Chapter V: Part I: The Ships, their Owners, their Sailors, and their Cargoes (3)

Why is this? Why are the most beautiful fresh-water seas in the whole world neglected by their own people? Why is it that from the single city of Boston there travel by water two million more people than on all of the Lakes combined, which number on their shores the second largest city on the continent and four others well up in the front rank? I have asked this question of steamship companies in a dozen ports along the Lakes, and from them all I have received practically the same reply. There is a man in Detroit who has been in the passenger traffic business for more than a quarter of a century. I refer to A. A. Schantz, general manager of the largest passenger business on the Lakes. He was managing boats at the age of twenty, he has studied the business for thirty years, and he hits the nail squarely on the head when he says: “It’s because people _don’t know_ about the Lakes. For generations newspapers and magazines have talked _ocean_ to them. They know more about Bermuda and the Caribbean than they do about Mackinaw and the three thousand islands of Lake Huron. The people of three States out of four are better acquainted with steamship fares to London and Liverpool than to Duluth or Chicago; they have been _taught_ to look to the oceans and ocean resorts, and to-day the five Great Lakes of America are more foreign, so far as knowledge of them is concerned, than either the Atlantic or the Pacific.”

This is true. When Admiral Dewey made his triumphal journey through the Inland Seas even he found himself constantly expressing astonishment at what he saw and heard. It is so with ninety-nine out of every hundred strangers who come to them. Think, for instance, of travelling from Detroit to Buffalo, a distance of two hundred and sixty miles, for $1.25!--less than _half a cent a mile_! I recently told a Philadelphia man who has been to Europe half a dozen times about this cheap travel, and he laughingly asked, “What kind of tubs do you have on the Lakes that can afford to carry passengers at these ridiculous rates?”

Well, there is one particular “tub” which offers this cheap transportation once a week, which cost a little over a million and a quarter dollars! Every bit of woodwork in the parlours, promenades, and dining-rooms is of Mexican mahogany. It carries with it a collection of oil paintings which cost twenty-five thousand dollars. Every one of four hundred state-rooms is equipped with a telephone and there is a telephone “central,” so that passengers may converse with one another or with the ship’s officers without leaving their berths. There are reading-rooms, and music-rooms, and writing-rooms, magnificently upholstered and furnished; and on more than one of these Lake palaces passengers may amuse themselves at shuffle-board, quoits, and other games which fifty millions of Americans believe are characteristic only of ocean craft. Another of these “tubs”--the _Eastern States_--broke Lake records in 1907 by berthing and feeding fifteen hundred people on a single trip; and the new _City of Cleveland_ will accommodate two thousand without crowding.

Notwithstanding the extreme cheapness of their rates of transportation, Lake passenger vessels constantly vie with one another in maintaining a high standard of appearance and comfort. This is illustrated in the interesting case of the _City of St. Ignace_, which was built a number of years ago at a cost of $375,000. Since that time, in painting, decorating, refurnishing, etc., and not including the cost of broken machinery or expense of crew, nearly $500,000 have been spent in the maintenance of this vessel, a sum considerably greater than her original cost. A Government law says that thirty per cent. of the cost of a vessel must be expended in this kind of maintenance before that particular boat can change its name. The _City of St. Ignace_ could have changed her name four times! And the case of the _St. Ignace_ is only one of many.

From a Photograph by Manning Studio, Detroit.
]

I have gone into these facts with some detail for the purpose of showing that the extreme cheapness of travel and living along the Lakes does not signify a loss of either comfort or luxury. In few words, it means that the Lakes, as in all other branches of their industries, are agents of tremendous saving to the nation at large in this one; and that, were the pleasure-seekers and travellers of the country to become better acquainted with them, the annual “dividend” earned in freight transportation would be doubled by passenger traffic. The figures of almost any transportation line on the Lakes will verify this. Last year, for instance, one line carried two hundred thousand people between Detroit and Cleveland. The day fare between these points is one dollar, the distance 110 miles. Estimating that four fifths, or one hundred and sixty thousand, of these passengers travelled by day, their total expense would be $160,000. By rail the distance is 167 miles, and the fare $3.35, making a total railway fare of $536,000. These figures show that one passenger line alone, and between just two cities, saved the travellers of the country $376,000 in 1908. The saving between other points is in many instances even greater. Once each week one may go by water from Detroit to Buffalo, or from Buffalo to Detroit, a distance of 260 miles, for $1.25, while the rail rate is seven dollars; and at any time during the week, and on any boat, the fare is only $2.50. These low rates prevail, not only in localities, but all over the Lakes. The tourist may board a Mackinaw boat at any time in Cleveland, for instance, travel across Lake Erie, up the Detroit River, through Lake St. Clair and Lake Huron, and back again--a round trip of nearly one thousand miles--at an expense of _ten dollars_. The round trip from Detroit to Mackinaw, which gives the tourist two days and two nights aboard ship and a ride of six hundred miles, costs eight dollars. The rail fare is $11. At a ticket expense of less than twenty-five dollars one may spend a whole week aboard a floating palace of the Lakes and make a tour of the Inland Seas that will carry him over nearly three thousand miles of waterway, his meal service at the same time being as good and from a third to a half as expensive as that of a first-class hotel ashore. Excursion rates, which one may take advantage of during the entire season, are even less, frequently being not more than half as high as those given above.

