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

A Steamer Stripped by a Tow-Line by Running between a Steamer and her Consort.

From a Photograph by Lord & Rhoades, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.

This possibility of the actual overcrowding, of the Lakes is one that I have discussed with half a hundred captains and owners. It offers a new “future” for romance and tragedy on the Great Lakes. Since the day the first strong-hearted explorers sailed up the Inland Seas on the Griffin, the unusual, the tragic, and the romantic have made up thrilling chapters in their history—chapters in battle, piracy, and adventure, whose heroes and their exploits rank on even terms with Paul Jones, Kidd, Morgan, Hudson, and other worthies of the open seas. The romance of the old days, as upon the ocean, is gone; a new romance has taken its place—the romance of iron and steel and steam; and a new and greater peril than that born of wind and storm, many believe, is fast developing to face the fresh-water mariner of the future. This is the peril of collision—not as it exists to-day, but as it may exist a few years from now. Already this peril is an ever-present menace upon the Great Lakes, and hardly a day passes during the season of navigation that collisions do not occur. The Lakes, it is probable, will never be able to take entire care of the enormous commerce of the East and West, and as a result ships will continue to increase until, like the streets of a great city with their rushing automobiles and unceasing pandemonium of cars, vans, and seething multitudes, these water highways will become dangerously crowded with the vehicles of trade. Already the Lake Carriers’ Association seems to foresee the danger of future navigation on the Inland Seas, and has recommended that east and west courses be established, so that up-bound vessels will be far out of the path of down-bound ships. This is but the first step toward government legislation, many believe, that will bring about the “cutting up of the Lakes into roads,” when vessels bound for given ports will have prescribed courses to travel, from which they will deviate, unless with good cause, at the risk not only of their safety, but of a heavy fine. Thus, it is probable, will the Lakes be made navigable for the myriad ships of the future, when, in the words of one ship-owner, “A pall of smoke will hover overhead day and night for seven months in the year, and when the world will witness water commerce as it has never existed before, and as it will never exist elsewhere on the globe.”

This is looking into the future; but one acquainted with the Lake life of to-day cannot but see the picture. And this picture brings one to the real motif of this chapter—a description of the “human interest side” of America’s vast “unsalted seas,” that side in which the romantic and the tragic and not the realities of statistics and economic progress play the absorbing parts, and which should serve to make them of interest to hundreds of thousands of people who have yet their first trips to take upon them.

From my twenty years of experience with them, I believe that failure to treat of the human interest of the Lakes is one of the most inexcusable omissions of American literature. In the rush of modern progress the Lakes have been forgotten—except in the way of their vital importance to the commerce of the nation. And each year their picturesque and thrilling aspects are becoming more deeply engulfed in considerations of profit and loss and corporation finance.

Not long ago I asked a romantically inclined young woman, who was about to spend the savings of several years on an ocean trip, why she did not take a more economical, and pleasanter, holiday by making a tour of the Lakes. She looked at me as if I had gone out of my head.

“Take a trip on the Lakes when I can have one on the ocean!” she cried. After a moment of continued surprise, she added: “I want something that I can think about. I want to go where something has happened—where there have been battles, and pirates, and where there’s sunken ships, and treasure, and things under us! I’m reading a story now that tells of the ocean—The Cruise of a Lonely Heart—situated in the very part of the sea we’re to cross, and I shall read every word of it over again while we’re aboard the ship!”

That is the great trouble. Historians, novelists, and short-story writers have neglected the Lakes. I did not waste my breath in telling this young lady that real pirates flourished in the days of King Strang and his Mormons on the Lakes; that some of the most picturesque “sea fights” of history were fought upon them, and that treasure untold, and mysteries without number, lie hidden within their depths. But I am determined that she shall read these few pages, and I pray that she, as well as a few thousand others of my readers, may hereby be induced to “take to their history.”

For centuries the oceans have been regarded as the realm of romance and mystery. In this age, the youths of Chicago, of New York, Cincinnati, or Denver, and even of Lake cities, search public libraries for tales of the South Seas and of the great Pacific; even the youngster whose every day has been spent on the shores of one of the five Great Lakes seeks afar the material that satisfies his boyish imagination. And so is it with his father and mother, his big brothers and sisters. Instead of a glorious trip over the Lakes, they prefer the old and oft-made journey to Europe, to the Bermudas; instead of seeking out the grand scenery and actual romance that environ them, they follow beaten paths laid out in books and pamphlets descriptive of the ocean.