Lake Opening

Over Lake Superior last week blew a strong northwest wind. At Duluth it loosened ice floes at the harbor mouth, and the freighter John Gehm, first vessel to clear since last December, steamed out with 2,500 tons of scrap. At the east end of the lake, tugs had cut a channel from Sault Ste. Marie to open water. The wind from the west closed this, packed miles & miles of ice into Whitefish Bay. Clamped fast in the glittering rubble, more than 50 high-riding ore boats westbound from the Soo Canal stayed strung out there for two days, like black beetles stuck in cake frosting. In the Straits of Mackinac 50 miles south the car ferry Chief Wawatan cleared a path of blue water for four freighters, led them across Lake Michigan to Escanaba, returned to the Straits to break ice for a cluster of 38 more. At week's end the wind changed to the south. Through softer ice the freighters Frontenac and Peter White pushed ahead of the others out of Whitefish Bay and crossed Lake Superior to Duluth. They passed the W. D. Rees, eastbound from Superior with the first 1937 grain cargo, 200,000 bu. of rye for Peoria, Ill. distilleries. The Great Lakes shipping season, expected to be the biggest since Wartime, had begun.

To millions of Midwesterners the Great Lakes are a vacationland provided by Nature on a scale with the prairies of the Mississippi Valley. To U. S. industry their clear water has been for years the cheapest medium in the world for moving freight. The Great Lakes waterway curves southeast 1,000 miles from the greatest sources of iron ore on the continent to the greatest U. S. steelmaking centres. It lies between the richest grainland of North America and the richest consumer population on any seaboard in the world. The tonnage of freight shipped and received at lake ports in 1929 surpassed that of the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific ports of the U. S. combined. The gross tonnage of ships employed on the Great Lakes in 1929 was greater than that of the merchant fleet of Holland and nearly equaled the French merchant marine. The backbone of this trade is ore. Last week, because Steel's big winter had depleted supplies of ore at Lake Erie docks to 2,851,951 tons, little more than half the amount on hand last year and the lowest in ten years, shipping companies rejoiced at getting their big boats through to Duluth and Superior two weeks ahead of the 1936 opening. And for the first time in eight years, crews had been signed for every available freighter on the Great Lakes.

Iron Ground. In 1844 a surveyor named William A. Burt, plagued by a dipping compass needle, discovered outcroppings of iron ore on Michigan's upper peninsula near Lake Superior. During the next few years prospectors filtered in among the Indians and trappers, word filtered out to Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo of the 30-mile Marquette iron range. Chief problem for interested capital was how to get ships into Lake Superior against the rapids of St. Mary's River. In Congress cold Henry Clay had killed an appropriation for a canal at Sault Ste. Marie, saying it might as well be on the moon. By 1852 Congress was of a different mind. In 1855 the first locks were completed and passed sailing ships carrying 1,447 tons of ore. Boomed by the Civil War, iron mining spread into new ranges in the West. In 1892 the greatest iron producer in the world, the Mesabi Range, was laid open to the grunt and whoosh of steam shovels.

Symbolic was the fact that last week the first freighter out of Duluth carried not ore but scrap iron. Since mining began in the Superior region, more than $3,000,000,000 worth of ore from the Mesabi alone has been transformed into the iron & steel of heavy industry. In 1929 the U. S. Bureau of Mines estimated that if ore continued to move out of the Lake Superior region at the rate of 65,204,600 tons a year, all the high-grade ore in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan would be exhausted in about 37 years. That rate fell as low as 3,567,985 tons during Depression, was up again to 44,822,023 in 1936. Especially important for this reason are the huge reserves of low-grade ore in the Mesabi Range which holds 1,200,000,000 tons of ore all told compared to 65,000,000 in the Menominee, the next richest. And especially fortunate is U. S. Steel Corp., which owns or controls 60% of the Mesabi, has enough ore in sight to last 50 years.

The colossal efficiency of the steel industry in handling brutal mass begins at its source. From the time iron ore is dug from the mines it scarcely stops moving till it reaches the blast furnaces in Gary or Pittsburgh. Along spurs of no fewer than nine railroads, box cars crawl out of the ore pits and stock piles toward the lake ports, roll on high trestles to the loading docks, which are anywhere from a sixth to a half-mile long. There each car is clamped by a cradle, lifted and dumped into hoppers from which the ore spouts into the holds of waiting ships. Loadings are incredibly rapid. The steamer D. G. Kerr on Sept. 7, 1921 took on 12,507 tons of iron ore at Two Harbors, Minn. in 16 1/2 minutes. Last week dock-hands at Duluth-Superior were working day and night to prepare for the big ore fleet.