When one becomes acquainted with these facts it is easy for him to understand the truth of Mr. Schantz’s statement that “people _don’t know_ about the Lakes.” If they did, the annual passenger traffic on them would be thirty million instead of sixteen; and, instead of an estimated saving of ten million dollars to the people because of Lake passenger ships, the “dividend” that thus goes into their pockets would be twice that amount.

The fastest steamer on the Lakes, holding a record of 22.93 miles per hour.]

Foreign shipbuilders as well as Americans along the seacoasts frankly concede that vessel-building on the Lakes has developed into a science which is equalled nowhere else in the world, evidence of which I have offered in a former article. This is true of passenger ships as well as of freighters, and the strongest proof of this fact lies in the almost inconceivably small loss of life among travellers on the Lakes. There was a time when the marine tragedies of the Inland Seas were appalling, and if all the ships lost upon them were evenly distributed there would be a sunken hulk every half-mile over the entire thousand-mile waterway between Buffalo and Duluth. But those days are gone. Lake travel has not only become the cheapest in the world, but the safest as well. The figures which show this are of tremendous interest when compared with other statistics. Of the sixteen million men, women, and children who travelled on Lake passenger ships in 1907, _only three were lost_, or one out of every 5,300,000. Two of these were accidentally drowned, and the third met death by fire. The percentage of ocean casualties is twelve times as great, and of the eight hundred million people who travelled on our railroads during 1906 approximately one out of every sixty thousand was killed or injured.

To the great majority of our many millions of people the summer life of the Lakes is as little known as the passenger traffic. And, if possible, it offers even greater inducements, especially to those who wish to enjoy the pleasures of an ideal summer outing and who can afford to spend but a very small sum of money. Notwithstanding this fact, the shores and countless islands of the Great Lakes are taken advantage of even less than their low transportation rates. Only a few of the large and widely-advertised resorts receive anything like the patronage of seacoast pleasure grounds. If a person in the East or West, for instance, plans to spend a month somewhere along the Lakes, about the only information that he can easily obtain is on points like Mackinaw Island: popular resorts which are ideal for the tourist who wishes to pass most of his time aboard ship, or who, in stopping off at these more fashionable places, is not especially worried about funds.

It is not of such isolated places as the great resorts that I shall speak first. They play their part, and an important one, in the summer life of the Lakes; but it is to another phase of this life, one which is almost entirely unknown, that I wish to call attention. The man who does not have to count the contents of his pocket-book when he leaves home will find his holiday joys without much trouble. But how about the man who works for a small salary, and who with his restricted means wishes to give his wife and children the pleasures of a real vacation? What about the men and women and children who look forward for weeks and months, and who plan and save and economise, sometimes hopelessly, that _somewhere_ they may have two weeks together, free from the worry and care and eternal grind of their daily life? It is to such people as these, unnumbered thousands of them, that the Lakes should call--and loudly. And it is to such as these that I wish to describe the astonishing conditions which now exist along thousands of miles of our Great Lakes coast line--conditions which, were they generally known, would attract many million more people to our Inland Seas next year than will be found there during the present summer.

