Cottages Built at Small Expense along the St. Mary’s River.
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.
Then he turned to me, and as we walked away from the scene, he observed:
“That’s good—that ‘crush’ idea of yours. I’d use it. It’s as pretty a comparison as you could get to the whole situation on the Lakes to-day, and it’s a key to what the situation is going to be ten years from now. It’s crush and crowd all over the Lakes from Duluth to Buffalo. Harbours are getting too small; the ‘Soo’ canals are becoming outgrown; the Lime Kiln crossing is a greater and greater menace as the number of ships increases. And the ships? They’re increasing so fast that unless the Government takes a hand, there will be more tragedies to write down in Lake history during the next decade or two, than in all of the years that have gone before.”
