United States and Canadian Commerce of the Great Lakes—The Sault Ste. Marie Ship Canals—The Erie Canal—Transportation Business—The Elevator—Deeper Waterways Commissions—The Ottawa and Georgian Bay Canal.
DURING the last quarter of a century the commerce of the Great Lakes—the United States commerce especially—has grown with a rapidity almost exceeding belief. It has become enormous! At the present time it is stated on competent authority that the steam tonnage of these inland seas largely exceeds the combined tonnage of this character in all other parts of the United States put together. Not to speak of the vast amount of shipping employed in the iron, the coal, and the lumber trade, the Lake Superior grain and flour shipments for 1896 were 121,750,000 bushels. The Lake Michigan grain and flour shipments for the same year were 273,820,000 bushels, together making 395,570,000 bushels of grain and flour shipped in one year from these two quarters! It is difficult to realize the magnitude of such a statement. Mr. Keep, already quoted, in his report for 1890 puts it strikingly when he says: “If the freight carried on the Great Lakes in the United States coastwise and foreign trade during the year 1890 were loaded into railway cars of average size and capacity, the cars so loaded would cover 13,466 miles of railroad track.” The Commissioners appointed by the Canadian Government to meet with a similar Committee appointed by the United States Government to consider the subject of international and deeper waterways, preface their report by alluding to the commerce of the Great Lakes in these terms: “It is impossible to convey, within reasonable space, an adequate idea of the extraordinary[49] development of inland water transportation on the Upper Lakes—which for rapidity, extent, economy and efficiency has no counterpart even on the ocean. More than half of the best steamships of the United States are imprisoned above Niagara Falls, and more than half of the tonnage built in the United States in 1896 was launched upon the lakes.” This inland water commerce has built up twelve cities on the southern shores above Niagara, five of which have over 200,000 population, and one of them over a million. Within these limits there are twenty-seven dry docks, the largest of which is on Lake Superior and is 560 feet long, 50 feet wide, and 18 feet depth of water. There are sixty-three life-saving stations upon these lakes, ten of which are Canadian. “Unusual prosperity has stimulated ship-building to such an extent that there are now in course of construction at the various lake shipyards, sixty-five vessels, thirty of which are steel freight steamers which will average 400 feet in length and 4,000 tons capacity—costing in all $9,000,000.”[50]
Up to a comparatively recent date the bulk of the lakes commerce was done by sailing vessels. Every town of any importance had its little fleet of schooners. As time went on, the vessels increased in size, and eventually a very fine class of three-masted schooners, with some brigs, barquentines, and even full-rigged barques, were employed in the carrying trade. One of the largest of these was the barque Utica, of 550 tons, which sailed on the Buffalo and Chicago route in the forties. A few of these clipper schooners may still be met with, but they are rapidly being supplanted by iron and steel steamships of great size, such as the Maryland, the Owego, the E. C. Pope, and the Manitou, representatives of fleets of first-class steamships, ranging from 300 to 350 feet in length, over 1,900 tons register, with triple expansion engines, a speed of from fourteen to sixteen miles an hour, and a carrying capacity of 120,000 to 125,000 bushels of grain. These, and many others like them, were accounted “queens” a few years ago; they are fine ships still, but there are much larger and finer than they now.
The Manitou here represented is one of the finest ships of her class on the lakes, built in 1893 by the Chicago Ship-building Company. Her hull is of steel, length over all 295 feet, breadth of beam 42 feet, and depth of hold 22 feet. Her average draught of water is 15 feet. She has triple expansion engines, a single four-bladed screw propeller 13 feet in diameter. Her gross tonnage is 2,944 tons. She is handsomely fitted up with sleeping accommodations for four hundred passengers, has a freight capacity of 1,500 tons, and develops a speed of eighteen miles an hour. Her route is between Chicago and Sault Ste. Marie, where she connects with the Lake Superior lines. She cost $300,000.
THE “MANITOU,” 1893.
The James Watt, the first of the Rockefeller fleet and the largest steamship on the lakes, is 426 feet long, 48 feet beam, and 29 feet deep. She cost $260,000, and will carry from 4,000 to 6,000 tons of ore, according as she is trimmed to draw 14 or 18 feet of water. The Empire City, owned by the Zenith Transportation Company, is of the same dimensions, less one foot in depth. She is now the largest grain carrier on the lakes, having capacity for 213,000 bushels. The Minnesota Iron Company have a fleet of fourteen steamships, each carrying from 100,000 to 180,000 bushels of grain. The Lehigh Valley Transportation Company own a fleet of large and powerful steel freight steamers which ply between Buffalo and Chicago. These are but a few of the many transportation companies that do business on the Great Lakes. As to the vessels at present employed in the trade, it is safe to say that they are to be regarded only as the precursors of a still larger class of freight steamers that will navigate these waters when the contemplated twenty-one foot channel shall have been established from Lake Superior to Buffalo. At present there is a navigable channel of 17½ feet all the way.
Many of the large steamers take a number of barges in tow, and in this way enormous quantities of grain are sometimes moved by a single shipment. The Appomattox, for example, with three consorts in tow, recently left Duluth with a combined cargo of 482,000 bushels, or 14,460 tons of wheat. Assuming the average yield of that cereal to be twenty bushels to the acre, this single shipment represented the produce of 24,100 acres!