CHAPTER XXVI

SHIPPING ON THE LAKES

Nowhere has the life of the Great Lakes developed more clearly an individuality of its own than in its shipping. The conditions which confronted the navigators on these great inland seas were peculiar to their environment. The size of the lakes made types of vessel designed for ocean use more suitable than river craft; yet the fact that they were not one inland sea, but a succession of lakes divided by narrow channels, differentiated them widely from the ocean both in the needs and possibilities of their navigation. To meet these special conditions and to suit the demands of the commerce in which they were engaged the shipbuilders of the lakes have designed vessels which are unique and interesting.

The French found on the Great Lakes a type of boat which was so well adapted to the exigencies of combined lake and river travel that it has persisted to this day. This was the birchbark canoe. But it was not the small pleasure canoe of our modern ideas. Even the first canoes that the Jesuit fathers found the Indians using before 1630 were large enough to transport a family of five or six with all their baggage, their kettles, blankets, and other household goods. With the development of the fur trade and the coming of white men in large numbers the canoes became twenty and thirty feet long, and this style persisted as the main water craft until well into the nineteenth century. The merchants from Montreal went up to Fort William in a fleet of ninety canoes, each carrying four tons’ burden and navigated by eight or ten men, and as late as 1820 the furs of Lake Superior were sent south by John Jacob Astor from his depot at Mackinac to the trading post at Chicago in similar vessels. It was no uncommon occurrence to see at Mackinac and Detroit a flotilla of fifty or sixty canoes sweep up to the shore, the Indians paddling silently and the _voyageurs_ singing a gay Canadian boat-song as they moved their paddles in swift unison at the rate of forty or even sixty strokes a minute. These men measured distances by the number of times they had stopped on the journey to smoke, and would tell you that a place was “three or four pipes away,” because the call had been three times given for “pipes--pipes” by the steersman, and at the word every paddle had been drawn in, every pipe lighted, and a few whiffs taken before the three-minute rest was up and they started on again. Sometimes these rests were once in every two miles, sometimes less frequently, and with their help the men paddled from morning to night, singing as cheerily after their forty-mile run as in the morning.

Other boats were used by the Indians and French, but not so universally. The Indian pirogue was a canoe-shaped boat hollowed out of one of the huge cotton-trees,--a vessel forty or fifty feet long and holding thirty men, but too heavy to carry easily around the numerous portages. The French introduced into the lakes in the eighteenth century the bateau, a flat-bottomed boat with sharp-pointed ends, which resisted the storms better than the clumsy scow barges, and was the precursor of the present two-masted Mackinaw boat. On the canoe and bateau sails were sometimes used, but only in very favorable weather, and in any of these boats all but the most experienced navigators hugged closely the shores of the stormy, wind-swept waters. To us with our eight and ten and twelve thousand ton steel vessels, which find the lake storms a source of dread and danger, it seems incredible that the greater part of the navigation for three centuries was in these frail, light canoes and bateaux.

With the story of the pioneer sailing vessel of La Salle, the sixty-ton _Griffon_ of the seventeenth century design, with her high stern deck and her two masts with clumsy square sails, we are already familiar. After she was lost in 1679, sailing vessels did not again appear on the lakes for nearly seventy-five years. Then there were two on Lake Superior, one the property of the man who made the first attempt at copper mining in that region. The first sailing vessels to come into historical importance were the _Beaver_ and the _Gladwin_, which did such efficient service at the siege of Detroit in 1763. War brought out the need of such vessels, and a shipyard started by the English on Navy Island in the Niagara River turned out several schooners during the next few years. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the entire fleet of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Michigan consisted of only three schooners and six sloops, and no one dreamed of the commercial changes to come before another century was over. Under the orders of the English government a Mr. Collins had made in 1788 a careful survey of the lakes and had stated that vessels on Lake Ontario might be of sixty or even seventy-five or eighty tons, but those on the other lakes should not exceed fifteen tons’ burden; but the ship-builders paid little attention to his instructions.

