Part 5 (1/2)

The commissioners in charge of the project performed one interesting service in these early days by putting Chicago on the map; but the two terminals, Ottawa on the Illinois and Chicago on Lake Michigan-both plotted in 1830-were very largely figures of speech at that time. The day of miracles was at hand, however, for the little town of one hundred people at the foot of Lake Michigan. The purchase of the lands of the Potawatomies, the Black Hawk War in 1832, which brought steamboats to Chicago for the first time, and the decision of Illinois in 1836 to pledge her good name in favor of the Illinois and Michigan Ca.n.a.l made Chicago a city of four thousand people by the panic year of 1837. So absorbed were these Chicago folk in the building of their ca.n.a.l and in wresting from their lake firm foothold for a city (reclaiming four hundred feet of lake bed in two years) that the panic affected their town less than it did many a rival. Although the ca.n.a.l enterprise came to an ominous pause in 1842, after the expenditure of five millions, the pledge of the State stood the enterprise in good stead. Local financiers, together with New York and Boston promoters, advanced about a quarter of a million, while French and English bankers, notably Baring Brothers, contributed about three-quarters of a million. With this a.s.sistance the work was carried to a successful ending. On April 10,1848, the first boat pa.s.sed over the ninety-mile route from Chicago to Ottawa, and the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin were united by this Erie Ca.n.a.l of the West. Though its days of greatest value were soon over, no one can exaggerate the importance of this waterway in the growth and prosperity of Chicago between 1848 and 1860. By 1857 Chicago was sending north and south annually by boat over twenty million bushels of wheat and corn.

The awakening of the lands behind Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Michigan brought forth innumerable demands for roads, ca.n.a.ls, and railways to the ports of Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago. There were actually hundreds of these enterprises undertaken. The development of the land behind Lake Superior was particularly spectacular and important, not only because of its general effect on the industrial world but also because out of it came the St. Mary's River s.h.i.+p Ca.n.a.l. Nowhere in the zone of the Great Lakes has any region produced such unexpected changes in American industrial and commercial life as did the region of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota contributory to Lake Superior. If, as the story goes, Benjamin Franklin said, when he drew at Paris the international boundary line through Lake Superior, that this was his greatest service to America, he did not exaggerate. The line running north of Isle Royale and thence to the Lake of the Woods gave the United States the lion's share of that great inland seaboard and the inestimably rich deposits of copper and iron that have revolutionized American industry.

From earliest days rumors of deposits of bright copper in the land behind Lake Superior had been reported by Indians to fur traders who in turn had pa.s.sed the story on to fur company agents and thus to the outside world. As a result of her ”Toledo War”-as her boundary dispute was called-Michigan had reluctantly accepted the northern peninsula lying between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan in lieu of the strip of Ohio territory which she believed to be hers. If Michigan felt that she had lost by this compromise, her state geologist, Dougla.s.s Houghton, soon found a splendid jewel in the toad's head of defeat, for the report of his survey of 1840 confirmed the story of the existence of large copper deposits, and the first rush to El Dorado followed. Amid the usual chaos, conflict, and failure incident to such stampedes, order and system at last triumphed and the richest copper mines of the New World were uncovered. Then came the unexpected finding of the mammoth iron-ore beds by William A. Burt, inventor of the solar compa.s.s. The circ.u.mstance of this discovery is of such national importance that a contemporary description by a member of Burt's party which was surveying a line near Marquette, Michigan, is worth quoting:

”I shall never forget the excitement of the old gentleman when viewing the changes of the variation. He kept changing his position to take observations, all the time saying ”How would they survey this country without my compa.s.s” and ”What could be done here without my compa.s.s.” At length the compa.s.sman called for us all to ”come and see a variation which will beat them all.” As we looked at the instrument, to our astonishment, the north end of the needle was traversing a few degrees to the south west. Mr. Burt called out ”Boys, look around and see what you can find.” We all left the line, some going to the east, some going to the west, and all of us returned with specimens of iron ore.”

But it was not enough that this Aladdin's Land in the Northwest should revolutionize the copper and steel industry of the world, for as soon as the soil took to its bosom an enterprising race of agriculturists it bade fair to play as equally important a part in the grain industry. Copper and iron no less came out of the blue of this cold northern region than did the mighty crops of Minnesota wheat, corn, and oats. In the decade preceding the Civil War the export of wheat from Lake Superior rose from fourteen hundred bushels to three and a quarter millions of bushels, while in 1859 nearly seven million bushels of corn and oats were sent out to the world.

