docks of Lake ports. The product of the Mesaba and Vermilion ranges, in Minnesota, is shipped from Duluth and Two Harbors; the eight million tons of the Goebic and Marquette ranges, in Michigan, from Escanaba and Marquette; and the five million tons of the Menominee range, in Wisconsin, from Ashland and Superior.
To these six ports of the Northland come the vikings of the Lakes and their immense fleets. Four of these ports are within a radius of seventy-five miles, and the two others, in Michigan, are about one hundred and fifty miles farther east and south. No other area of lake or ocean in the world is as much travelled by shipping as that along which these ore harbours are situated. The people of Duluth have witnessed blockades of vessels such as have never been seen in the greatest ocean ports. Over this part of Superior there is a constant trail of smoke from the funnels of ships. During one month there were 1221 arrivals and clearances from Duluth alone, an average of forty a day.
Behind these great ships, which rest never a day nor an hour for eight months of the year, are the kings of Lake commerce – such men as J. C. Gilchrist, James Davidson, Captain Mitchell, William Livingstone, Harry Coulby, W. C. Richardson, A. B. Wolvin, G. Ashley Tomlinson, and scores of others. To write of these would be to chronicle a history of men who have fought their way to the top through sheer force of the “breed that is in them.”
Take G. Ashley Tomlinson, of Duluth, for instance, whose ships carry a couple of million tons of ore a year. “Not a great record,” as Mr. Tomlinson modestly says, but still enough to supply every man, woman, and child in the United States with a little matter of fifty pounds each twelvemonth! In a novel Tomlinson would make an ideal soldier of fortune; in plain, matter-of-fact life he represents those elements which make the great men of the Lakes. He is forty years old. He has sixteen ships. His income is over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.
Yet Tomlinson began, as did many other Great Lake men of to-day, with just two assets – the clothes on his back and a huge ambition. He started his career as a messenger boy in the State treasurer’s office at Lansing, Michigan. But there was not enough of the strenuous life in this for him, so he went West to become a cowboy. He succeeded, much to his regret; for soon after he had mastered the broncho and could handle a lasso there came the war between the cowboys and the White River Utes. In one of the fights Tomlinson was wounded and afterward captured by the redskins. During the whole of one night he was subjected to torture, and at dawn of the following day, when almost at the point of death, he was delivered by a party of ranchmen. Tomlinson was not one to display the white feather – but he had had enough of Western life, and as soon as possible he worked himself from Rawlins, Wyoming, to Chicago on a cattle train. After a time he came to Michigan, and with his savings attended the University of Michigan for about a year. This was enough of “higher education” for him, so he sold his text-books and went to work on the Detroit Journal at the munificent salary of six dollars a week. Newspaper work was all right until Buffalo Bill came along. Tomlinson joined the show, rode a bucking broncho for a year, then “developed” a voice and cast his fortunes with the Mapleson Opera Company. In 1889, he went to New York as a reporter on the Sun, returned the following year to become night editor of the Detroit Tribune, and in 1893 moved to Duluth.
The Lakes began to hold a peculiar fascination for him. He went into the vessel brokerage business mostly on his nerve; but nerve made him money, and his capital began to grow. How fast it has grown during the past dozen years one must judge by his ships and his income. He is president of five steamship companies, vice-president of another, secretary to three more, and a director in the American Exchange Bank, of Duluth, and the Cananea Central Copper Company. He has developed from a typical adventurer of fortune into one of the great men of the Lakes. His romantic career is described here because it is illustrative of the fact that brain and brawn, not “pull” and money, have made the vikings and iron barons of the Inland Seas. No millionaires’ sons here, living on their fathers’ prestige – no blue-blooded drones in these regions of the five little seas, where only red blood counts!
