The Great Lakes.The Vessels That Plough Them

“A hundred million tons,” repeated the mayor of one of our Lake ports when I told him about it recently. “A hundred million tons! That’s quite a lot of stuff, isn’t it?”

Quite a lot of stuff! It might have been a hundred million bushels and he would have been equally surprised. His lack of enthusiasm does not discredit him. He does not own ships; neither does he fill them. He is like the vast majority of our millions, who have never given more than a passing thought to that gigantic inland water commerce which has largely been the making of the nation. It did not dawn on him that it meant more than a ton for every man, woman, and child on this North American continent; that in dollars it counted billions; that on it depended the existence of cities; that largely because of it foreign nations acknowledged our commercial prestige.

No other hundred million tons of freight in all the world is as important to Americans as this annual traffic of the Great Lakes. To move it requires the services of nearly three thousand vessels of all kinds, employing twenty-five thousand men at an aggregate wage of thirteen million dollars a year. A million working people are fed and clothed and housed because of the cargoes this huge argosy carries from port to port.

It is impossible to say with accuracy how this hundred million tons of freight is distributed and of what it consists. Only at the Soo and at Detroit are records kept of passing tonnage, so the figures which are given showing the tremendous commerce that passes these places do not include the enormous tonnage which is loaded and emptied without passing through the Detroit River or the Sault Ste. Marie canals. The Detroit River is the greatest waterway of commerce in the world, and in 1906 there passed through it over sixty million tons, or more than three fifths of the total tonnage of the Lakes. Of this about a quarter moved in a northerly direction and three quarters toward the cities of the East. The principal item of the up-bound traffic was 14,000,000 tons of coal, of the south-bound 37,513,600 tons of iron ore, 110,598,927 bushels of grain, 1,159,757 tons of flour, 14,888,927 bushels of flaxseed, and over 1,000,000,000 feet of lumber. In 1907, there was a big increase, the commerce passing through the Detroit River being over 75,000,000 tons.

“And when you are figuring out what the ships carry, be sure and don’t leave out the smoke!” said the captain of an ore carrier, pointing over our port to a black trail half a mile long. “Never thought of it, did you? Well, last year our Lake ships burned three million tons of coal. Think of it! Three million tons – enough to heat every home in Chicago for two years!”

But in this chapter I am not going to deal with smoke; neither with the grain that feeds nations, nor the lumber that builds their homes. They will be described in their time. The backbone of American manufacturing industry – the mainspring of our commercial prestige abroad – is iron; and it is this iron, gathered in the one-time wildernesses of the Northland and brought down a thousand miles by ship, that stands largely for the greatness of the Lakes to-day. “Gold is precious, but iron is priceless,” said Andrew Carnegie. “The wheels of progress may run without the gleam of yellow metal, but never without our ugly ore.” And the Lake country, or three little patches of it, produce each year nearly a half of the earth’s total supply of iron. Farmers in the wake of their ploughshares, our millions of workers in metal, and our other millions whose fingers daily touch the chill of iron have never dreamed of this. Few of them know that eight hundred great vessels are engaged solely in the iron ore traffic; that in a single trip this immense fleet can transport more than three million tons, and that in 1907, they brought to the foundries of the East and South over forty-one million tons. If every man, woman, and child, savage or civilised, that inhabits this earth of ours were to receive equal portions of this one product carried by Lake vessels in 1907, each person’s share would be forty pounds! And still the world is crying for iron. There is not enough to supply the demand, and there never will be. The iron ore traffic of the Lakes has doubled during the last six years; it will double again during the next ten – and iron will still be the most precious thing on earth.