The commerce of Lake Superior could not await the building of a ca.n.a.l around the foaming rapids of the St. Mary's River, its one outlet to the lower lakes. In the decade following the discovery of copper and iron more than a dozen s.h.i.+ps, one even of as much as five hundred tons, were hauled bodily across the portage between Lake Huron and Lake Superior. The last link of navigation in the Great Lake system, however, was made possible in 1852 by a grant by Congress of 750,000 acres of Michigan land. Although only a mile in length, the work proved to be of unusual difficulty since the pathway for the ca.n.a.l had to be blasted throughout practically its whole length out of solid rock. It was completed in 1855, and the princely empire ”in the moon” was in a position to make its terms with the coal fields of Pennsylvania and to usher in the iron age of transportation and construction.

It is only in the light of this awakening of the lands around the Great Lakes that one can see plainly the task which fell to the lot of the successors of the frail Walk-in-the-Water and st.u.r.dier Superior of the early twenties. For the first fifteen years the steamboat found its mission in carrying the thousands of emigrants pouring into the Northwest, a heterogeneous mult.i.tude which made the Lake Erie boats seem, to one traveler at least, filled with ”men, women and children, beds, cradles, kettles, and frying pans.” These craft were built after the pattern of the Walk-in-the-Water-side-wheelers with a steering wheel at the stern. No cabins or staterooms on deck were provided; and amid such freight as the thriving young towns provided were to be found the twenty or thirty cords of wood which the engines required as fuel.

The second period of steamboating began with the opening of the Ohio Ca.n.a.l and the Welland Ca.n.a.l about 1834 and extended another fifteen years to the middle of the century, when it underwent a transformation owing to the great development of Chicago, the completion of the Illinois and Michigan and St. Mary's ca.n.a.ls, and the new railways. This second period was marked by the building of such steamers as the Michigan, the Great Western, and the Illinois. These were the first boats with an upper cabin and were looked upon with marked suspicion by those best acquainted with the severe storms upon the Great Lakes. The Michigan, of 475 tons, built by Oliver Newberry at Detroit in 1833, is said to have been the first s.h.i.+p of this type. These boats proved their seaworthiness and caused a revolution in the construction of lake craft. Later in this period freight transportation saw an equally radical advance with the building of the first propellers. The sloop-rigged Vandalia, built by Sylvester Doolittle at Oswego on Lake Ontario in 1842, was the first of the propeller type and was soon followed by the Hercules, the Samson, and the Detroit.

One very great handicap in lake commerce up to this time had been the lack of harbors. Detroit alone of the lake ports was distinctly favored in this respect. The harbors of Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Chicago were improved slowly, but it was not until the great Chicago convention of 1846 that the nation's attention was focused on the needs of Western rivers and harbors, and there dawned a new era of lighthouses and buoys, breakwaters and piers, and dredged channels. Another handicap to the volume of business which the lake boats handled in the period just previous to the Civil War was the inadequacy of the feeders, the roads, riverways, and ca.n.a.ls. The Erie Ca.n.a.l was declared too small almost before the cries of its virulent opponents had died away, and the enlargement of its locks was soon undertaken. The same thing proved true of the Ohio and Illinois ca.n.a.ls. The failure of the Welland Ca.n.a.l was similarly a very serious handicap. Although its locks were enlarged in 1841, it was found by 1850 that despite the improvements it could not admit more than about one-third of the grain-carrying boats, while only one in four of the new propellers could enter its locks.

As late as the middle forties men did not in the least grasp the commercial situation which now confronted the Northwest nor could they foresee that the land behind the Great Lakes was about to deluge the country with an output of produce and manufactures of which the roads, ca.n.a.ls, s.h.i.+ps, wharfs, or warehouses in existence could handle not a tenth part. They did not yet understand that-this trade was to become national. It was well on in the forties before the Galena lead mines, for instance, were given up as the terminal of the Illinois Central Railroad and the main line was directed to Chicago. The middle of the century was reached before the Lake Sh.o.r.e was considered at Cleveland or Chicago as important commercially as the neighboring portage paths which by the Ordinance of 1787 had been created ”common highways forever free.” The idea of joining Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago with the interior-an idea as old as the Indian trails thither-still dominated men's minds even in the early part of the railroad epoch. Chicago desired to be connected with Cairo, the ice-free port on the Mississippi; and Cleveland was eager to be joined to Columbus and Cincinnati. The enthusiastic railway promoters of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois drew splendid plans for uniting all parts of those States by railway lines; but the strategic position of the cities on the continental alignment from New York to the Pacific by way of South Pa.s.s never came within their horizon. The ten million dollar Illinois scheme did not even contemplate a railway running eastward from Chicago. But the future of the commerce of the Great Lakes depended absolutely upon this development. There was no hope of any ca.n.a.ls being able to handle the traffic of the mighty empire which was now awake and fully conscious of its power. The solution lay in joining the cities to each other and to the Atlantic world markets by iron rails running east and west.

