastward into New York, and westward across the northern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. As it was in the natural line of migration both from the rivers of the south and the lakes of the north, this central belt was cut long before the pine sections were touched. It fell out in this way, therefore, that for three-quarters of a century these states have been in the main agricultural, rather than forest lands.

Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have had a long history of lumber prosperity. The first railroads of Michigan were welcomed by the settlers as a means of transporting lumber from the logging-camps and sawmills that were springing up all through the central part of the state. The northern industry was taken care of by the lake vessels, which took the lumber from the ports on the shore through the straits of Mackinac. Lake Superior, which had long been a centre for the shifting fur trade, was settled permanently for the first time by the men who were brought by lumber interests. The Mackinac region, the Saginaw and St. Croix rivers, and many smaller streams became the scenes during the winter months of a busy and picturesque activity, and have been associated ever since in fact and fiction with the romance as well as the profit of the lumber industry. As Rochester in the East had begun with a sawmill, so Duluth and Superior in the West came into being as supply stations for the rivermen, and their prosperity depended in 1870 so largely on the lumber traffic that the contest over the railroads, which each place wanted on its side of the state line, was determined by the interests and preferences of the lumber kings.

No accurate record of the entire amount of lumber produced was made in the first decades of the industry, but in 1890 Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were cutting more than one-third of all the lumber supply of the United States, and to this Michigan contributed one-half the amount credited to the three states, and one-fifth of the whole product of the country. Four-fifths of Michigan was then reported to be forested,--a record leading that of any other state.

As early as 1850 the Michigan lumber business was so large as to attract attention throughout commercial centres of the country, and it grew with the amazing rapidity of all western development. In 1854 there were in the state sixty-one sawmills with an output of 108 million feet; in 1872 there were fifteen hundred sawmills, to say nothing of all the other activities incident on lumbering, such as making shingles and planing. By 1881 the amount had jumped to nearly forty million feet, and it was calculated that the output of Michigan mills that year would have loaded a train of cars nearly twenty-five hundred miles long.

These figures have come from the western states, but here as everywhere else the cities and states of the lakes show their interdependence. Buffalo, at the eastern extremity of Lake Erie, becomes one of the leading lumber markets of the world by reason of the immense shipments that come to it from the upper lakes. In 1907 Buffalo had one hundred and thirty-two lumber firms, and an annual output from her yards of over two hundred million feet of pine and over one hundred and fifty million feet of hardwood. This product was made up of the best species of pines, sought for by all dealers, and the hardwood embraced every known variety of American trees.

It is beginning to be evident that this pace cannot be kept up without exhausting the forests. In 1903 the cut from the three northern states was not fifty million feet, a smaller cut than any year since 1878 and hardly more than half that of 1890. To the danger involved in reckless cutting without reforesting our people and legislators have become aroused, and these states are matching their past leadership in output by a corresponding activity in protecting their forest areas. Minnesota led in having an effective system of fire-wardens, and each state is creating forestry commissions and buying up preserves. In thus rescuing from destruction our forests no one can be too prompt or too energetic. Less than a hundred years of occupation of the lake region must not wipe out this industry or destroy the natural beauty and resources of the country. The fur trade had to go before the advance of civilization; the lumber industry must not be allowed to follow in its wake.

The fur trade was at its height in 1820 and was seriously on the wane by 1835; the lumber industry was of a size to be reckoned with by 1830; in the next decade, between 1840 and 1850, the mineral industry came into existence. The earliest explorers had known of the presence in the Lake Superior region of large deposits of virgin copper. References are made to these deposits in the Jesuit “Relations.” The first attempt at mining was made in 1770 by Alexander Henry, the trader at Mackinac, after the Indian wars were over, but he was not successful.

With the coming of the Americans, copper mining began in earnest. Indeed, it was said by a friend, who told the story twenty years after the conversation, that Benjamin Franklin told him that when he was drawing the treaty of peace in Paris he had access to the journals and charts of a corps of French engineers who had been exploring Lake Superior, and that he drew the line through Lake Superior to include the best and largest supply of copper in the American possessions. “The time will come,” said Franklin, “when drawing that line will be considered the greatest service I ever rendered my country.”

Copper and silver were the minerals whose discovery created the most enthusiasm, and several companies were formed for their mining in the thirties and forties after the expedition of Governor Cass. Of these at the time of the Civil War only two were paying dividends. In 1865 the Calumet and Hecla mines were started and began to develop that part of the rich upper peninsula of Michigan known as Keweenaw Point. From that time the mines have sent out yearly thousands of tons, and millions of dollars are realized every year from them. Until 1880, when copper was found in Montana and Arizona, Michigan was the only source of supply in the United States, and sent out five-sixths of the nation’s whole product. Since that time her output has trebled, but owing to the great increase of mining in the West this tremendous tonnage of copper is to-day only one-fourth of the total, although still a most important factor in the contribution of the lake region to the wealth of the country.

[Illustration: An Early Lake Superior Copper Mine]

The presence of iron ore in the Lake Superior country was hardly suspected until after 1840. All companies were formed to mine copper, silver, or gold. The state geologist made no mention of iron in his first report in 1840, but in September, 1844, a party of government surveyors running the lines of a township twelve miles west of Marquette, noticed the deflection of their compass needle. The party was under the leadership of Mr. Burt, the inventor of the solar compass, and he was overjoyed to find his instrument working according to his predictions. The deflection was so great that he summoned his party and sent them out in all directions to search for the iron which he was convinced must exist in large quantities in the near vicinity. Every one of them returned in a short time with specimens of the ore. Thus was discovered the first of the famous ranges that to-day produce one-third of all the iron mined in the United States.