If the iron ore mines of the North were to go out of existence to-morrow nearly half of the commerce of the Inland Seas would cease to be. With it would go the strongest men of the Lakes. For our iron has made iron men. In that Northland, along the Mesaba, Goebic, and Vermilion ranges, from Duluth’s back door to the pine barrens of northern Michigan and Wisconsin, they have practically made themselves rulers of the world’s commerce in steel and iron. To follow the great ships of the Lakes over their northward trail into this country is to enter into realms of past romance and adventure which would furnish material for a hundred novels. But people do not know this. The picturesque days of ’49, the Australian fever, and the Klondike rush are as of yesterday in memory – but what of this Northland, where they load dirty ore into dirty ships and carry it to the dirty foundries of the East? Ask Captain Joseph Sellwood; ask the “three Merritts,” Alfred, Leonidas, and N. B.; or John Uno Sebenius, David T. Adams, and Martin Pattison; ask any one of a score of others who are living, and who will tell you of the days not so very long ago when the iron prospectors went out with packs on their backs and guns in their hands to seek the “ugly wealth.” These are of the old generation of “iron men” – the men who suffered in the days of exploration and development in the wilderness, who starved and froze, who survived while companions died, who suffered adventures and hardships in the death-like grip of Northland winters that rival any of those in Klondike history. And the new generation that has followed is like them in “the strength of man” that is in them. They are a powerful breed, these iron kings, down to the newest among them; men like Thomas F. Cole, who rose from nothing to a position of power and wealth, and W. P. Snyder, the poverty-stricken Methodist minister’s son, who has fought the Steel Corporation to a standstill and who is talked of as its president of the future.

It will be a great “coming together” for the iron and steel industry, this winning of William Penn Snyder. To-day he is the king of pig iron. When he refused to deal with those who formed the United States Steel Corporation, his friends said that he was ruined. But he stood on his feet alone – and fought. He got a neck hold on the corporation. He cornered pig iron and because of him at the present time the corporation is paying very heavy prices for its outside product. Snyder is worth fifteen million dollars. In 1906, he cleaned up one million five hundred thousand dollars on pig iron alone, and there is no reason for doubting that his 1907 earnings were greater still. He is a powerful enemy to have as a friend – and the corporation wants him, and will probably get him.

If you are going into the North to study the ore traffic at close range, the first man you will probably hear of after leaving your ship is Thomas F. Cole, of Duluth. You must know Cole before you go deeper into the subject of the forty or fifty million tons of ore which the ships will carry during the present year of 1909. The United States Steel Corporation will use about thirty million tons of the total output of the ore regions this year, and Cole is the United States Steel Corporation in this big Northland. He is the head of the finest and most delicate industrial mechanism in the world. This mechanism, in a way, is so fine that it may be said to be almost non-existent. It is simply an “organized and capitalized intelligence.” The Steel Corporation will mine some eighteen or twenty million tons of ore in Minnesota alone this year. Yet it owns not a dollar’s worth of property in the State. As a corporation it does no business in the State. It might be described as a huge octopus, and each arm of this octopus, representing a big mining interest, works independently of all other arms and of the body of the octopus itself. Through these arms the corporation accomplishes its aims. Each huge mine has its own executive organisation, is responsible for its own acts – but it must obtain results. The “central intelligence,” or body of the corporation, is there to judge results, and Cole is the power that watches over all. Officially he is known as the president of the Oliver Mining Company, the greatest organisation of its kind in existence, which attends not only to the Steel Corporation’s interests in Minnesota, but in Michigan and Wisconsin as well. As the great eye of the world’s largest trust he guards the interests of thirty-one mines, employs fifteen thousand men, and gives subsistence to sixty thousand people.

Because of the transportation of this mighty product Cole is as closely associated with the Lakes and their ships as with the ranges and their mines. It has been said that he was “born between ships and mines,” and he has always remained between them. He is one of the most remarkable characters of the Inland Seas. Cole is only forty-seven years old, and for thirty-nine years he has earned his own livelihood, and more. When six years old, his father was killed in an accident in the Phœnix Mine. Baby Tom was the oldest of the widowed mother’s little brood, and he rose to the occasion. At the age of eight he became a washboy in the Cliff stamp mill. He had hardly mastered his alphabet; he could barely read the simplest lines; never in this civilised world did a youngster begin life’s battle with greater odds against him. But even in these days the great ambition was born in him, as it was born in Abraham Lincoln; and like Lincoln, in his little wilderness home of poverty and sorrow, he began educating himself. It took years. But he succeeded.

This is the man whose name you will hear first when you enter the mining country. To chronicle his rise from a dusty Calumet office of long ago to his present kingdom of iron would be to write a book of romance. And there are others of the iron barons of the North whose histories would be almost as interesting, even though fortune may have smiled on them less kindly.