“But _where_ shall I go?” asks the man who is planning a vacation, and who may live two or three hundred miles away from the nearest of the Great Lakes. He is perplexed, and with good cause. He has spent other vacations away from home and generally speaking he knows what a hold-up game ordinary summer-resort life is. But he need not fear this on the Lakes. All that he has to do in order successfully to solve this problem of “where to go” is to get a map, select any little town or village situated on the fresh-water sea nearest to him, or three or four of them, for that matter, and write to the postmasters. They can turn the communications over to some person who will interest himself to that extent. Say, for instance, that you write to the little port of Vermilion, on Lake Erie. Your reply will state that “Shattuck’s Grove would be a nice place for you to spend your holidays; or you may go to Ruggles’ Grove, half a dozen miles up the beach; or you can get cheap accommodations, board and room for three or four dollars a week apiece, at any one of a hundred farmhouses that look right out over the lake.” In fact, it is not necessary for you to write at all. When you are ready to leave on your vacation, when your trunk is ready and the wife and children all aglow with eagerness and expectancy--why, _start_. Go direct to any one of these little Lake towns. Within a day after arriving there, or within two days at the most, you will be settled. I have passed nearly all of my life along the Lakes, and have travelled over every mile of the Lake Erie shore; I have gone from end to end of them all, and I do not know of a Lake town that does not possess in its immediate vicinity what is locally known as a “grove.” A grove, on the Lakes, means a piece of woods that the owner has cleared of underbrush, where the children may buy ice-cream and candy, where there are plenty of swings, boats, fishing-tackle, and perhaps a merry-go-round, and where the pleasure-seeker may rent a tent at almost no cost, buy his meals at ridiculously low prices and live entirely on the grounds, or board with some farmer in the neighbourhood. A “grove,” in other words, is what might be called a rural resort, a place visited almost entirely by country people and the residents of neighbouring towns, and where one may fish, swim, and enjoy the most glorious of all vacations for no more than it would cost him to live at home, and frequently for less.

Showing the type of “Inns,” where people may pass their holidays at small expense.

Courtesy of Northern Steamship Co.
]

There are many hundreds of these “groves” along the Lakes, unknown to all but those who live near them. Only on occasion of Sunday-school picnics or Fourth of July celebrations are they crowded. They are the most ideal of all places in which to spend one’s holidays, if rest and quiet recreations are what the pleasure-seeker desires. And these groves are easily found. I do not believe there is a twenty-mile stretch along Lake Erie that does not possess its grove, and sometimes there are a dozen of them within that distance. I know of many that are not even situated near villages, being five or six miles away and patronised almost entirely by farmers. In almost any one of them a family may enjoy camp life if they wish, buy their supplies of neighbouring farmers, do their own cooking, rent a good boat for from twenty-five to fifty cents a day, and get other things at a corresponding cost. I am personally acquainted with one family of four who came from Louisville to one of these sylvan resorts on Lake Huron last year, and the total expense of their three weeks’ vacation, not including railroad fare, was under fifty dollars. The experience of these parents and their children is not an exception. It is a common one with those who are acquainted with the Lakes and who know how to take advantage of them to their own profit.

There is another phase of Lake life, a degree removed from that which I have described, which is also unknown beyond its own local environment and which ought to be made to be of great profit and pleasure to those seeking holiday recreation along our Inland Seas. The shores of the Lakes, from end to end, are literally dotted with what might appropriately be called lakeside inns--places located far from the dust and noise and more fashionable gaiety of crowded resorts and cities, where one may enjoy all of the simpler pleasures of water-life for from six to eight dollars a week. This price includes room, board, boats, fishing-tackle, and other accommodations. At most of these places the board is superior to that which one secures at the large resorts. Fish, frogs’ legs, and chickens play an important part in the bill of fare, and almost without exception they are placed upon the table in huge dishes, heaped with fresh viands from the kitchen as soon as they become empty. The fish cost the innkeepers nothing, for they are mostly caught by the pleasure-seekers themselves; frogs usually abound somewhere in the immediate vicinity, and where the landlord does not raise his own fowls they are purchased from neighbouring farmers. The inn is a local market for butter, eggs, celery, and vegetables of all kinds, so it is not difficult to understand why the board at these places is superior to almost any that can be found in a city. I have no doubt that if these lakeside inns were generally known they would be so crowded that life would not be worth living in them. But they are _not_ known and as a consequence are running along in their old-fashioned way, sources of unrivalled summer joy to those who have been fortunate enough to discover them. At many of these inns only a dollar a day is charged, all accommodations included, and the price is seldom above $1.50 a day, even for transients. I know of one inn that has been “discovered” by half a dozen travelling men and their wives. Three of these families live in Cleveland, one in Pittsburg, and two in New York, and each year they spend a month together on Lake St. Clair. The cost is _six dollars a week_ for each adult! A few weeks ago I was talking with one of these men, the representative of a New York dry-goods firm, and he told me that for himself, his wife, and two children it cost less to stay a month at this place than it did to pass a single week at an ocean resort, and that the accommodations and opportunities for pleasure were greater there than he had ever been able to afford on the Atlantic. I do not wish to emphasise the attractions of any particular inn, for in most ways all of them are alike. And the holiday-seeker who knows nothing of the Lakes can find them as easily as he can locate the groves I have described. The secret of the whole thing is in the knowledge that hundreds of such places really exist.

