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.
A Shaft on One of the Ranges.
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.