From the immensity of the interests which Cole superintends one might be led to believe that the iron ore industry is almost entirely in the hands of the trust. This, however, is not so. For every ship that goes down into the South for the trust another leaves for an independent. Nearly every maker of steel owns a mine or two in the ranges of Minnesota, Michigan, or Wisconsin. There are five of these ranges. The Mesaba and Vermilion ranges, both in Minnesota, produce about two thirds of the total product carried by the ships of the Lakes; the Goebic, Menominee, and Marquette ranges are in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Somehow it is true that nearly every great thing associated with the Lakes is unusual in some way – unusual to an astonishing degree, and the iron ore industry is not an exception. Probably not one person in ten thousand knows that one lone county in this great continent is the very backbone of the steel industry in the United States. This county is in Minnesota. It is the county of St. Louis, and is about as big as the State of Massachusetts. Not much more than twenty years ago it was a howling wilderness. Even a dozen years ago the Mesaba bore but little evidence of the presence of man. Now this country is alive with industry. Buried in the wilderness which still exists are thriving towns; where a short time ago deer and bear wandered unmolested, is now the din of innumerable locomotives, the rumbling of thousands of trains, the screeching of whistles, and the constant groaning of steam shovels. There is not a richer county on the face of the earth. In it are over one hundred mines, from which one hundred and twenty-three million tons of ore have been taken since Charlemagne Tower, now Ambassador to Germany, brought down the first carload to Duluth in 1884. These mines afford livelihood for more than two hundred thousand people, and because of them St. Louis County possesses the greatest freight traffic road in existence – the Duluth, Mesaba, and Northern Railway – which, in 1907, carried about fourteen million tons of ore from the mines to the docks.

This comparatively little corner of Minnesota practically runs the whole State in so far as expenses are concerned. To administer the affairs of the State, including all of its activities, costs about two million six hundred thousand dollars, and, as inconceivable as it may seem, the three railroads in the ore region pay in taxes one fifth of this sum. They pay one third of the total railroad tax of the State, notwithstanding the fact that some of the greatest lines in the country centre at Minneapolis and St. Paul. To this must be added about seven hundred thousand dollars paid in direct taxes by the mines themselves, so that the iron ore which the ships of the Lakes bring down to Eastern ports each season pays almost half of the total expense of running the State of Minnesota!

And these mines will add more and more to the State exchequer each year, as will also the mines of the three ranges in Michigan and Wisconsin. For in no part of the world has mining been undertaken on a scale so gigantic as that of the Superior region, and every contrivance known to mining science is being used to increase month by month the mountains of ore which ever fail to satisfy the hungry furnaces of the East. It is predicted by Captain Joseph Sellwood, of Duluth, one of the oldest and greatest of the iron barons, that the time is not distant when the Mesaba range alone will be producing forty million tons of ore a year – as much as all five ranges are producing now.

“It will cost over a billion dollars to get this ore to the docks,” said he. “And seven hundred and fifty million dollars more to land it in Lake Erie ports.” – Nearly a two-billion-dollar mining and transportation business for the people of the Lakes to look forward to, and this from a single range!

“But will not this tremendous activity exhaust your mines?” I asked of several of these iron barons. “The ore doesn’t go down to China, and it doesn’t extend all over the State. What is the future?”

The future! Few have thought of this. There are just at present too many millions of dollars in the making to give one time or inclination to picture the days when only black and silent scars will remain to give evidence of the time when this Northland was one of the treasure houses of the earth. But that time must come. Old mining men say so if you can get them to talk about it, and scientific computations, as far as they go, are proof of it. These computations differ, but they agree pretty generally that there are still between a billion and a half and two billion tons of ore in the Superior district. Within the next five years the ships will be bringing down fifty million tons a year, and there is no reason for believing that this will be the maximum. So it is obvious that the ore of the Lake Superior regions will not last beyond the year 1950 unless new deposits are discovered, or methods are found for the utilisation of immense deposits that cannot now be used.

“Will this event not prove ruinous to a large extent to shipping interests?” I asked G. Ashley Tomlinson, of Duluth, and others closely associated with iron and vessel interests. “To-day nearly half of the total tonnage of the Lakes is from the mines. If this industry becomes practically extinct what will become of the hundreds of ships engaged in the traffic?”

