Well, that is what is being done at Conneaut, Ohio, morning, noon and night, and often all night, as all day. The boats bringing these immense loads of iron ore are waiting to take back coal, and so this enormous process of loading and unloading goes on continually. Franklin and I were standing on a high bank commanding all this and a wonderful view of Lake Erie, never dreaming that the little box-like things we saw in the distance being elevated and turned over were steel coal cars, when he suddenly exclaimed, “I do believe those things over there are cars, Dreiser,—steel coal cars.”
“Get out!” I replied incredulously.
“That’s what they are,” he insisted. “We’ll have Speed run the machine over onto that other hill, and then we can be sure.”
From this second vantage point it was all very clear—great cars being run upon a platform, elevated quickly to a given position over a runway or coal chute leading down into the hold of a waiting steamer, and then quickly and completely upset; the last few coals being shaken out as though each grain were precious.
“How long do you think it takes them to fill a ship like that?” I queried.
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Franklin meditatively.
“Let’s see how long it takes to empty a car.”
We timed them—one car every three minutes.
“That means twenty cars an hour,” I figured, “or one hundred cars in five hours. That ought to fill any steamer.”
A little farther along this same shore, reaching out toward the lake, where eventually was a small, white lighthouse, were those same hills of red powdered iron I have been telling you about—great long hills that it must have taken ships and ships and ships of iron to build. I thought of the ownership of all those things, the iron and copper mines in northern Michigan, the vast coal beds in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and how they were acquired. Did you ever read a true history of them? I’ll wager you haven’t. Well, there is one, not so detached as it might be, a little propagandistic in tone in spots, but for all that a true and effective work. It is entitled “A History of the Great American Fortunes,” by one Gustavus Myers, a curious soul, and ill repaid, as I have reason to know, for his untiring energy. It is really a most important work, and can be had in three compact volumes for about six dollars. It is almost too good to be true, a thorough going, forthright statement of the whole process. Some of his expositions make clear the almost hopeless nature of democracy,—and that is a very important thing to discover.