I have often thought that if it were possible for every person in the United States to make a trip over the Lakes, beginning at Niagara Falls, our Inland Seas from that day on would be recognised as the greatest pleasure-grounds in the world. At Niagara Falls, the traveller takes the Gorge ride, and perhaps makes a trip on the _Maid of the Mist_. But he is probably unaware that in the immediate neighbourhood are a score of spots hallowed in history, and whose incidents have made up some of the most romantic and tragic pages in the story of our country. He may not know that within walking distance of the falls was fought the battle of Queenston Heights, that at certain points the earthworks of the British still remain, that he may stand in the very spot where General Brock fell dying, and that he may follow, step by step, that thrilling fight far up on the summit of those wild ridges. Neither does the ordinary tourist know that almost within sight of the falls is one of the oldest cemeteries in America, where many of the men who were slain in the battles of those regions are at rest. Old Fort Niagara remains almost unvisited, and the spot not far distant where the adventurer La Salle built the _Griffin_, the first vessel ever to sail the Lakes, is virtually unknown. Two weeks, and every hour of them filled with interest, might be spent by the Lake tourist at Niagara Falls, yet the average person is satisfied with a day. And it is all because he does not _know_. This may be said of his experiences from end to end of the Lakes.

One of the largest and fastest boats on the Lakes. Carries 2500 people and her fastest speed is 20 miles an hour.

From a Photograph by Detroit Photographic Co.
]

When his ship passes into Lake Erie he enters upon new and even more thrilling pages of history. Near Put-in-Bay his captain can point out to him where Perry and his ships of war engaged and whipped the British fleet in 1813; for nearly a hundred miles his vessel will travel over the very course taken by the fleeing British ships, and that course, if he follows it to the Thames, will lead to the scenes of the fierce battle that was fought there, and of the sanguinary conflict with the Indians in which the famous chieftain Tecumseh was slain. And all this time he will see rising along the white stretches of shore the smoke of great cities, and hundreds of miles of wooded beach, where unnumbered millions might pass their summer holidays without crowding. And when he enters the Detroit River he looks out upon quiet Canadian shores and little “Sleepy Hollow” towns, still characterised by the quaint French atmosphere and peacefulness that marked them a century ago.

Now he begins to see the crowded, noisy, jostling pleasures of popular river resorts; then comes Detroit, the greatest excursion city on the Lakes. Here again history may add to the pleasure of his reflections, for three nations have fought for and possessed Detroit. He passes Belle Isle, the greatest pleasure ground in the world with the exception of Coney Island, and a few minutes later can almost throw a stone upon the island that was once the home of the famous Indian chief Pontiac, and where the plans for that bloodthirsty warrior’s assaults upon the whites were made. Then follows the course across beautiful Lake St. Clair, and the slow journey through Little Venice, where again the crowds and music and gay vessels of one of the most popular resorts in America greet his eyes for many miles; where every bit of land that thrusts itself out of the lake is lined with summer cottages and lakeside inns. Here the tourist may stop for a dollar a day or two dollars a day, and may mingle freely with bankers and merchants and millionaires as well as with the “common herd.” It is a mixed, happy, cosmopolitan life.

From Little Venice the tourist’s ship enters the St. Clair River, along which live innumerable captains of ships. It is a paradise of beauty, yet along its length one may buy cottage sites cheaper than he can purchase ordinary city lots. Here the traveller will see the tents of happy campers from the city, comfortable inns, and now and then a summer resort hotel--a mixed life, one of pleasure for the man with a family and little money as well as for him who has more than he knows well how to spend.

Once out upon the bosom of Lake Huron, the scenes begin to change. Now there are miles of shore on which there is hardly a habitation to be seen. From Saginaw Bay northward for hundreds of miles along the Georgian Bay and Michigan shores, the grandeur and beauty of the wilderness are seen from the deck of the vessel. As one progresses farther north the scenes become wilder and wilder, until the captain may tell you that you are looking out over regions where the bear and the deer and the wolf make their homes; and if you have a drop of sportsman’s blood in you, he adds to your excitement by saying that you may see big game from the deck of the ship before the trip is over. At times, and for long distances, the vessel seems to be picking her way between innumerable islands, and if the course is through Georgian Bay their number bewilders the traveller. They are on all sides of him. Here and there upon them are resort hotels; more numerous still are the simple, homelike places where the city worker and his family may stay at comparatively small expense, and along the mainland are the homes of settlers and farmers, nine out of ten of whom are glad to accommodate summer visitors at prices which make living there as cheap as at home.