Mr. Tomlinson’s answer struck me as extremely logical. “The production of ore will probably reach its maximum within the next ten years,” he said. “It will then begin to decline. But the decrease will be gradual, and meanwhile other freight traffic on the Lakes will be increasing so rapidly that each year ships that were intended originally for the ore trade will carry other business. There will be no loss for the ships. The development of our own and the Canadian West has only begun, and the Lakes are the great links of commerce between their vast enterprises of the future and the East. The grain trade of the Canadian West alone will in the not distant future be something tremendous.”

But whatever the future of the ore regions of the North may be, their present is one of great interest and importance to the world at large. Mining, like shipbuilding, has been reduced to a science on the Lakes. A stranger visiting for the first time any one of the five ranges is filled with astonishment. I will never forget the sensations with which I first saw mining on the Mesaba range. We had come up over a forest-clad hill and stood on the very edge of the mine before I had been made aware of its nearness. Below me there stretched a mile of deep, huge scars in the bottom of what seemed to be a great hole dug into the earth. One of these pits, half a mile in diameter, and, as I afterward discovered, nearly two hundred feet in depth, was almost at my feet.

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

This was one of the great “open pits” of the Mesaba range. There are many others like it in the Superior regions. They are the most wonderful mines in the world. Imagine that you take a barrel of salt, dig a hole, pour the salt into this hole, and cover it with a few inches of earth. This gives you an idea of one of these ore mines. After the earth has been “stripped” from the top the ore is reached and it is found in much the same way that the salt would be found. In the words of one superintendent, it is “all together.” It is as if Nature, like a pirate, had dug holes here and there in which she had hidden her treasure, covering it over for concealment with a few feet of earth.

Down into these pits and along their edges run the tracks of the ore cars. There is here but little of the shovelling and “picking” of men. Steam shovels, weighing from sixty to seventy-five tons each, do the work. Like a great hand one of these shovels dips down into the soft mass of ore, buries its great dipper until it holds from four to eight tons, and then, groaning and rumbling, slowly lifts its burden aloft, swings it over a car, and the actual work of mining is done. A thousand times a day it will repeat this operation, lifting from three thousand to eight thousand tons of ore. This one shovel keeps busy three locomotives and as many trains of dump cars. And there are nearly two hundred of these shovels in use on the Mesaba range alone. It costs only about six cents a ton to mine in this way, after the “stripping” has been done, or, in other words, after the ore has been laid bare. There are two other processes on the ranges where the ore is not so soft or so closely laid. One of these is the milling process, and the other is the blasting out of hard ore. Milling costs about thirty-five cents per ton, and the blasting process from one dollar to one dollar and twenty-five cents.

Why it has for some time been impossible to build ships too fast for the demand may most graphically be shown, perhaps, by quoting a few figures which demonstrate the tremendous energy now being exerted in the ore regions of the North. Figures as a usual thing are uninteresting, but these enter so vitally into the welfare of every American citizen that they should be regarded with more than ordinary respect. As stated before, we are now making nearly half of all the iron and steel produced on earth. In 1880, we made only 1,240,000 tons of steel; in 1890, this had increased to over 4,000,000; in 1900, to 10,188,000 tons, and in 1905, to 20,023,000 tons. Lake ships and Lake mines had to supply this. And now we come to mine figures which almost stagger belief. In 1904, the Mesaba range, for instance, yielded only a little over 12,000,000 tons. In the following year the production was nearly doubled, the ore carriers bringing down 20,153,699 tons, which in 1906 was increased to almost 24,000,000!

This enormous annual tonnage of the Mesaba range, together with that of the other four ranges of the Superior region, is carried by rail directly from the mines to the great ore docks of Lake ports. The product of the Mesaba and Vermilion ranges, in Minnesota, is shipped from Duluth and Two Harbors; the eight million tons of the Goebic and Marquette ranges, in Michigan, from Escanaba and Marquette; and the five million tons of the Menominee range, in Wisconsin, from Ashland and Superior.

To these six ports of the Northland come the vikings of the Lakes and their immense fleets. Four of these ports are within a radius of seventy-five miles, and the two others, in Michigan, are about one hundred and fifty miles farther east and south. No other area of lake or ocean in the world is as much travelled by shipping as that along which these ore harbours are situated. The people of Duluth have witnessed blockades of vessels such as have never been seen in the greatest ocean ports. Over this part of Superior there is a constant trail of smoke from the funnels of ships. During one month there were 1221 arrivals and clearances from Duluth alone, an average of forty a day.