Ships. At the close of 1936 there were 867 U. S. and Canadian steamers, motorships and barges with a combined tonnage of 3,323,105 gross tons plying the Great Lakes. During the season they transported 50,200,666 net tons of ore, 44,699,443 tons of coal, 7,433,967 tons of grain and 12,080,672 tons of limestone to and from lake ports. From Duluth, Superior, Escanaba, they brought ore to the mills of Gary, South Chicago and Cleveland, to Ashtabula and Conneaut to be transshipped by rail to Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Bethlehem. Reloading at Toledo and Sandusky they returned, carrying coal from the bituminous fields of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, to the industries of Detroit, Milwaukee, Duluth and the Northwest. From Duluth and from the gigantic grain elevators of Fort William and Port Arthur, they carried Minnesota and Saskatchewan wheat to Buffalo and Montreal. At Alpena and Calcite, Mich., they loaded limestone for Chicago and Buffalo.

Total shipments last year of 114,414,748 tons were nearly three times as great as the total in 1932, which marked a 20-year low in Great Lakes trade. Shipping men last week predicted that the tonnage shipped this year will equal the 1929 record of 138,574,441 tons, that the Sault Ste. Marie locks, busiest in the world, will pass a tonnage equal to that of 1929, when they had a traffic greater than that of the Panama and Suez Canals combined.

The necessity of shipping an enormous volume of freight in an eight-month navigation season has compelled not only efficiency at Great Lakes ports but economy in Great Lakes ship design. Distinctive Lakes craft, introduced in 1906, is the standard 600-ft. bulk freighter, which resembles nothing so much as a huge steam barge with a minimum of upper-works fore & aft, engines and smokestack so far aft as to seem astern.

Storms are frequent on the Lakes and there have been at least two disastrous hurricanes, in 1869 and 1913. Winked at by sailors on the snub-nosed freighters but still believed by old Chippewas, farmers and fishermen around the Straits of Mackinac is the Great Lakes' most eerie legend--the Indian Drum. Distinctly reverberant on nights of storm, the Drum of the Manitou has been heard to give one roll for every ship sunk on the Lakes, one beat for every life lost. Around one night on which the Drum counted wrong, Authors William Machharg & Edwin Balmer wrote a Great Lakes novel (The Indian Drum) whose authentic chill may well outlive the dangers of lake navigation.

Big shipbuilders of the Lakes are the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Corp. of Manitowoc, Wis., and American Shipbuilding Co. with yards at Lorain, Ohio. Called the "Clipper Town" in sailing days, Manitowoc has turned out $20,000,000 worth of shipping since the present company was founded in 1904, is now engaged on a $1,250,000 tanker for Standard Oil of Indiana. Soon after May 1, American Shipbuilding Co. will lay keels for two 600-ft. freighters, first to be built on the Lakes in six years.

Lines. Both these ships will be commissioned by U. S. Steel's Pittsburgh Steamship Co., biggest steamship line on the Lakes, about half of whose 72 freighters were in Whitefish Bay last week. Second biggest line, with 47 ships, is Interlake Steamship Co., an affiliate of old & famed Pickands-Mather & Co., coal & iron. Notable among independent companies is the Tomlinson Fleet, founded in 1901 by Cleveland's crotchety George Ashley Tomlinson, 71, colleague of George A. Ball in the great Van Sweringen Deal (TIME, Dec. 14 et seq.), whose transportation interests were further enlarged fortnight ago when he became chairman of Missouri Pacific R. R. One of the 13 Tomlinson freighters is named Ball Brothers.

Potent guardian of these and 39 other lines, comprising the most important Lakes shippers, is the Lake Carriers Association of Cleveland, which trains seamen, presses harbor development, hires icebreakers and employs Newton D. Baker as general counsel. In the face of the new amendments to the Seaman's Act of 1915, requiring a three-watch system on all freighters, which will add about 20% to lake crews this year the Association this spring hiked wages back nearly to 1929 levels, beginning at $87 a month for common seamen. Holding out for still higher pay, however, Detroit sailors last week were stubborn enough to cause an appeal for Federal mediation. At Hamilton, Ont., 235 longshoremen struck for a new 50-c--per-hour contract. Somewhat alarmed over these signs of the times on the lake front, miners and steelmen in Duluth began considering what had never been considered before--the possibility of shipping iron ore east by rail.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.