Farther northward the tourist’s ship carries him deeper into the wilderness country, through St. Mary’s River, with its forest-clad shores and islands, broken here and there by little cottages built and owned by city people; through the locks at the “Soo,” and into Lake Superior. Beyond this, as one captain expressed it to the writer, “there is howling wilderness on every shore.” At times the traveller may have glimpses of the Canadian coast, from which the unbroken wild stretches northward to Hudson Bay; his eyes may travel over the hazy distance of the greatest moose- and caribou-hunting country on the continent; and when near the Michigan shore he may see the smoke rising above the great copper mines of the Upper Peninsula. And at the end of this northern route he comes to Duluth, the second greatest freight-shipping port in the world, and destined to become one of the most important cities in America.

At the Straits of Mackinaw, however, the tourist may turn into Lake Michigan instead of continuing into Superior: and if so, he soon comes within sight of Beaver Island, famous for all ages in history as the one-time stronghold of King Strang and his Mormons--an island about which piracy once flourished and where more than one vessel, in the years of long ago, met a mysterious and tragic end at the hands of buccaneers as bloodthirsty as any that ever roamed the seas.

And so it goes, from end to end of the Lakes, every mile fraught with interest, every hour offering the traveller something new of scenery or history. At no time is there the monotonous sameness of ocean travel, and even night is to be regretted because of the things which are passed then and cannot be seen. And this life of the Lakes is not, like that of the salt seas, open only to those of means. It is within the poor man’s reach as well as the rich, is accessible to the hard-working housewife as well as to the woman who possesses her carriage and her servants.

V

The Romance and Tragedy of the Inland Seas

I was watching a blockade of ships in a Lake Erie harbour--a score of striving, crowding, smoking monsters of the Inland Seas, hung under a pall of black smoke, with screeching tugs floundering here and there, megaphone voices shouting curses and orders, and the crashing of chains and steel filling the air. And I thought of a theatre I had visited the night before where, arriving late, I was forced to crush in with the gallery gods and fight for a place in the fifth heaven. In the excitement of this “spring rush” of great ships for the freight-laden docks of the North, I spoke my sentiment to the man beside me--a man who had always before him in his office five miniature lakes, on which miniature vessels represented his steel leviathans of commerce, which he moved about, and played, and watched, day by day and almost hour by hour, as a player might move his men at chess. And this man, I noticed, was regarding the scene before him with different eyes from mine. His face was set in a frown, his eyes stared in their momentary anxiety, and I could almost feel the eager tenseness of his body. Out there in that chaotic tangle, where captains were fighting for prestige and taking chances that might cost thousands, _he_ had ships. I saw him clench his hand as a black monster crept forward into the gap between two ships ahead; I saw it forge on, yard by yard, saw the other vessels close up on it as though it were an egg which they were bent on crushing between them, heard the rumbling of steel side against steel side, and when at last I witnessed this ship break triumphantly into the lead, great blotches of paint scraped from it, I looked at the man again, and he was smiling.

Then he turned to me, and as we walked away from the scene, he observed:

“That’s good--that ‘crush’ idea of yours. I’d use it. It’s as pretty a comparison as you could get to the whole situation on the Lakes to-day, and it’s a key to what the situation is going to be ten years from now. It’s crush and crowd all over the Lakes from Duluth to Buffalo. Harbours are getting too small; the ‘Soo’ canals are becoming outgrown; the Lime Kiln crossing is a greater and greater menace as the number of ships increases. And the ships? They’re increasing so fast that unless the Government takes a hand, there will be more tragedies to write down in Lake history during the next decade or two, than in all of the years that have gone before.”

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.

In view of the action already being taken to bring about legislation to prevent collisions, it is interesting to note that no similar area of any ocean, if suddenly robbed of its waters, would expose to human eyes more sunken ships, or more valuable cargoes, than the Great Lakes. During the twenty years between 1878 and 1898, only one less than 6000 vessels were wrecked on the Inland Seas, and 1093 these were total losses. The loss of cargo during this period of a little more than one fourth of the years of navigation on the Lakes was nearly $8,000,000, and from this it is quite safe to figure that the total amount of property that has gone to the bottom of the Lakes, including only cargoes, would make a total of at least $15,000,000, involving the wrecking of 14,000 vessels and the total loss of over 2000 ships. Were these “total losses” strung out in a row, there would be a sunken ship at a distance of every half-mile over the thousand-mile length of the Lakes between Buffalo and Duluth. What a field for romance here! What material for the seeker of human achievement, of heroism, of sacrifice! Scores of these vessels disappeared as suddenly and as mysteriously as though some great power had smuggled them from the face of the earth, leaving naught behind to tell of the tragedies; hundreds of ships carried with them valuable cargoes which remain to this day for lucky fortune-hunters to recover from the depths; and in their going thousands of lives were snuffed out, and thousands of unwritten acts of heroism were played and never heard of, or forgotten.