When the first ships of the season come up from the South in April or May nearly a million and a half tons of ore are awaiting them in the docks of the ore-shipping ports. There are twenty-six of these ore docks, one of which, at Duluth, has a storage capacity of ninety-six thousand tons. From a distance these docks look like great trestles, from fifty to one hundred feet above the water, some of them running for nearly half a mile out into the lake. Out upon these docks run the cars from the mines. From these cars the ore is dropped into huge pockets, from which run downward long chutes, or spouts. A ten-thousand-ton carrier runs alongside. Her hatches are opened. Into each hatch runs a chute. The chute “doors” are opened, and with a dull, rumbling, rushing sound the ore pours down by force of gravity from the huge pockets above. At dock No. 4, Duluth, 9277 tons were put aboard the steamer E. J. Earling in seventy minutes, being at the rate of 7988 tons an hour. The rapidity with which Lake transportation is carried on is shown in the fact that upon this occasion the Earling was in port only two hours and fifteen minutes before she began her thousand-mile return trip eastward.
And now comes the last important phase. One viewing the continuous activity at the mines, the building up of cities on the ranges, and the tremendous interests represented in the great shipping ports may forget that this is but one end of the gigantic industry which makes the United States the steel-maker for the world. At the other end of the fresh-water highways is seen the other half of the picture. Down into Erie come the ships from the North. A few of them go to Chicago, but only a few. Out of a total movement of thirty-seven million tons, in 1906, thirty-two million tons were received at Lake Erie ports. There are eleven of these “receiving ports” – Toledo, Sandusky, Huron, Lorain, Cleveland, Fairport, Ashtabula, Conneaut, Erie, Buffalo, and Tonawanda.
Between these cities there is a constant battle for prestige. Now one leads in tonnage received, now another. At the present time the bitterest rivalry exists between Cleveland, Ashtabula, and Conneaut, the three greatest ore ports in the world. In 1901, Ashtabula led. In 1902, Cleveland bore away the “pennant,” with Ashtabula and Conneaut second and third. Cleveland was still ahead in 1903, but in 1904, Conneaut became the greatest ore-receiving port in the world. In 1905, Ashtabula had again won the ascendency, and in 1906, she maintained her prestige, receiving in that year 6,833,352 tons; Cleveland was second, and Conneaut third. Lorain, Fairport, Ashtabula, Conneaut, and Erie practically exist because of the ore which comes down from the northern mines. Seven million dollars are now being expended in the improvement of Ashtabula harbour by the Lake Shore and Pennsylvania railroad companies, and the capacity of the harbour has been doubled since 1905. With the improvement of that harbour Conneaut’s greatest advantage will be gone, for until a comparatively recent date nearly all of the largest vessels went to that port. The tremendous activity in Ashtabula must be seen to be fully appreciated. In one day lately almost four thousand ore and coal cars were moved between that port and Youngstown.
At this end of the great ore industry the wonderful mechanism for the handling of cargoes is even more astonishing than that of the Northland. The ore carrier is run under a huge unloading machine which thrusts steel arms down into the score or more hatches of the vessel, and without the assistance of human hands the cargo is emptied so quickly that the uninitiated observer stands mute with astonishment. How quickly this work is done is shown in the record of the George W. Perkins, which discharged 10,346 tons at Conneaut in four hours and ten minutes.
Once more, after this unloading, the steel monster of the Lakes is all but ready for her long journey into the North. Within a few hours she is reloaded, with a few sonorous blasts of her whistle she bids a last adieu, and again she is off on the long trail that leads to the “ugly wealth” in the ore ranges of Superior.
III
What the Ships Carry – Other Cargoes
Not long ago I went to see William Livingstone, President of the Lake Carriers’ Association – Great Admiral, in a way, of the world’s mightiest fleet of steel – an enrolled navy of 593 ships and a tonnage of nearly one million nine hundred thousand. Unconsciously I had come to call this man the Grey Man and the Man who Knows. Both titles fit, as they will tell you from the twin Tonawandas to Duluth. For six consecutive years president of the greatest organisation of its kind on earth, an association of ships made up, if weighed, of half of the iron and steel floating