The Great Lakes: The Vessels That Plough Them: Their Owners, Their Sailors, and Their Cargoes, Together with a Brief History of Our Inland SeasCurwood, James Oliver
History
The Great Lakes: The Vessels That Plough Them: Their Owners, Their Sailors, and Their Cargoes, Together with a Brief History of Our Inland Seas
Curwood, James Oliver
Great Lakes (North America); Inland navigation -- United States; Shipping -- Great Lakes (North America)
Farther northward the tourist’s ship carries him deeper into the
wilderness country, through St. Mary’s River, with its forest-clad
shores and islands, broken here and there by little cottages built
and owned by city people; through the locks at the “Soo,” and into
Lake Superior. Beyond this, as one captain expressed it to the writer,
“there is howling wilderness on every shore.” At times the traveller
may have glimpses of the Canadian coast, from which the unbroken
wild stretches northward to Hudson Bay; his eyes may travel over the
hazy distance of the greatest moose- and caribou-hunting country on
the continent; and when near the Michigan shore he may see the smoke
rising above the great copper mines of the Upper Peninsula. And at the
end of this northern route he comes to Duluth, the second greatest
freight-shipping port in the world, and destined to become one of the
most important cities in America.
At the Straits of Mackinaw, however, the tourist may turn into Lake
Michigan instead of continuing into Superior: and if so, he soon comes
within sight of Beaver Island, famous for all ages in history as the
one-time stronghold of King Strang and his Mormons--an island about
which piracy once flourished and where more than one vessel, in the
years of long ago, met a mysterious and tragic end at the hands of
buccaneers as bloodthirsty as any that ever roamed the seas.
[Illustration: Cottages Built at Small Expense along the St. Mary’s
River.]
And so it goes, from end to end of the Lakes, every mile fraught with
interest, every hour offering the traveller something new of scenery or
history. At no time is there the monotonous sameness of ocean travel,
and even night is to be regretted because of the things which are
passed then and cannot be seen. And this life of the Lakes is not, like
that of the salt seas, open only to those of means. It is within the
poor man’s reach as well as the rich, is accessible to the hard-working
housewife as well as to the woman who possesses her carriage and her
servants.
V
The Romance and Tragedy of the Inland Seas
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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