How many remember the name of Captain James Jackson? Jackson is only one of a thousand heroes of the Inland Seas, and the deed which made him famous among Lake seamen is only one of a thousand of a similar kind. It happened one year in the closing days of navigation on Superior. The owners of the freighter _W. F. Sauber_ had sent that ship from Duluth with one last load of iron ore under the command of W. E. Morris. Off Whitefish Point the vessel was caught in a fierce storm from the north. All night she weathered the gale, but with morning there came a blinding sleet with fierce wind and intense cold, and the breaking seas froze as they touched the upper works of the ship. Under the increasing weight of ice the disabled _Sauber_ gradually settled. When thus the “little ice devils” of Superior gather upon a victim, it sometimes happens that no power of man can save the ship, and in this instance the crew of the doomed freighter realised that it was only a matter of a short time before the end would come. But strange things happen on the Inland Seas, as on the oceans.

Upon this day, so far as is known, there were just two vessels on Lake Superior, and fate decreed that they should meet off Whitefish Point. While the men of the _Sauber_ were waiting for death, the steamer _Yale_ was tearing her way through the gale toward the “Soo,” and as he passed Captain Jackson sighted the sinking ship. It was then that occurred that act which won him a gold medal and a purse contributed to by hundreds of sailors all over the Lakes.

Notwithstanding the peril of his own situation, Captain Jackson brought his vessel to. For hours it was buffeted in the trough of the sea, which was too heavy for small boats to attempt a rescue in. Night came, and the freighters drifted to within a stone’s throw of each other. At dawn, when the _Yale_ might have been safely in port, it was found that she, too, was gradually settling, and that the _Sauber_ could not live an hour longer. Captain Jackson at once called for volunteers willing to risk their lives in an attempt at rescue; he himself went out in the first boat. If bravery was ever rewarded it was then. Every member of the _Sauber’s_ crew, with the exception of the captain, was carried to the _Yale_. At the last moment Captain Morris attempted to lower himself into one of the boats--hesitated--then leaped back to the deck of the sinking ship.

“Go on, boys!” he shouted through the gale. “Good luck to you, but I’m going to stay with the old boat!”

This is heroism, sacrifice, faithfulness, as they are bred on the Inland Seas.

Thirty minutes later the _Sauber_ went under, and immediately after the explosion of her deck, caused by the pressure of air and water, those who were still courageously waiting in a small boat heard the last cries of Captain Morris rising above the gale.

These “last days of navigation”--the season when life and property are hazarded by crews and captains with a recklessness that thrills one’s blood--are justly dreaded, and I have been told by a hopeful few that the time is coming when proper legislation will send ships into winter quarters earlier than now. It is at this time that casualties multiply with alarming rapidity, the perils of Lake navigation becoming tenfold as great as those of the ocean. Heavy fogs hide the beacons that mark the danger lines. Blinding snowstorms blot out the most powerful lights. Driven by fierce gales, weighted by ice, with heaven and sea meeting in a pall that conceals the guiding stars ashore, scores of vessels continue to beat onward in the hope of adding one more successful trip to their season’s record.

The history of a Lake Superior tragedy is simple. One more trip from Duluth may mean thousands of dollars. The season is late--too late. But freight rates are high. No risk, no gain, argues the ship-owner, as he sends his vessel from port. Those are days of anxiety for captain, crew, and owner. In a few hours the clear sky may give place to banks of snow clouds. The air turns bitter cold. Darkness falls in the middle of the afternoon. The snow descends in dense clouds. It is far worse than the blackest night, for it shuts out the lights along the treacherous shores as completely as a wall of mountains. Upon the captain alone now depends the safety of the ship, for the Government’s attempts to aid him are futile. Perhaps his vessel is safely making her course miles from the coast. Or it may be that it is driving steadily toward its doom upon the dreaded Pictured Rocks. It was in this way that the steamer _Superior_ was lost with all on board, and in the same way the _Western Reserve_ beat herself to pieces within sight of the Big Sable light. And Superior has a harder fate in store for many of those who take the last ill-fated trip of the season. Sailors dread it more than the tragedy of dense snowstorms, when they run upon the rocks, for even there hope does not die; they dread it more than the fierce, sledge-hammer wash of Erie in a storm; more than the fearful dash for port in Lake Michigan, where ports are few; and this fate is the fate of “the little ice devils”--those masses of ice which freeze upon a ship until she is weighted beyond control.