This railroad expansion is what makes the last decade before the Civil War such a remarkable series of years in the West. In the half decade, 1850-55, the Baltimore and Ohio and Pennsylvania railways reached the Ohio River; the links of the present Lake Sh.o.r.e system between Buffalo and Chicago by way of Cleveland and Toledo were constructed; and the Pennsylvania line was put through from Pittsburgh to Chicago. The place of the lake country on the continental alignment and the imperial situation of Chicago, and later of Omaha, came to be realized. The new view transformed men's conceptions of every port on the Great Lakes in the chain from Buffalo to Chicago. At a dozen southern ports on Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan, commerce now touched the swiftest and most economical means of transcontinental traffic. This development culminated in the miracle we call Chicago. In 1847 not a line of rail entered the town; its population then numbered about twenty-five thousand and its property valuation approximated seven millions. Ten years later four thousand miles of railway connected with all four points of the compa.s.s a city of nearly one hundred thousand people, and property valuation had increased five hundred per cent. The growth of Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit during this period was also phenomenal.

When the crisis of 1861 came, the service performed by the Walk-in-the-Water and her successors was seen in its true light. The Great Lakes as avenues of migration had played a providential part in filling a northern empire with a proud and loyal race; from farm and factory regiment on regiment marched forth to fight for unity; from fields without number produce to sustain a nation on trial poured forth in abundance; enormous quant.i.ties of iron were at hand for the casting of cannon and cannon b.a.l.l.s; and, finally, pathways of water and steel were in readiness in the nick of time to carry these resources where they would count tremendously in the four long years of conflict.

CHAPTER XI. The Steamboat And The West

Two great fields of service lay open before those who were to achieve by steam the mastery of the inland waterways. On the one hand the cotton kingdom of the South, now demanding great stores of manufactured goods, produce, and machinery, was waiting to be linked to the valleys and industrial cities of the Middle West; and, on the other hand, along those great eastward and westward rivers, the Ohio and Missouri, lay the commerce of the prairies and the Great Plains. But before the steamboat could serve the inland commerce of the West, it had to be constructed on new lines. The craft brought from the seaboard were of too deep draft to navigate shallow streams which ran through this more level country.

The task of constructing a great inland river marine to play the dual role of serving the cotton empire and of extending American migration and commerce into the trans-Mississippi region was solved by Henry Shreve when he built the Was.h.i.+ngton at Wheeling in 1816. Shreve was the American John Hawkins. Hawkins, that st.u.r.dy old admiral of Elizabethan days, took the English s.h.i.+p of his time, trimmed down the high stern and p.o.o.p decks, and cut away the deep-lying prow and stern, after the fas.h.i.+on of our modern cup defenders, and in a day gave England the key to sea mastery in the shape of a new s.h.i.+p that would take sail and answer her rudder beyond anything the maritime world until then had known. Shreve, like Hawkins, flagrantly ignoring the conventional wisdom of his day and craft, built the Was.h.i.+ngton to sail on the water instead of in it, doing away altogether with a hold and supplying an upper deck in its place.

To few inventors, indeed, does America owe a greater debt of thanks than to this Ohio River s.h.i.+pbuilder. A dozen men were on the way to produce a Clermont had Fulton failed; but Shreve had no rival in his plan to build a flat-bottomed steamboat. The remarkable success of his design is attested by the fact that in two decades the boats built on his model outweighed in tonnage all the s.h.i.+ps of the Atlantic seaboard and Great Lakes combined. Immediately the Ohio became in effect the western extension of the great national highway and opened an easy pathway for immigration to the eastern as well as the western lands of the Mississippi Basin. The story goes that an old phlegmatic negro watched the approach of one of the first steamboats to the wharf of a Southern city. Like many others, he had doubted the practicability of this new-fangled Yankee notion. The boat, however, came and went with ease and dispatch. The old negro was converted. ”By golly,” he shouted, waving his cap, ”the Mississippi's got her Ma.s.sa now.”

