A Bird’s-eye View of the Harbour of Duluth, Taken from the Hill.
From a Photograph by Maher, Duluth.
These are only two of the remarkable facts about Buffalo and Duluth, the Alpha and Omega of the Inland Seas. That they are now two of the greatest freight-distributing points in the United States is shown by figures; that within the next generation they will become the two greatest distributing cities in the world is almost a certainty. It is not only Lake commerce that assures their destinies. Logically, they are situated to rule the world of commerce in the United States. Duluth is approximately midway in the continent, with a clear waterway soon to reach to the ocean, and with the great West behind her already webbed, with Duluth as the centre, by thirty-seven thousand miles of rail; and Buffalo, with sixty million people within five hundred miles of her City Hall, with fifteen great trunk-lines entering the city, with the greatest electrical power of the age at her doors, with “one hand on the ocean and the other on the Inland Seas,” holds a position which no other city can ever hope to attain. According to H. C. Elwood, Chairman of the Transportation Committee of the Chamber of Commerce of Buffalo, the combined rail and water tonnage of that city is not exceeded by that of any other city in the United States, with the exception of Pittsburg. And the story of Buffalo’s commerce has just begun. In 1885, Buffalo’s total tonnage of iron ore received by Lake was only a little more than eight thousand,—less than the single cargo carried by one of the great freighters of the Inland Seas to-day! Last year it was five and a half millions. The position that both Buffalo and Duluth hold in the commerce of the Lakes is briefly told in figures. Of the total tonnage of ninety-seven million carried on the Lakes in 1907, more than fourteen and a half million were registered at Buffalo and thirty-five million at Duluth-Superior. In other words, over a half of the total tonnage of the Lakes passed in or out of these two great doors of the Inland Seas in 1907.
There are few cities in the world to-day in which romance and adventure have combined in more extraordinary ways with calamity, failure, and indomitable courage than in the upbuilding of Duluth. Chiselled back into the rocky hillsides, terrace upon terrace, and stretching for miles along the bay front where only a quarter of a century ago was the wild and rugged grandeur of virgin wilderness; built upon rock, and in rock; looking down upon one of the finest harbours in the world on one hand, and up over vast regions red with iron treasure on the other, Duluth is one of the most beautiful cities in the United States—one of the most wonderful and most interesting. Twenty-five years ago, only a village marked this stronghold of the iron barons. The deer, the wolf, the bear, the moose roamed unafraid over places now alive with commercial activity. Into the vast unexplored wildernesses, even less than a dozen years ago, prospectors went out with their packs and their guns, and searched and starved and even died for the “ugly wealth” hidden in the ranges that are now giving to the world three quarters of its iron and steel. And to-day many of these same men, “whose callouses of the old prospecting days have hardly worn away,” live in a city of eighty thousand people, whose annual receipts from its industries aggregate fifty-five million dollars, and whose invested wealth is over one hundred and fifty millions. While London, Liverpool, Hamburg, Antwerp, Hong-kong, and Marseilles have had eyes for New York alone in this Western World, while the ports of ancient and historic renown have been struggling among themselves for supremacy, away up at the end of the Lake Superior wilderness the second greatest freight-shipping port in the world was building itself, quietly, unobtrusively, unknown. That is the story of Duluth in a nutshell.
The Ship Canal and Aërial Bridge, Duluth, Minn.
Copyright 1908 by Detroit Photographic Co.
But it is only the first chapter. The others will be written even more quickly, perhaps with even greater results. The commerce of America’s five Inland Seas has but just commenced, and the growth of this commerce and the growth of Duluth go hand in hand. In 1892, for instance, only four thousand tons of ore were shipped from the Duluth-Superior harbour; in 1907, including the sub-port of Two Harbours, the total was nearly thirty millions! And this same percentage of increase holds good with other products. Fifteen years ago very few people along our seaboards would have recognised the name of Duluth; to those who knew the town it was often an object of ridicule—the “pricked balloon,” the “town of blasted hopes.” Yet in 1907, this same town, still unknown in a large sense, handled one sixth of the combined tonnage of all the two hundred and forty shipping ports on the coast of the United States. During the two hundred and fifty days of navigation in 1907, an average of fifty-six vessels entered or left Duluth each day, or one ship every twenty-six minutes, day and night, for eight months. These vessels carried cargoes valued at two hundred and eighty-eight million dollars. In other words, over a million dollars a day left or entered Duluth-Superior harbour.
Not long ago a writer who was seeking information on the possibilities of our inland waterways asked me what would happen when, as experts predicted, the ore of the North became exhausted. “Where will Duluth be then?” he questioned. This is what nine people out of ten ask, who are at all interested in the future of Duluth. There seems to be an almost universal opinion among people who do not live along the Lakes that, with the exhaustion of the great iron deposits, the commerce of our Inland Seas will dwindle. A more near-sighted supposition than this could hardly be imagined. At the present time ore is the greatest object of commerce on the Great Lakes, and it will continue to be so for many years. It is safe to say that the day is not far distant when fifty million tons of iron ore, instead of thirty million, will leave Duluth each year; and at the same time millions of tons of steel will be leaving by rail. But Duluth’s great future does not rest on iron and steel alone. As I have said, thirty-seven thousand miles of rail already reach out from the city into the vast agricultural regions of the West. It is the one logical doorway of the vast empire at its back, to which it offers the cheapest and shortest route to the Atlantic and Europe; just as it must become the great distributing point through which the bulk of the vast commerce of the East will flow into the West. There is more agricultural and grazing land tributary to it than to any other port in America. And Minnesota is still one of the great timber States of the country in spite of the vast scale on which lumber operations have been carried on within its boundaries during the past few years. Lake, Cook, and other northern counties (several of these counties are each as large as a small State) possess great forest wealth, and for many years to come Duluth will be the great lumber-shipping port of the Lakes.
These are a few of the reasons why Duluthians see in their city a future metropolis of perhaps a million people.