The steamboat made its appearance on the Great Lakes in 1818 in the shape of a side-wheeler, naïvely called the _Walk-in-the-Water_, which was launched at Buffalo. Even a contemporary described her as a “weak but elegant boat,” and an oil painting shows her to be a little craft with a curious tiller at the stern, no pilot-house, a smoke stack of six lengths of stove-pipe put together, and unboxed wheels. She was a profitable venture while she lasted, making the trip from Buffalo to Detroit with forty or fifty passengers, each of whom paid eighteen dollars, but often taking thirteen days to do it. For four years she held a monopoly on the lakes as the solitary steam-propelled craft, and then one stormy night in October she went ashore after riding out a furious gale. None of her passengers were lost, and there is an old picture portraying this mournful event, “one of the greatest misfortunes that has ever befallen us,” as a journal of the day said. The vessel is depicted as going to pieces on the shore while its passengers stand up straight in unruffled silk hats, pointing apparently at spots of interest in the vicinity,--a very different state of affairs from that told of by those who spent that fearful night on the little vessel hoping for daylight to come before she was knocked to pieces.

[Illustration: The Old and the New. General Cass’s Canoe and a Modern Freight Steamer. Copyright, 1905, by Detroit Publishing Co.]

The steamboat did not disappear from the lakes, as the journal had feared it would, but in 1827 the first steamboat reached Sault Ste. Marie, carrying among her passengers General Winfield Scott, who came to visit the military post there. She made no effort to pass the barrier of the rapids, as even the little canal built by the Northwest Company in 1790 for canoes and bateaux had been blown up in the War of 1812. The first steamboat reached Chicago in 1832, and from that time on they began to multiply on the lakes. It was not, however, till 1845 that the need of steam navigation for working successfully the rich copper mines south of Lake Superior made it so necessary to have some craft not dependent on the uncertainties of the wind that the mine owners combined and bought a little steamboat which they had hauled laboriously over the portage on rollers, an undertaking that occupied seven weeks.

The great need of connecting the rich Lake Superior region with the other lakes,--urged upon the people for twenty years,--brought about in 1855 the building of the “Soo” Canal. After much discussion Congress voted in 1852 three-quarters of a million acres of land to aid the state of Michigan in building this canal. This was done in spite of the opposition of many Eastern members to spending so much money on a project for so remote a wilderness. The type and size of the canal was fought over by engineers and statesmen, and it was finally agreed that a lock two hundred and fifty feet long would provide amply for any vessels that would ever navigate those waters. A young man who was visiting at Sault Ste. Marie at the time, Mr. Charles T. Harvey, became convinced that this was too small an estimate. Mr. Harvey was neither an engineer nor a canal builder, but was a man with foresight. He went before the legislature with plans, drawn under his direction by a New York engineer, for a lock at least one hundred feet longer, and was met with ridicule. The longest vessel on the lakes was then only one hundred and sixty-seven feet, and the lock proposed by Harvey and the Fairbanks Company, who were backing him, would be the largest lock in the world. Harvey won his point, and was given charge of constructing the canal. It was a tremendous undertaking for those days. The nearest railroad was many hundred miles away; the steamboats were slow; it took six weeks to get a reply to a letter mailed to New York, and agents had to be sent to that city to get gangs of laborers from the immigrant population. The temperature on the Sault was at thirty-five degrees below zero much of the time during the winter months, and the men were necessarily poorly housed and cared for. At one time an epidemic of cholera killed ten per cent of the men, but work went on each day. Again two thousand laborers struck, and Harvey hid all the provisions in the woods until they returned to work, which they did in twenty-four hours. Within two years, and at a cost of less than a million dollars, the canal was completed. Immediately the problems of lake navigation were entirely changed. One of the difficulties of the cautious Mr. Collins of seventy years before, who wanted the size of boats limited to fifteen tons, was removed in the building of a channel around the rapids of the Sault. In fifteen years the lock was enlarged and then later enlarged again, till in 1896 the famous eight-hundred-foot Poe lock was built by the army engineer of that name, at the cost of four million dollars. Mr. Harvey, at the fiftieth anniversary of the building of his first lock, came to the celebration of the event and heard discussion of the possible need of a lock larger than the present one. Thus in the memory of living men there has been built up a great commercial marine of over five thousand vessels, and by the spending of fifty millions of dollars in deepening all the lake channels and cutting canals, the four upper lakes have been united into one great waterway over which passes a large proportion of the productive wealth of the United States. Yearly one hundred million tons of freight pass through this lock, which is twice the record of London and Liverpool combined in their twelve-month season.