The Mississippi had indeed found her master, but only by slow degrees and after intervals of protracted rebellion did she succ.u.mb to that master. Luckily, however, there was at hand an army of unusual men-the ”alligator-horses” of the flatboat era-upon whom the steamboat could call with supreme confidence that they would not fail. Theodore Roosevelt has said of the Western pioneers that they ”had to be good and strong-especially, strong.” If these men upon whom the success of the steamboat depended were not always good, they were beyond any doubt behemoths in strength.

The task before them, however, was a task worthy of Hercules. The great river boldly fought its conquerors, asking and giving no quarter, biding its time when opposed by the brave but crus.h.i.+ng the fearful on sight. In one respect alone could it be depended upon-it was never the same. It is said to bring down annually four hundred million tons of mud, but its eccentricity in deciding where to wash away and where to deposit its load is still the despair of river pilots. The great river could destroy islands and build new ones overnight with the nonchalance of a child playing with clay. It could shorten itself thirty miles at a single lunge. It could move inland towns to its banks and leave river towns far inland. It transferred the town of Delta, for instance, from three miles below Vicksburg to two miles above it. Men have gone to sleep in one State and have wakened unharmed in another, because the river decided in the night to alter the boundary line. In this way the village of Hard Times, the original site of which was in Louisiana, found itself eventually in Mississippi. Were La Salle to descend the river today by the route he traversed two and a half centuries ago, he would follow dry ground most of the way, for the river now lies practically everywhere either to the right or left of its old course.

If the Mississippi could perform such miracles upon its whole course without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding ca.n.a.l through its center called by pilots the ”channel”? The flatboatmen had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West through this mazy, s.h.i.+fting channel, but as steamboats developed in size and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman. He needed to be. He must know the stage of water anywhere by a glance at the river banks. He must guess correctly the amount of ”fill” at the head of dangerous chutes, detect bars ”working down,” distinguish between bars and ”sand reefs” or ”wind reefs” or ”bluff reefs” by night as well as by day, avoid the” breaks” in the ”graveyard” behind Goose Island, navigate the Hat Island chutes, or find the ”middle crossing” at Hole-in-the-Wall. He must navigate his craft in fogs, in storms, in the face of treacherous winds, on black nights, with thousands of dollars' worth of cargo and hundreds of lives at stake.

As the golfer knows each knoll and tuft of gra.s.s on his home links, so the pilot learned his river by heart. Said one of these pilots to an apprentice:

”You see this has got to be learned.... A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a sh.o.r.e perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from sh.o.r.e all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All sh.o.r.es seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there) and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a sh.o.r.e. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways.... You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD and never mind the one that's before your eyes.” *

* Mark Twain, ”Life on the Mississippi,” pp. 103-04.

No wonder that the two hundred miles of the Mississippi from the mouth of the Ohio to St. Louis in time contained the wrecks of two hundred steamboats.

The river trade reached its zenith between 1840 and 1860, in the two decades previous to the Civil War, that period before the railroads began to parallel the great rivers. It was a time which saw the rise of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas, and which witnessed the spread of the cotton kingdom into the Southwest. The story of King Cotton's conquest of the Mississippi South is best told in statistics. In 1811, the year of the first voyage which the New Orleans made down the Ohio River, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi exported five million pounds of cotton. In 1834 these same States exported almost two hundred million pounds of cotton. To take care of this crop and to supply the cotton country, which was becoming wealthy, with the necessaries and luxuries of life, more and more steamboats were needed. The great s.h.i.+pyards situated, because of the proximity of suitable timber, at St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville became busy hives, not since paralleled except by such centers of s.h.i.+pbuilding as Hog Island in 1917-18, during the time of the Great War. The steamboat tonnage of the Mississippi Valley (exclusive of New Orleans) in the hustling forties exceeded that of the Atlantic ports (exclusive of New York City) by 15,000 tons. The steamboat tonnage of New Orleans alone in 1843 was more than double that of New York City.

Those who, if the old story is true, ran in fear to the hills when the little New Orleans went puffing down the Ohio, in 1811, would have been doubly amazed at the splendid development in the art of boat building, could they have seen the stately Sultana or Southern Belle of the fifties sweep swiftly by. After a period of gaudy ornamentation (1830-40) steamboat architecture settled down, as has that of Pullman cars today, to sane and practical lines, and the boats gained in length and strength, though they contained less weight of timber. The value of one of the greater boats of this era would be about fifty thousand dollars. When Captain Bixby made his celebrated night crossing at Hat Island a quarter of a million dollars in s.h.i.+p and cargo would have been the price of an error in judgment, according to Mark Twain, * a good authority.