The Great Lakes.The Vessels That Plough Them

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.

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.”

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.”

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?

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“But where shall I go?” asks the man who is planning a vacation, and who may live two or three hundred miles away from the nearest of the Great Lakes. He is perplexed, and with good cause. He has spent other vacations away from home and generally speaking he knows what a hold-up game ordinary summer-resort life is. But he need not fear this on the Lakes. All that he has to do in order successfully to solve this problem of “where to go” is to get a map, select any little town or village situated on the fresh-water sea nearest to him, or three or four of them, for that matter, and write to the postmasters. They can turn the communications over to some person who will interest himself to that extent. Say, for instance, that you write to the little port of Vermilion, on Lake Erie. Your reply will state that “Shattuck’s Grove would be a nice place for you to spend your holidays; or you may go to Ruggles’ Grove, half a dozen miles up the beach; or you can get cheap accommodations, board and room for three or four dollars a week apiece, at any one of a hundred farmhouses that look right out over the lake.” In fact, it is not necessary for you to write at all. When you are ready to leave on your vacation, when your trunk is ready and the wife and children all aglow with eagerness and expectancy – why, start. Go direct to any one of these little Lake towns. Within a day after arriving there, or within two days at the most, you will be settled. I have passed nearly all of my life along the Lakes, and have travelled over every mile of the Lake Erie shore; I have gone from end to end of them all, and I do not know of a Lake town that does not possess in its immediate vicinity what is locally known as a “grove.” A grove, on the Lakes, means a piece of woods that the owner has cleared of underbrush, where the children may buy ice-cream and candy, where there are plenty of swings, boats, fishing-tackle, and perhaps a merry-go-round, and where the pleasure-seeker may rent a tent at almost no cost, buy his meals at ridiculously low prices and live entirely on the grounds, or board with some farmer in the neighbourhood. A “grove,” in other words, is what might be called a rural resort, a place visited almost entirely by country people and the residents of neighbouring towns, and where one may fish, swim, and enjoy the most glorious of all vacations for no more than it would cost him to live at home, and frequently for less.

There are many hundreds of these “groves” along the Lakes, unknown to all but those who live near them. Only on occasion of Sunday-school picnics or Fourth of July celebrations are they crowded. They are the most ideal of all places in which to spend one’s holidays, if rest and quiet recreations are what the pleasure-seeker desires. And these groves are easily found. I do not believe there is a twenty-mile stretch along Lake Erie that does not possess its grove, and sometimes there are a dozen of them within that distance. I know of many that are not even situated near villages, being five or six miles away and patronised almost entirely by farmers. In almost any one of them a family may enjoy camp life if they wish, buy their supplies of neighbouring farmers, do their own cooking, rent a good boat for from twenty-five to fifty cents a day, and get other things at a corresponding cost. I am personally acquainted with one family of four who came from Louisville to one of these sylvan resorts on Lake Huron last year, and the total expense of their three weeks’ vacation, not including railroad fare, was under fifty dollars. The experience of these parents and their children is not an exception. It is a common one with those who are acquainted with the Lakes and who know how to take advantage of them to their own profit.

There is another phase of Lake life, a degree removed from that which I have described, which is also unknown beyond its own local environment and which ought to be made to be of great profit and pleasure to those seeking holiday recreation along our Inland Seas. The shores of the Lakes, from end to end, are literally dotted with what might appropriately be called lakeside inns – places located far from the dust and noise and more fashionable gaiety of crowded resorts and cities, where one may enjoy all of the simpler pleasures of water-life for from six to eight dollars a week. This price includes room, board, boats, fishing-tackle, and other accommodations. At most of these places the board is superior to that which one secures at the large resorts. Fish, frogs’ legs, and chickens play an important part in the bill of fare, and almost without exception they are placed upon the table in huge dishes, heaped with fresh viands from the kitchen as soon as they become empty. The fish cost the innkeepers nothing, for they are mostly caught by the pleasure-seekers themselves; frogs usually abound somewhere in the immediate vicinity, and where the landlord does not raise his own fowls they are purchased from neighbouring farmers. The inn is a local market for butter, eggs, celery, and vegetables of all kinds, so it is not difficult to understand why the board at these places is superior to almost any that can be found in a city. I have no doubt that if these lakeside inns were generally known they would be so crowded that life would not be worth living in them. But they are not known and as a consequence are running along in their old-fashioned way, sources of unrivalled summer joy to those who have been fortunate enough to discover them. At many of these inns only a dollar a day is charged, all accommodations included, and the price is seldom above $1.50 a day, even for transients. I know of one inn that has been “discovered” by half a dozen travelling men and their wives. Three of these families live in Cleveland, one in Pittsburg, and two in New York, and each year they spend a month together on Lake St. Clair. The cost is six dollars a week for each adult! A few weeks ago I was talking with one of these men, the representative of a New York dry-goods firm, and he told me that for himself, his wife, and two children it cost less to stay a month at this place than it did to pass a single week at an ocean resort, and that the accommodations and opportunities for pleasure were greater there than he had ever been able to afford on the Atlantic. I do not wish to emphasise the attractions of any particular inn, for in most ways all of them are alike. And the holiday-seeker who knows nothing of the Lakes can find them as easily as he can locate the groves I have described. The secret of the whole thing is in the knowledge that hundreds of such places really exist.

I have often thought that if it were possible for every person in the United States to make a trip over the Lakes, beginning at Niagara Falls, our Inland Seas from that day on would be recognised as the greatest pleasure-grounds in the world. At Niagara Falls, the traveller takes the Gorge ride, and perhaps makes a trip on the Maid of the Mist. But he is probably unaware that in the immediate neighbourhood are a score of spots hallowed in history, and whose incidents have made up some of the most romantic and tragic pages in the story of our country. He may not know that within walking distance of the falls was fought the battle of Queenston Heights, that at certain points the earthworks of the British still remain, that he may stand in the very spot where General Brock fell dying, and that he may follow, step by step, that thrilling fight far up on the summit of those wild ridges. Neither does the ordinary tourist know that almost within sight of the falls is one of the oldest cemeteries in America, where many of the men who were slain in the battles of those regions are at rest. Old Fort Niagara remains almost unvisited, and the spot not far distant where the adventurer La Salle built the Griffin, the first vessel ever to sail the Lakes, is virtually unknown. Two weeks, and every hour of them filled with interest, might be spent by the Lake tourist at Niagara Falls, yet the average person is satisfied with a day. And it is all because he does not know. This may be said of his experiences from end to end of the Lakes.