In these days of late navigation--days of fierce battles with snow, ice, and wind, days of death and destruction as they are never known upon the salt seas--is material for a generation of writers; unnumbered stories of true mystery, true romance, and true tragedy, which, if fed to the nation in popular form, would be of immeasurable value to lovers of the literature of adventure. Into what a fascinating tale of mystery, for example, might the loss of the _Queen of the West_ be turned! And, yet, here is a case where truth is in reality stranger than fiction, and possibly an editor might “turn down” the tale as too improbable. Recently I chronicled a true romance of the Lakes. I had dates, names of ships, names of people, and even court records to prove the absolute verity of my story, which was related in the form of fiction. I sent it to several editors who had published other stories of mine, and one after another they returned it, saying that while my proofs were conclusive, the story was so unusual in some of its situations that their readers would consider the tale as a gross exaggeration of anything that might occur on the Great Lakes!

Well, here is the story of the _Queen of the West_--only one of scores of Lake incidents equally unusual; and I hope that it will have at least some weight in showing that things _can_ occur on the Inland Seas. In the late navigation days of 1903, the freighter _Cordurus_ left Duluth on a “last trip down.” In mid-lake, the lookout reported a ship in distress, and upon nearer approach the vessel was found to be the _Queen of the West_, two miles out of her course, and sinking. Captain McKenzie immediately changed his course that he might go to the rescue, at the same time signalling the other vessel to lay to. What was his astonishment when he perceived the _Queen of the West_ bearing rapidly away from him, as though her captain and crew were absolutely oblivious of their sinking condition, as well as of the fact that assistance was at hand!

Now began what was without doubt the most unusual “chase” in marine history. Every eye on the deck of the _Cordurus_ could see that the _Queen of the West_ was sinking--that at any moment she might plunge beneath the sea. Was her captain mad? Each minute added to the mystery. The fleeing ship had changed her course so that she was bearing directly on to the north Superior shore. Added fuel was crammed under the _Cordurus’s_ boilers; yard by yard, length by length, she gained upon the sinking vessel. Excited figures were seen waving their arms and signalling from the _Queen of the West’s_ deck. But still the ship continued on her mysterious flight. At last Captain McKenzie came within hailing distance. His words have passed down into Lake history:

“You’re sinking, you idiot! Why don’t you heave to?”

“I know it--but I _can’t_,” came back the voice of the _Queen of the West’s_ captain. “We’re almost gone and if we stop our engines for a second we’ll go down like a chunk of lead!”

Not stopping to consider the risk. Captain McKenzie ran alongside. The _Queen of the West’s_ engines were stopped and her crew clambered aboard. Hardly had the _Cordurus_ dropped safely away when the doomed ship went down. Her momentum alone had kept her from sinking sooner.

One of the most thrilling and interesting pages in the history of Great Lakes navigation, despite the comparative smallness of these fresh-water seas, is made up of “mysterious disappearances.” Ships have sailed from one port for another, and though at no time, perhaps, were they more than ten to thirty miles from shore, they have never been heard from again. Of some not even a spar or a bit of wreckage has been found. Only a few years ago the magnificent passenger steamer _Chicora_ left St. Joseph, Michigan, for Chicago on a stormy winter night. She was one of the finest, staunchest, and best-manned vessels on the Lakes. She sailed out into Lake Michigan--and thence into oblivion. Not a soul escaped to tell the story of her end. Through the years that have passed no sign of her has ever been found. Wreckers have sought for her, people along the shore have watched for years; but never a memento has the lake given up from that day to this. And this is only one of the many mysteries of the Inland Seas.

One phase of Lake navigation.]

Captains and sailors theorise and wonder to this day on the loss of the _Atlanta_, which went down in Lake Superior; and wonderful stories are told of the disappearance of the _Nashua_, the _Gilcher_, and the _Hudson_, and of the nameless vessels spoken of by old Lake mariners as “The Two Lost Tows” of Huron. The disappearance of these tows remains to this day unexplained. During the night the line which held them to their freighter consort parted and unknown to the steamer they fell behind. With the coming of dawn search was made for them, but in vain. What added to the uncanniness of the simultaneous disappearance of the two vessels was the fact that there was no storm at the time. No trace of the missing ships has ever been found. Almost as mysterious was the disappearance of the crack steamer _Alpena_ in Lake Michigan. When last seen she was thirty miles from Chicago. From that day to this no one has been able to say what became of her. Of the fifty-seven people who rode with her that tragic night, not one lived to tell the tale.

