The Great Lakes / The Vessels That Plough Them: Their Owners, Their Sailors, and Their Cargoes, Together with a Brief History of Our Inland Seas

by James Oliver Curwood

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!

When one knows these facts, when perhaps for the first time in his life he is brought to a realisation of the enormous proportions of the commerce of the Inland Seas, he may, and with excellent excuse, believe that he has reached the limit of its interest. But as a matter of fact he has only begun to enter upon its wonders, and the farther he goes the more he sees that economic questions which have long been mysteries to him are being unravelled by the Great Lakes of the vast country in which he lives.

“Because of the ships of our Inland Seas,” James A. Calbick, late President of the Lumber Carriers’ Association, said to me, “the people of the United States, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, and as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee, have been able to build the cheapest homes in the world—and the best,” and this assertion, which can be proved in several different ways, brings us at once to the lumber traffic as it exists on the Lakes to-day.

Going through almost any one of the Eastern and Central States one will find thousands of old sheds and barns, travelling the road to ruin through age alone, though built of the best of pine and oak—materials of a quality which cannot be found in the best of modern homes in this year of 1909. For ten years past the price of lumber has been steadily climbing, and since 1900 the increase in the cost of building construction has brought lumber to a par with brick. While the commerce of the Lakes is increasing by tremendous bounds in other ways, people are now, perhaps unknowingly, witnessing the rapid extinction of one of their oldest and most romantic branches of traffic—the lumber industry; and each year, as this industry comes nearer and nearer to its end, the price of lumber climbs higher and higher, home-owners become fewer in comparison with other years, and fleets and lumber companies go out of existence or direct their energies into other channels.

Scooping up Ore from the Mahoning Mine at Hibbing.

The largest open pit mine in the world.

To Lake people it is pathetic, this death of the lumber fleets of the Inland Seas. An old soldier who had sailed on a lumber hooker since the days of the Civil War once said to me, “They’re the Grand Army of the Lakes—are those old barges and schooners, and they’re passing away as fast as we old fellows of the days of ’61.” To-day no vessels are built along the Lakes for the carrying of lumber. Scores of ancient “hookers” and picturesque schooners of the romantic days of old are rotting at their moorings, and when a great steel leviathan of ten thousand tons passes one of these veterans the eyes of her crew will follow it until only her canvas remains above the horizon.