Behind these great ships, which rest never a day nor an hour for eight months of the year, are the kings of Lake commerce – such men as J. C. Gilchrist, James Davidson, Captain Mitchell, William Livingstone, Harry Coulby, W. C. Richardson, A. B. Wolvin, G. Ashley Tomlinson, and scores of others. To write of these would be to chronicle a history of men who have fought their way to the top through sheer force of the “breed that is in them.”

Take G. Ashley Tomlinson, of Duluth, for instance, whose ships carry a couple of million tons of ore a year. “Not a great record,” as Mr. Tomlinson modestly says, but still enough to supply every man, woman, and child in the United States with a little matter of fifty pounds each twelvemonth! In a novel Tomlinson would make an ideal soldier of fortune; in plain, matter-of-fact life he represents those elements which make the great men of the Lakes. He is forty years old. He has sixteen ships. His income is over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

Yet Tomlinson began, as did many other Great Lake men of to-day, with just two assets – the clothes on his back and a huge ambition. He started his career as a messenger boy in the State treasurer’s office at Lansing, Michigan. But there was not enough of the strenuous life in this for him, so he went West to become a cowboy. He succeeded, much to his regret; for soon after he had mastered the broncho and could handle a lasso there came the war between the cowboys and the White River Utes. In one of the fights Tomlinson was wounded and afterward captured by the redskins. During the whole of one night he was subjected to torture, and at dawn of the following day, when almost at the point of death, he was delivered by a party of ranchmen. Tomlinson was not one to display the white feather – but he had had enough of Western life, and as soon as possible he worked himself from Rawlins, Wyoming, to Chicago on a cattle train. After a time he came to Michigan, and with his savings attended the University of Michigan for about a year. This was enough of “higher education” for him, so he sold his text-books and went to work on the Detroit Journal at the munificent salary of six dollars a week. Newspaper work was all right until Buffalo Bill came along. Tomlinson joined the show, rode a bucking broncho for a year, then “developed” a voice and cast his fortunes with the Mapleson Opera Company. In 1889, he went to New York as a reporter on the Sun, returned the following year to become night editor of the Detroit Tribune, and in 1893 moved to Duluth.

The Lakes began to hold a peculiar fascination for him. He went into the vessel brokerage business mostly on his nerve; but nerve made him money, and his capital began to grow. How fast it has grown during the past dozen years one must judge by his ships and his income. He is president of five steamship companies, vice-president of another, secretary to three more, and a director in the American Exchange Bank, of Duluth, and the Cananea Central Copper Company. He has developed from a typical adventurer of fortune into one of the great men of the Lakes. His romantic career is described here because it is illustrative of the fact that brain and brawn, not “pull” and money, have made the vikings and iron barons of the Inland Seas. No millionaires’ sons here, living on their fathers’ prestige – no blue-blooded drones in these regions of the five little seas, where only red blood counts!

When the first ships of the season come up from the South in April or May nearly a million and a half tons of ore are awaiting them in the docks of the ore-shipping ports. There are twenty-six of these ore docks, one of which, at Duluth, has a storage capacity of ninety-six thousand tons. From a distance these docks look like great trestles, from fifty to one hundred feet above the water, some of them running for nearly half a mile out into the lake. Out upon these docks run the cars from the mines. From these cars the ore is dropped into huge pockets, from which run downward long chutes, or spouts. A ten-thousand-ton carrier runs alongside. Her hatches are opened. Into each hatch runs a chute. The chute “doors” are opened, and with a dull, rumbling, rushing sound the ore pours down by force of gravity from the huge pockets above. At dock No. 4, Duluth, 9277 tons were put aboard the steamer E. J. Earling in seventy minutes, being at the rate of 7988 tons an hour. The rapidity with which Lake transportation is carried on is shown in the fact that upon this occasion the Earling was in port only two hours and fifteen minutes before she began her thousand-mile return trip eastward.