At the time of the discovery of iron deposits there were not over fifty people in Marquette County. Expeditions were fitted out in each succeeding year, and companies began to operate the mines. They worked against great natural obstacles in the remote wilderness. It is hard for us to realize how far out of the world this country seemed at that time. When Michigan was admitted as a state in 1837, the reception of the upper peninsula in compensation for a cession to Ohio of the well-known Toledo tract was regarded with the greatest dissatisfaction. The “State Gazetteer” of that year spoke of the new possession as a wild tract of twenty thousand miles of howling wilderness, while one of the political songs of the time told with scorn how the people were being coerced into trading away the southern land for “that poor frozen land of Michigan.” Within twenty years that sentiment underwent a swift and radical change.

The first companies struggled along in the wilderness carrying their ore to a forge on the Carp River, bringing it first by Indian trail and then by wagon road twelve miles down to the waterside, where it was loaded on sailing vessels by being put on wheelbarrows and rolled up a steep plank. In 1852 the Marquette Iron Company shipped six barrels by this laborious method to Cleveland, which was the first ever received from Lake Superior. The first considerable shipment was one of five thousand tons three years later. Then the great panic of 1857 stopped people for the time being from venturing their money in new and unproved enterprises; but the Civil War created a great demand for iron, and from that time the industry has flourished.

When transportation facilities were needed, the “Soo” Canal was built, and at that very time Mr. Heman B. Ely began an agitation for the building of a railroad in this region. Owing to his influence and under his direction the Iron Mountain Road was built from Marquette to the shore of Lake Superior, the first road in the whole northern country. Mr. Ely was well known in other lake states, as well as being one of the leading pioneers in the north. He had built the first telegraph lines from Buffalo to Detroit and from Cleveland to Pittsburg, had been president of a railroad company at Cleveland whose holdings were the foundation of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, and was director of the Northern Pacific. He was in all his activities a leader to whom the Great Lakes owe much. Railroads built during these years in Ohio and Pennsylvania helped to solve the problem of iron transportation, while the freight traffic in iron ore helped these young roads to live. The enormous demand for iron, due to the great era of railroad building, made furnaces spring up in the Cleveland, Mahoning, and Shenango valleys, and the Michigan industry was fairly launched.

For a long time only the Michigan and Wisconsin ranges were worked, but in 1875 presence of large deposits in the Vermilion Range of Minnesota was brought by Mr. George Stone to the attention of Charlemagne Tower, a prominent lawyer and business man of Pennsylvania. Mr. Tower had had large experience in coal mining, both in the examination of coal fields in Pennsylvania for his cases in the law courts, and as an owner and manager of companies. He sent an expedition to explore the Minnesota ranges, and becoming convinced of their wealth proceeded at once to their development. The friends and business associates whom he endeavored to enlist in this venture were sceptical, so Mr. Tower had to proceed single-handed in his task.

[Illustration: Iron Ore at a Lake Superior Port. From Stereograph, copyright, 1906, by Underwood & Underwood, New York. Depicting iron ore in a series of railroad cars.]

It is little wonder that men doubted the practicability of Mr. Tower’s schemes; it is the more worthy of admiration that he dared to undertake them amid the almost insuperable obstacles. To plant a mining establishment ninety miles north of Duluth and seventy miles west in a direct line from Lake Superior in a region that had no intermediate connections with even the outskirts of civilization seemed an impossible task. The country was densely wooded, with only very small streams and impassable swamps breaking the forest stretch. Provisions, supplies, tools,--everything needed for the camp must be taken either in midwinter over frozen ground and snow when the temperature was usually forty degrees below zero, or in summer on the backs of men and in Indian canoes over a most circuitous route. A railroad must be built to carry the ore, and dock and harbor facilities must be provided on Lake Superior. All this Charlemagne Tower undertook at the age of seventy-three, and carried through to a wonderful success. He built a railroad from the mines to Two Harbors on Lake Superior; he selected Two Harbors as the best place for his docks, roundhouses, machine-shops, and sawmills; and he opened up his mines in the iron district.

In August, 1884, the railroad was finished and the first shipments of ore were made. These shipments were shrewdly distributed among manufacturers of three states leading in iron industries, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, instead of being sent to a single dealer. They met with instant favor from all the companies. The quality of all the northern ranges had been found to be very fine. The percentage of metallic iron contained in the best red hematites shipped from the Michigan mines had been over sixty per cent; this first shipment from Minnesota contained sixty-eight per cent, and with its success the future of the country was assured. The country opened up rapidly, the railroad was carried to Duluth, and a town sprang up about the docks at Two Harbors. In the first year 68,000 tons were shipped; three years later the output had jumped to 400,000 tons, and Minnesota had been transformed in four years from a non-mineral district into one of the foremost iron markets of the United States. Fifteen hundred men were working in its mines, and five thousand were directly or indirectly employed by the industry. In 1887 the Mesabi Range began to be opened up, and together the five ranges,--the Marquette, Gogebic, Menominee, Vermilion, and Mesabi,--located in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, supply to-day more iron than any single country in the world.

This is the history of three of the leading industries of the Great Lakes. In the nineteenth century there came to be many more which have contributed much to the prosperity of the region. From the earliest occupation by the French the Great Lakes have offered not only a comfortable means of livelihood to the settler who came to their shores, but also wealth to the country which possessed them.