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

VI
Buffalo and Duluth: the Alpha and Omega of the Lakes

Is the day approaching when Buffalo and not Chicago will be the second largest city in the United States? and when, at the end of Lake Superior, her back doors filled with the treasures of the earth and with a developed empire about her, Duluth will claim a million inhabitants? Is the day far distant when the world’s greatest manufacturing city will be located on the Niagara River? and when, as steel men all the world over believe, Duluth will be a second and perhaps greater Pittsburg?

These are questions which have never been of greater interest than now, when the State of New York is expending over a hundred million dollars on the new Erie Canal, thus “bringing Buffalo and the Lakes to the sea,” and when, at the same time, the United States Steel Corporation is devoting ten million dollars to the erection of the most modern steel plant in the world at Duluth.

“Buffalo is the great doorway of the Inland Seas,” said President McKinley only a short time before his tragic death. “Some day she will reach out to the ocean, and when that time comes she will be one of the greatest cities in the world.” For many years the people of Buffalo have dreamed of this. And now it is coming true. And while the Pittsburger, entrenched in the prosperity of steel and fortified behind the smoke of his own mills, has been laughing at prophecies, away up at the end of the thousand-mile highway that leads to Duluth, other people have been dreaming. And their dreams, too, are coming true. For years the silent struggle for the supremacy of cities has been in progress along the Great Lakes. The outside world has seen little of it, and has heard little of it. Now the beginning of the end is at hand. The two great doors of the Inland Seas have been opened wide. At one end is Duluth, at the other Buffalo. Chicago is great, Buffalo may be greater. Pittsburg, like ancient Rome, feels that hers is to be a reign unbroken, and that she will still be “Pittsburg, Queen of the World of Steel” until the last call of Judgment Day. In another ten years—perhaps in less time—she will recognise the power of her rival in the North.

The Residence of A. Wilcox at Buffalo.

Where President Roosevelt took the oath of office.

Copyright 1908 by Detroit Photographic Co.

These are predictions, but they are well founded. To find just why they are made, one must go among the powerful men of the Lakes, among the iron barons of the North and the coal barons of the South and East—must, in short, become acquainted with the entire commercial and industrial mechanism which exists on the Great Lakes to-day. They are not predictions that can be arrived at from New York, or San Francisco, or London, or Liverpool. One must talk with the men who make them, must live among those commercial and industrial conditions for a long time, and must know at first hand the two cities we speak of—Buffalo and Duluth. They are predictions which have a solid foundation of facts, and these facts are what make these two cities the most interesting as well as the most important ports in the Western World, with the exception of New York City. I venture to say that only a ridiculously small percentage of our own people—of Americans, whose very existence as an industrial and commercial power depends largely upon the Lakes—know these two cities beyond their names, their location, and possibly the number of their inhabitants. How many, for instance, know that to-day Duluth is the second greatest freight-shipping port on earth; that London, the capital of the British Empire, queen of the world’s commerce for many years, has abdicated in favour of a port so remote from the heart of British commercial enterprise that it is doubtful if fifty thousand of the five million people of London have ever heard of the name of the city which has taken the place of the world’s metropolis in the list of the great harbours of the world? And how many know, as well, that within a single night’s ride of the city of Buffalo—within a radius of less than five hundred miles—live sixty per cent. of the total population of North America?