Of all Lake mysteries, that of the _Bannockburn_ is one of the freshest in the memory. The ill-fated vessel left Duluth in the days of the “ice devils,” a big, powerful freighter with a crew of twenty-two men. What happened to her will never be known. She went out one morning, was sighted the next evening--and that was the last. Not a sign of her floated ashore, not one of her crew was found. For eighteen months the ice-cold waters of Lake Superior guarded their secret. Then one day an oar was found in the driftwood at the edge of the Michigan wilderness. Around the oar was wrapped a piece of tarpaulin, and when this was taken off, a number of rude letters were revealed scraped into the wood--letters which spelled the word B-a-n-n-o-c-k-b-u-r-n. This oar is all that remains to-day to tell the story of the missing freighter. And now, by certain superstitious sailors, the _Bannockburn_ is supposed to be the Flying Dutchman of the Inland Seas and there are those who will tell you in all earnestness that on icy nights, when the heaven above and the sea below were joined in one black pall, they have descried the missing _Bannockburn_--a ghostly apparition of ice, scudding through the gloom. And this is but one more illustration of the fact that all of the romance in the lives of men who “go down to the sea in ships” is not confined to the big oceans.

Unnumbered thousands of tourists travel over the Lakes to-day with hardly a conception of the unrevealed interests about them. What attracts them is the beauty and freshness of the trip; when they go upon the ocean they wonder, and dream, and read history. Tragedy has its allurement for the pleasure-seeker, as well as romance; and while certain phases of tragedy are always regrettable, it is at least interesting to be able at times to recall them. The Lake traveller, for instance, would feel that his trip had more fully repaid him if his captain should say, pointing to a certain spot, “There is where Perry and his log ships of war met the British: the battle was fought right here”; or, “There is where the _Lady Elgin_ went down, with a loss of three hundred lives.”

After a collision with another freighter.]

Three hundred lives! The ordinary modern tourist would hold up his hands in incredulous wonder. “Is it possible,” he might ask, “that such tragedies have occurred on the Lakes?” I doubt if there are many who know that upon the Lakes have occurred some of the greatest marine disasters of the world. On September 8, 1860, the _Lady Elgin_ collided with the schooner _Augusta_ and went down in Lake Michigan, carrying with her three hundred men, women, and children, most of whom were excursionists from Milwaukee. Two months later the propeller _Dacotah_ sank in a terrific gale off Sturgeon Point, Lake Erie, carrying every soul down with her. Nothing but fragments were ever seen afterward, so complete was her destruction. On the steamer _Ironsides_, which dove down into one hundred and twenty feet of water, twenty-four lives were lost in full sight of Grand Haven. Many vessels, like the _Ironsides_, have perished with their bows almost in harbour. Less than four years ago, for instance, the big steel ship _Mataafa_ was beaten to pieces on the Duluth breakwater, while not more than thirty or forty rods away thousands of people stood helpless, watching the death-struggles of her crew, who were absolutely helpless in the tremendous seas, and who died within shouting distance of their friends.

Probably the most terrible disaster that ever occurred on the Lakes was the burning of the steamer _G. P. Griffin_, twenty miles east of Cleveland. The vessel was only three miles from shore when the flames were discovered, and her captain at once made an effort to run her aground. Half a mile from the mainland the _Griffin_ struck a sand-bar and immediately there followed one of the most terrible scenes in the annals of marine tragedy. The boats were lowered and swamped by the maddened crowd. Men became beasts, and fought back women and children. Frenzied mothers leaped overboard with their babes in their arms. Scorched by the flames, their faces blackened, their eyes bulging, and even their garments on fire, over three hundred people fought for their lives. Men seized their wives and flung them overboard, leaping after them to destruction; human beings fought like demons for possession of chairs, boards, or any objects that might support them in the water, and others, crazed by the terrible scenes about them, dashed into the roaring flames, their dying shrieks mingling with the hopeless cries of those who still struggled for life. From the shore scores of helpless people, without boats, or any means of assistance, watched the frightful spectacle, and strong swimmers struck out to give what aid they could. Only a few were saved. For days scorched and unrecognisable corpses floated ashore, and when the final death-roll was called, it was found that 286 lives had gone out in that frightful hour of fire.