The Great Lakes.The Vessels That Plough Them

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.