GITCHE GUMEE
Bruce Henley realized that the information Ganawa had just given him was not encouraging; but if he had fully comprehended the size of this inland sea, its sheer endless shore-line, which it would take years to explore and search in detail, he would have been utterly discouraged at the well-meant information of Ganawa.
On the usual small map of a school-book, Lake Superior looks quite commonplace and harmless, but no man can stand on its shore without feeling the overwhelming power and mystery of this sea in the heart of a continent. It is different from every other lake on earth.
The distance a boat must sail from its west end at Duluth to the canals which now pass the Sault Sainte Marie is greater than the distance from St. Paul and Minneapolis [[24]]to Chicago or from Buffalo to New York. Its shore-line would stretch more than half-way across the continent between New York and San Francisco.
On this shore-line there are great bays, more than fifty miles in length, such as Nipigon Bay and Black Bay, where a canoe or small boat might wind about for a whole summer in a maze of channels and among a world of large and small islands, and bold, rocky headlands.
On the other hand, there are great stretches of more than a hundred miles where the rocks, a hundred feet high, drop sheer into the lake, and where it is difficult for even a canoe or a rowboat to find shelter in a storm.
In area, Lake Superior is about equal to the combined areas of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Its greatest depth runs close to a thousand feet, and depths of three hundred to seven hundred feet a few miles from shore are very common. The water is so clear that in quiet [[25]]bays one can see a fish at a depth of twenty feet, and the waves and the white spray have the color and appearance of waves and spray of the ocean.
The water is always ice-cold, except in midsummer within a few feet of the surface and in quiet, sheltered bays. But even in midsummer, the surface temperature does not pass fifty degrees.
The low temperature of the water is the reason that bodies of persons drowned in Lake Superior very rarely rise to the surface or drift ashore. The tradition that Lake Superior never gives up its dead is as old as the navigation of the lake by white men, and it existed among the Indians before the arrival of white men.
The writer has found no records of Indians ever travelling over the middle of the lake. Several of the red tribes were bold and skillful canoeists, but they were not sailors. They did, however, occasionally visit the large islands such as Michipicoten and Isle Royale, and in fair weather they [[26]]paddled boldly along the shore from the Sault to Grand Portage and Duluth, and in one recorded case the Chippewa woman, Netnoqua, and her adopted white son, John Tanner, beat a trader’s sailboat on the voyage from the Sault to Grand Portage at the mouth of the Pigeon River. On this trip Netnoqua’s canoe must have travelled nearly five hundred miles.