They have projected a ship-canal round, or rather by the side of the rapids of St. Marie. The length of this canal is said to be only, in actual cutting, three-quarters of a mile, and the whole expense necessary not more than 230,000 dollars, or about £55,000 sterling.
The British government should look in time to this; it owns the other side of the Sault St. Marie, and the Superior country is so rich in timber and minerals that it is called the Denmark of America, whilst a direct access hereafter to the Oregon territory and the Pacific must be opened through the vast chain of lakes towards the Rocky Mountains by way of Selkirk Colony, on the Red River.
The lakes of Canada have not engaged that attention at home which they ought to have had; and there is much interesting information about them which is a dead letter in England.
Their rise and fall is a subject of great interest. The great sinking of the levels of late years, which has become so visible and so injurious to commerce, deserves the most attentive investigation. The American writers attribute it to various causes, and there are as many theories about it as there are upon all hidden mysteries. Evaporation and condensation, woods and glaciers, have all been brought into play.
If the lakes are supplied by their own rivers, and by the drainage streams of the surrounding forests, and all this is again and again returned into them from the clouds, whence arises the sudden elevation or the sudden depression of such enormous bodies of water, which have no tides?
The Pacific and the Atlantic cannot be the cause; we must seek it elsewhere. To the westward of Huron, on the borders of Superior, the land is rocky and elevated; but it attains only enormous altitudes at such a distance on the rocky Andean chain as to render it improbable that those mountains exert immediate influences on the lakes. The Atlantic also is too far distant, and very elevated land intervenes to intercept the rising vapours. On the north, high lands also exist; and the snows scarcely account for it, as the whole of North America near these inland seas is alike covered every year in winter.
The north-east and the south-west winds are the prevalent ones, and a slight inspection of the maps will suffice to show that those compass bearings are the lines which the lakes and valleys of Northern America assume.
In 1845, the lakes began suddenly to diminish, and to such a degree was this continued from June to December, when the hard frosts begin, that, at the commencement of the latter month, Lake Ontario, at Kingston, was three feet below its customary level, and consequently, in the country places, many wells and streams dried up, and there was during the autumn distress for water both for cattle and man, although the rains were frequent and very heavy.
Whence, then, do the lakes receive that enormous supply which will restore them to their usual flow?—or are they permanently diminishing? I am inclined to believe that the latter is the case, as cultivation and the clearings of the forest proceed; for I have observed within fifteen years the total drying up of streamlets by the removal of the forest, and these streamlets had evidently once been rivulets and even rivers of some size, as their banks, cut through alluvial soils, plainly indicated.
The lakes also exhibit on their borders, particularly Ontario, as Lyell describes from the information of the late Mr. Roy, who had carefully investigated the subject, very visible remains of many terraces which had consecutively been their boundaries.