With the opening of the “Soo” Canal the old conventional type of lake vessel began to disappear, and the designs were accommodated to the special demands of trade and natural conditions. The sailing vessel is coming to be a thing of the past, and the men who navigated the turbulent waters and were caught in gales and ice-jams in their wooden schooners rejoice in its disappearance. Since 1873 the shipyards have built less and less of this type of ship, and in our own day the steel vessel has come to take its place.

The canoe served its purpose for fur trade, and the schooner for lumber; but the mineral industries of Lake Superior, and a little later the grain crops of the West, demanded a different kind of vessel. With the coming of steam power and the development of the “Soo” Canal came into being the style of vessel which has been well described as a “steel trough with a lid on it.” These vessels are built solely to carry as much cargo as is consistent with safety. They are huge steel freighters five and six hundred feet long, with a hold whose capacity is from six to twelve thousand tons of iron ore or a like amount of wheat. Astern is the machinery with a smoke stack and a row of cabins visible above the deck, and three or four hundred feet off--the length of a city block--is the deck-house, containing officers’ quarters with the wheel-house and bridge. Within this house is invariably to be found a man of rare skill and experience. To the casual observer the narrow lake passages and the crowded, winding channels and flats of the rivers would seem to preclude so long and unwieldy a craft, but the lake sailor can navigate her with the string of barges which she often has in tow through any passage with skill and ease. The bows of these vessels are high and rounded to meet and part the heavy waves of the frequent lake storms, and the whole shell is built with special regard to strength, both to resist these gales and to bear the impact of the thousands of tons of wheat and iron which are to be poured from grain elevators and iron bins into their holds. A crew of twenty-five men can handle one of these vessels, but they have no easy time on long stretches between ports. They must be ever on the alert in their short, swift trips from lake to lake.

In the short summer season the motto of lake transportation is speed, and science has bent its energies most successfully to that end. Up in the mines of Michigan and Minnesota a big steam-operated bucket dips down into the earth and scoops from the hillside a load of iron ore which it dumps into steel cars with openings at the bottom, at a cost of five cents a ton! At the docks of Lake Superior,--and the total length of the ore docks on the lake is well over five miles,--the bottom of the car is turned aside and the whole load of red earth rushes either down long chutes directly into the holds of the vessels, or into big buildings called bins or pockets, from which it can be poured from a great height into the vessels filling them at fifteen or sixteen hatches simultaneously. Such records have been made as the loading of more than ten thousand tons of iron ore into a steamer in less than an hour and a half, and the usual time for the operation is only three or four hours. The cost of this loading is made, by the use of this machinery, less than three cents a ton. After the swiftest passage that can be made the vessel reaches the ports of the lower lakes, and there the devices for unloading are even more wonderful. From a bridgelike crane hangs a huge scoop shaped like a clam-shell, which dips down into the vessel’s hold and pulls out ten tons of ore at a time, swings it to one side and drops it on a mountainous heap of red earth. From there it is put into steel cars which, at the furnaces of Pennsylvania, are picked off the track by an immense crane as though they were mere children’s toys and dumped on the ore piles from which the furnaces are fed. In the interval while the ore was being unloaded from the hold of the vessel, coal for the return cargo has been poured in, and in an incredibly short time the freighter is started on her northward journey. So successfully have time and expense been minimized by the elimination of hand labor that the freight charges of the lakes are the wonder of the whole commercial world. Of some kinds of freight the cost of transporting a ton from Buffalo to Duluth is only eighty-five cents. The railroads have given up the attempt to compete and have bought up instead the lines of steamers with which they make connection. The recent tendency on the lakes is to consolidation of ownership. To-day the Pittsburg Steamship Company owns a fleet of one hundred and eight vessels, whose total length if put in one long line would be over eight miles. These fleets are many times the size of those owned by Americans on the ocean. Indeed, this is one of the striking contrasts between lake and ocean traffic. A very large proportion of lake vessels is owned by Americans, while the reverse is true on the ocean.

