The _James Watt_, the first of the Rockefeller fleet and the largest steamship on the lakes, is 426 feet long, 48 feet beam, and 29 feet deep. She cost $260,000, and will carry from 4,000 to 6,000 tons of ore, according as she is trimmed to draw 14 or 18 feet of water. The _Empire City_, owned by the Zenith Transportation Company, is of the same dimensions, less one foot in depth. She is now the largest grain carrier on the lakes, having capacity for 213,000 bushels. The Minnesota Iron Company have a fleet of fourteen steamships, each carrying from 100,000 to 180,000 bushels of grain. The Lehigh Valley Transportation Company own a fleet of large and powerful steel freight steamers which ply between Buffalo and Chicago. These are but a few of the many transportation companies that do business on the Great Lakes. As to the vessels at present employed in the trade, it is safe to say that they are to be regarded only as the precursors of a still larger class of freight steamers that will navigate these waters when the contemplated twenty-one foot channel shall have been established from Lake Superior to Buffalo. At present there is a navigable channel of 17½ feet all the way. Many of the large steamers take a number of barges in tow, and in this way enormous quantities of grain are sometimes moved by a single shipment. The _Appomattox_, for example, with three consorts in tow, recently left Duluth with a combined cargo of 482,000 bushels, or 14,460 tons of wheat. Assuming the average yield of that cereal to be twenty bushels to the acre, this single shipment represented the produce of 24,100 acres! [Illustration: SS. “NORTH-WEST,” 1894.]