The Great Lakes [antikvár]

In 1831 Henry Schoolcraft, an Indian Agent, led an expedition to the Algonquin villages on the shore of Lake Superior. He had never experienced anything like it. "Vastness is the term by which it is, more than any other, described" he wrote. "That nature has created such a scene of magnificence merely to look at is contrary to her usual economy."But if nature had beauty in mind, Schoolcraft understood the mind of man. "The sources of a busy future commerce lie concealed in its rocks. Its depths abound in fish, which will be eagerly caught, and even its forests are not without timber to swell the obj ects of a future commerce. Even the prairies of the West are destined to waft their superabundance here."It all seems so long ago, but it was just a century and a half, the wink of an eye in the history of the Great Lakes.It all began thousands of years ago with the great glaciers of the Ice Age. Over time they slowly gouged out five great hollows. As they crept southward, they pushed debris into moraines which later acted as dams when the glaciers began to melt. In the process, the five huge basins filled with water, which followed the easiest path to the sea, connecting them from west to east. The shoreline, which totals more than eight thousand miles, and extends 1200 miles from the tip of Lake Superior to the outlet of Lake Ontario, is a varied landscape, from rugged cliffs and capes to gentle beaches.Together, with 81,000 square miles of surface, the Great Lakes form the largest body of fresh water in the worid, larger by far than the Arabian desert, almost as large as the British mainland.But statistics are just part of the story. Schoolcraft was right. The Lakes represent some of nature's most beautiful handiwork, with lush green forests and broad seascapes. They also represent nature's bounty in dramatic ways.Long before Schoolcraft ventured up to the northernmost of the Lakes, French trappers and explorers were already making a very impressive living from the abundance of ilirs and fish. Not long after them came the loggers, who did their best to cut down every tree in sight and, within decades, men came to dig for copper and iron ore. And as they hacked and dug the lakes rolled on, providing them with an easy way to move their treasures to market, and the shores of the Lakes were soon dotted with thriving cities built to receive them.In the mid-nineteenth century, the cargoes aboard Great Lakes ships was as likely to be human as the country moved West and the Lakes provided the highway Most went no further West than Wisconsin or Michigan or Illinois, where the fruits of their labor on farms and in factories were moved back East or South down the Mississippi after beginning the j oumey on the waters of the Great Lakes.The first of the Great Lakes to be explored by the White Man was Lake Huron, which the Jesuit missionary explorers called "The Sweet Sea." It didn't take them long to realize that they could use this system of lakes to take them to the West, all the way to China, probably The explorer Jean Nicolt was so convinced that the Lakes were the long-dreamed-of Northwest Passage that when he reached the shores ofWisconsin in 1634, he went ashore wearing a Chinese costume. The get-up surprised the Winnebago Indians, but not nearly as much as he was surprised by them.If the waterway didn't lead to China, there were enough riches in the heart of the North American continent to make it worth making the trip anyway But it never was an easy trip. The Lakes are as treacherous as any ocean in the worid and shifting sandbars, heavy fogs and a winter deep freeze makes them a real challenge to the most experienced sailor It is also obvious that Mother Nature didn't have commerce in mind when she created the Great Lakes. The surface of Lake Superior is 602 feet above sea level. Lake Erie in 572 feet and Ontario is 248 feet higher than the level of the Atlantic Ocean. In the early days ships were literally carried over land and it wasn't until 1855 that a canal was built to bypass the rapids of the Saint Mary's River and it was possible for the first time to go by steamer from Milwaukee or Cleveland, Detroit or Chicago into Lake Superior and on to Duluth.For a variety of reasons it wasn't possible to navigate the 2,342 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to Duluth until 1959 when, the St. Lawrence Seaway made it look easy, thanks to 16 locks, to move the treasures of America's heartland directly to foreign destinations without the necessity of transferring cargoes along the way.If the water in all the Great lakes were to be spread over the Continental United States, it would create a lake ten feet deep from the Atlantic to the Pacific and south to the Gulf of Mexico. But that's just another statistic. As Henry Schoolcraft said, they are, and always have been, more than anything else, a scene of magnificence.