The Great Lakes.The Vessels That Plough Them

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.

Steamer “Western States.”

When his ship passes into Lake Erie he enters upon new and even more thrilling pages of history. Near Put-in-Bay his captain can point out to him where Perry and his ships of war engaged and whipped the British fleet in 1813; for nearly a hundred miles his vessel will travel over the very course taken by the fleeing British ships, and that course, if he follows it to the Thames, will lead to the scenes of the fierce battle that was fought there, and of the sanguinary conflict with the Indians in which the famous chieftain Tecumseh was slain. And all this time he will see rising along the white stretches of shore the smoke of great cities, and hundreds of miles of wooded beach, where unnumbered millions might pass their summer holidays without crowding. And when he enters the Detroit River he looks out upon quiet Canadian shores and little “Sleepy Hollow” towns, still characterised by the quaint French atmosphere and peacefulness that marked them a century ago.

Now he begins to see the crowded, noisy, jostling pleasures of popular river resorts; then comes Detroit, the greatest excursion city on the Lakes. Here again history may add to the pleasure of his reflections, for three nations have fought for and possessed Detroit. He passes Belle Isle, the greatest pleasure ground in the world with the exception of Coney Island, and a few minutes later can almost throw a stone upon the island that was once the home of the famous Indian chief Pontiac, and where the plans for that bloodthirsty warrior’s assaults upon the whites were made. Then follows the course across beautiful Lake St. Clair, and the slow journey through Little Venice, where again the crowds and music and gay vessels of one of the most popular resorts in America greet his eyes for many miles; where every bit of land that thrusts itself out of the lake is lined with summer cottages and lakeside inns. Here the tourist may stop for a dollar a day or two dollars a day, and may mingle freely with bankers and merchants and millionaires as well as with the “common herd.” It is a mixed, happy, cosmopolitan life.

From Little Venice the tourist’s ship enters the St. Clair River, along which live innumerable captains of ships. It is a paradise of beauty, yet along its length one may buy cottage sites cheaper than he can purchase ordinary city lots. Here the traveller will see the tents of happy campers from the city, comfortable inns, and now and then a summer resort hotel – a mixed life, one of pleasure for the man with a family and little money as well as for him who has more than he knows well how to spend.

Once out upon the bosom of Lake Huron, the scenes begin to change. Now there are miles of shore on which there is hardly a habitation to be seen. From Saginaw Bay northward for hundreds of miles along the Georgian Bay and Michigan shores, the grandeur and beauty of the wilderness are seen from the deck of the vessel. As one progresses farther north the scenes become wilder and wilder, until the captain may tell you that you are looking out over regions where the bear and the deer and the wolf make their homes; and if you have a drop of sportsman’s blood in you, he adds to your excitement by saying that you may see big game from the deck of the ship before the trip is over. At times, and for long distances, the vessel seems to be picking her way between innumerable islands, and if the course is through Georgian Bay their number bewilders the traveller. They are on all sides of him. Here and there upon them are resort hotels; more numerous still are the simple, homelike places where the city worker and his family may stay at comparatively small expense, and along the mainland are the homes of settlers and farmers, nine out of ten of whom are glad to accommodate summer visitors at prices which make living there as cheap as at home.

Farther northward the tourist’s ship carries him deeper into the wilderness country, through St. Mary’s River, with its forest-clad shores and islands, broken here and there by little cottages built and owned by city people; through the locks at the “Soo,” and into Lake Superior. Beyond this, as one captain expressed it to the writer, “there is howling wilderness on every shore.” At times the traveller may have glimpses of the Canadian coast, from which the unbroken wild stretches northward to Hudson Bay; his eyes may travel over the hazy distance of the greatest moose- and caribou-hunting country on the continent; and when near the Michigan shore he may see the smoke rising above the great copper mines of the Upper Peninsula. And at the end of this northern route he comes to Duluth, the second greatest freight-shipping port in the world, and destined to become one of the most important cities in America.

At the Straits of Mackinaw, however, the tourist may turn into Lake Michigan instead of continuing into Superior: and if so, he soon comes within sight of Beaver Island, famous for all ages in history as the one-time stronghold of King Strang and his Mormons – an island about which piracy once flourished and where more than one vessel, in the years of long ago, met a mysterious and tragic end at the hands of buccaneers as bloodthirsty as any that ever roamed the seas.

And so it goes, from end to end of the Lakes, every mile fraught with interest, every hour offering the traveller something new of scenery or history. At no time is there the monotonous sameness of ocean travel, and even night is to be regretted because of the things which are passed then and cannot be seen. And this life of the Lakes is not, like that of the salt seas, open only to those of means. It is within the poor man’s reach as well as the rich, is accessible to the hard-working housewife as well as to the woman who possesses her carriage and her servants.

V

The Romance and Tragedy of the Inland Seas

I was watching a blockade of ships in a Lake Erie harbour – a score of striving, crowding, smoking monsters of the Inland Seas, hung under a pall of black smoke, with screeching tugs floundering here and there, megaphone voices shouting curses and orders, and the crashing of chains and steel filling the air. And I thought of a theatre I had visited the night before where, arriving late, I was forced to crush in with the gallery gods and fight for a place in the fifth heaven. In the excitement of this “spring rush” of great ships for the freight-laden docks of the North, I spoke my sentiment to the man beside me – a man who had always before him in his office five miniature lakes, on which miniature vessels represented his steel leviathans of commerce, which he moved about, and played, and watched, day by day and almost hour by hour, as a player might move his men at chess. And this man, I noticed, was regarding the scene before him with different eyes from mine. His face was set in a frown, his eyes stared in their momentary anxiety, and I could almost feel the eager tenseness of his body. Out there in that chaotic tangle, where captains were fighting for prestige and taking chances that might cost thousands, he had ships. I saw him clench his hand as a black monster crept forward into the gap between two ships ahead; I saw it forge on, yard by yard, saw the other vessels close up on it as though it were an egg which they were bent on crushing between them, heard the rumbling of steel side against steel side, and when at last I witnessed this ship break triumphantly into the lead, great blotches of paint scraped from it, I looked at the man again, and he was smiling.