And now comes the last important phase. One viewing the continuous activity at the mines, the building up of cities on the ranges, and the tremendous interests represented in the great shipping ports may forget that this is but one end of the gigantic industry which makes the United States the steel-maker for the world. At the other end of the fresh-water highways is seen the other half of the picture. Down into Erie come the ships from the North. A few of them go to Chicago, but only a few. Out of a total movement of thirty-seven million tons, in 1906, thirty-two million tons were received at Lake Erie ports. There are eleven of these “receiving ports” – Toledo, Sandusky, Huron, Lorain, Cleveland, Fairport, Ashtabula, Conneaut, Erie, Buffalo, and Tonawanda.

Between these cities there is a constant battle for prestige. Now one leads in tonnage received, now another. At the present time the bitterest rivalry exists between Cleveland, Ashtabula, and Conneaut, the three greatest ore ports in the world. In 1901, Ashtabula led. In 1902, Cleveland bore away the “pennant,” with Ashtabula and Conneaut second and third. Cleveland was still ahead in 1903, but in 1904, Conneaut became the greatest ore-receiving port in the world. In 1905, Ashtabula had again won the ascendency, and in 1906, she maintained her prestige, receiving in that year 6,833,352 tons; Cleveland was second, and Conneaut third. Lorain, Fairport, Ashtabula, Conneaut, and Erie practically exist because of the ore which comes down from the northern mines. Seven million dollars are now being expended in the improvement of Ashtabula harbour by the Lake Shore and Pennsylvania railroad companies, and the capacity of the harbour has been doubled since 1905. With the improvement of that harbour Conneaut’s greatest advantage will be gone, for until a comparatively recent date nearly all of the largest vessels went to that port. The tremendous activity in Ashtabula must be seen to be fully appreciated. In one day lately almost four thousand ore and coal cars were moved between that port and Youngstown.

At this end of the great ore industry the wonderful mechanism for the handling of cargoes is even more astonishing than that of the Northland. The ore carrier is run under a huge unloading machine which thrusts steel arms down into the score or more hatches of the vessel, and without the assistance of human hands the cargo is emptied so quickly that the uninitiated observer stands mute with astonishment. How quickly this work is done is shown in the record of the George W. Perkins, which discharged 10,346 tons at Conneaut in four hours and ten minutes.

Once more, after this unloading, the steel monster of the Lakes is all but ready for her long journey into the North. Within a few hours she is reloaded, with a few sonorous blasts of her whistle she bids a last adieu, and again she is off on the long trail that leads to the “ugly wealth” in the ore ranges of Superior.

III

What the Ships Carry – Other Cargoes

Not long ago I went to see William Livingstone, President of the Lake Carriers’ Association – Great Admiral, in a way, of the world’s mightiest fleet of steel – an enrolled navy of 593 ships and a tonnage of nearly one million nine hundred thousand. Unconsciously I had come to call this man the Grey Man and the Man who Knows. Both titles fit, as they will tell you from the twin Tonawandas to Duluth. For six consecutive years president of the greatest organisation of its kind on earth, an association of ships made up, if weighed, of half of the iron and steel floating on the Inland Seas, he has become a part of Lake history. I sought him for an idea. I found it.

The Grey Man was at his desk studying over the expenditure of a matter of several millions of dollars for a new canal at the “Soo.” He turned slowly – grey suit, grey tie, grey eyes, grey beard, grey hair – all beautifully blended. He seldom speaks first. He is always fighting to be courteous, yet the days are ten hours too short for him.

“I want a new idea,” I opened bluntly. “I want something new in marine – something that will make people sit up and take notice, as it were. Can you help me?”

He swung slowly about in his chair until his eyes rested upon a picture on the wall. It was a picture of the old days on the Lakes. My eyes, too, rested on the old picture. It reminded me of things, and I kept pace with the thoughts that might be his. I saw him, more than half a century before, the stripling son of a ship’s carpenter, swimming in the shadows of the big fore-’n’-afters that were monarchs before steam came – glorious days when ninety-eight per cent. of vessels carried sail, and sailors dispensed law with their fists and bore dirks in their bootlegs. Later I saw the proud moment of his first trip to “sea” – and then, quickly, I noted his rise: his saving dollar by dollar until he bought an interest in a tug, his monopolisation of it later, his climb – up – up – until —

“I’m busy, very busy!” he broke in quietly. “But say, did you ever think of this? Did you ever build a city of the lumber we carry each year, populate that city, feed it with the grain we carry, and warm it with our coal? You can do it on paper and you will be surprised at what you find. It will show you more graphically than anything else just what the ships carry. Try it. You’ll be interested.”