Grain is handled in much the same manner as iron ore. Millions of bushels come into the ports of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior,--to Fort William, Duluth, West Superior, Milwaukee, Chicago, and minor ports,--and are stored in huge fireproof buildings on the water front, known as grain elevators. These structures are of all sizes, holding from thirty and forty thousand bushels of wheat to a million or more. They are equipped with machinery for scouring, cleaning, and drying the grain, and for pouring it into the vessels. The unloading is done either by means of an endless chain of buckets which work on a long spout or “leg” lowered into the hatch, or by “pipes” or shafts from the elevators into the fifteen or twenty hatches. Down these pipes the grain rushes with a buzzing sound at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five thousand bushels an hour. For the unloading process the grain is drawn out by suction through similar pipes, the force supplied by powerful engines which give a pressure of several hundred pounds to the square inch. In 1907 grain came into the lake ports which would have made, when converted into flour, forty-three million barrels of flour. Reckoning that two hundred and fifty one-pound loaves can be made from a barrel, this grain would have supplied the world with ten billion loaves of bread.

Chicago and Buffalo, the principal gateways of entrance and exit for grain, have large systems of elevators with a capacity of millions of bushels, and in the winter months these are not sufficient, but the ice-bound vessels as they wait in the harbors of Chicago and Lake Superior become floating storage warehouses, ready to sail east with their cargoes the moment navigation is open.

These cargo freighters, with the huge barges of similar construction that they tow behind them in lines of two or three, are the most characteristic vessels of the lakes. Another style of ship, of which much was expected at the time of its invention, was the whaleback, a long, cigar-shaped steel craft whose decks were so low that they were constantly washed by the waves. These boats were designed, as are all lake boats, to have the greatest possible empty space for cargo, a condition made possible by the fact that in their short voyages they do not need to carry large stores of coal or provisions. The whaleback is a blunt-ended hulk with rounded gunwales, which from its appearance and from its manner of rooting and rolling about in the waves has gained the lake nickname of the “pig.” These vessels are unique and picturesque, but not so successful as the usual style of freighters. Moreover, they have reached their maximum size and cannot be improved or enlarged without change of shape.

[Illustration: Grain Elevator and Lumber Jam. Copyright, 1902, by Detroit Photographic Co. In the distance a grain elevator with numerous silos. In the foreground, a logjam on the surface of the water.]

The passenger steamers of the lakes are models of comfort, built more and more on the style, and even approximating the size of, the ocean liners, and after them there remains only one other type of vessel that deserves mention,--the ice-breaker. The situation of the Great Lakes on the extreme confines of the region whose climate makes it fit for the uses of civilized man keeps them ice-bound and closes their commerce for five months in the year. Early in April vessel owners begin to watch with interest the straits of Mackinac, Sault Ste. Marie, and Detroit. When the channel at Mackinac shows water instead of ice, navigation of the lakes has opened. Then strong ice-breakers force their way through the floating ice with a string of vessels at their sterns. They are powerful craft with a screw at the bow as well as at the stern, the first to suck the water from under the ice so that the boat climbing upon it may crush it down, breaking it and throwing it out of the way, and the second to propel the vessel through the two or three or even four feet of solid blue ice that have been broken in this way. This is an American invention which has been copied in all northern waters. Russia sent one of her foremost generals to study its construction, and it is now in use on her frozen lakes and seas.

The tale of lake shipping is a tale that can only be begun in the limits of a single chapter. There are the car-ferries of Detroit, by which trains are carried across the river. These are now so crowded that a tunnel under the river is in process of construction to relieve the congestion. There are the stories of traffic at the “Soo” Canal, through which for six months of the year a big steamer passes in every fifteen minutes of the night and day, and of the Detroit River, with a record of a vessel every thirteen minutes, and of an average of two hundred tons of freight a minute for a season of two hundred and thirty days. There are the ship-building yards at Cleveland, where thirty-one steel freighters were ordered in a single winter, and more are turned out every year. The ships of the lakes are built on the lakes, and the shipyards are among the busiest centres of all that country. Lastly, there is the sad tale of wrecks and loss of lives, for since the first canoes were lost and the _Griffon_ and the _Walk-in-the-Water_ went down, the waters have exacted their annual toll, and fishing schooners and seven-thousand-ton freighters alike have broken in two or have foundered and been dashed to pieces on the rocks, while of the tale of hairbreadth escapes there is no end.

Lake shipping within the limits of its own waterways has developed in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth is to come the connecting of the lakes with the Atlantic by canal and river, and the story of the twentieth century will be of vessels going direct from the ports of the Great Lakes to the ports of the Old World. With this prophecy the tale would seem to be complete.