I have kept that idea warm. Now I am going to use it. For probably in no better way can the immensity of the lumber, grain, coal, flour, and package freight traffic of the Great Lakes be given. Imagine, then, this “City of the Five Great Lakes.” We will build it, we will people it, feed it, and heat it – and our only material, with the exception of its inhabitants, will be the cargoes of the Lake carriers for a single season. And these carriers? If you should stand at the Lime Kiln Crossing, in the Detroit River, one would pass you on an average every twelve minutes, day and night, during the eight months of navigation; and when you saw their number and size you would wonder where they could possibly get all of their cargoes. The cargoes with which we will deal in this article will be of lumber, grain, flour and coal, for these, with iron ore, constitute over ninety per cent. of the commerce of the Inland Seas.

To build our city we first require lumber. During the 1909 season of navigation about 1,500,000,000 feet of this material will be carried by Lake ships. What this means it is hard to conceive until it is turned into houses. To build a comfortable eight-room dwelling, modern in every respect, requires about 20,000 feet of lumber, and when we divide a billion and a half by this figure we have 75,000 homes, capable of accommodating a population of about 400,000 people. With the thousands of tons of building stone transported by lake each year, the millions of barrels of cement, the cargoes of shingles, sand, and brick, our “City of the Lakes” for 1909 would be as large as Buffalo, Cleveland, or Detroit.

But one does not begin fully to comprehend the significance of the enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, and what it means not only to this country but to half of the civilised world, until he begins to figure how long the grain which will be carried by ships during the present year would support this imaginary city of 400,000 adult people. There will pass through the “Soo” canals this year at least 90,000,000 bushels of wheat and 60,000,000 bushels of other grain, besides 7,500,000 barrels of flour, all of which represents the “bread stuff” that is shipped from Lake Superior ports alone. There will, in addition, be shipped by lake at least 50,000,000 bushels from Chicago, Milwaukee, and other ports whose eastbound commerce is not reported at the “Soo.” In short, estimating conservatively from the past four years, it is safe to say that at least 200,000,000 bushels of grain and 11,000,000 barrels of flour will have been transported by the Great Lakes marine by the end of this year’s season of navigation.

But what do these figures mean? They seem top-heavy, unwieldly, valuable perhaps to the scientific economist, but of small interest to the ordinary everyday eater of bread. Let us reduce this grain to flour. It takes from four and a half to five bushels of grain for a barrel of flour and dividing by the larger figure our grain would give us 40,000,000 barrels, which, plus the 11,000,000, would make a total of 51,000,000 barrels. Now we come right down to dinner-table facts. At least 250 one-pound loaves of bread can be made from each 196-pound barrel of flour, or a total of 12,750,000,000 from the whole, which would mean at least five loaves for every man, woman, and child of the two and one half billion people who inhabit this globe! In other words, figuring from the reports of food specialists, the grain and flour carried by the ships of the Lakes for one year would give the total population of the earth a food supply sufficient to keep it in life and health for a period of two weeks!

This enormous supply of the staff of life would give each of the 400,000 bread-eating people in our “City of the Lakes” a half-pound a day for one hundred and seventy-five years, or it would supply a city of the size of Chicago with bread for fifty years! To each of the 60,000,000 bread-eaters in the United States it would give 212 one-pound loaves, or, with an allowance of half a pound for each person per day, it would feed the nation for one year and two months!

Now, having built our city, peopled it, and supplied it with food, we come to the point of heating it. In 1907, there were transported by Lake nearly 15,000,000 tons of coal, and this year another million will probably be added to that figure. Here again mere figures fail to tell the story. But when we come to divide this coal among the homes of a city like Cleveland, Detroit, or Buffalo, which rank with our 75,000-home “City of the Lakes,” we again come to an easy understanding. Each of these 75,000 home-owners would receive as his share over 213 tons of coal, and if he burned six tons each winter this would last him for thirty-five years!

In a nutshell, there is enough lumber and other material carried by Lake ships each year to build a city the size of Detroit; there is enough grain transported to supply its 400,000 inhabitants with bread-stuffs for a period of one hundred and seventy-five years, conceding the total population of the city to be adults; and enough coal is shipped from Erie ports into the North to heat the homes in this city for thirty-five years!