This is the history of three of the leading industries of the Great Lakes. In the nineteenth century there came to be many more which have contributed much to the prosperity of the region. From the earliest occupation by the French the Great Lakes have offered not only a comfortable means of livelihood to the settler who came to their shores, but also wealth to the country which possessed them. CHAPTER XXVI SHIPPING ON THE LAKES Nowhere has the life of the Great Lakes developed more clearly an individuality of its own than in its shipping. The conditions which confronted the navigators on these great inland seas were peculiar to their environment. The size of the lakes made types of vessel designed for ocean use more suitable than river craft; yet the fact that they were not one inland sea, but a succession of lakes divided by narrow channels, differentiated them widely from the ocean both in the needs and possibilities of their navigation. To meet these special conditions and to suit the demands of the commerce in which they were engaged the shipbuilders of the lakes have designed vessels which are unique and interesting. The French found on the Great Lakes a type of boat which was so well adapted to the exigencies of combined lake and river travel that it has persisted to this day. This was the birchbark canoe. But it was not the small pleasure canoe of our modern ideas. Even the first canoes that the Jesuit fathers found the Indians using before 1630 were large enough to transport a family of five or six with all their baggage, their kettles, blankets, and other household goods. With the development of the fur trade and the coming of white men in large numbers the canoes became twenty and thirty feet long, and this style persisted as the main water craft until well into the nineteenth century. The merchants from Montreal went up to Fort William in a fleet of ninety canoes, each carrying four tons’ burden and navigated by eight or ten men, and as late as 1820 the furs of Lake Superior were sent south by John Jacob Astor from his depot at Mackinac to the trading post at Chicago in similar vessels. It was no uncommon occurrence to see at Mackinac and Detroit a flotilla of fifty or sixty canoes sweep up to the shore, the Indians paddling silently and the _voyageurs_ singing a gay Canadian boat-song as they moved their paddles in swift unison at the rate of forty or even sixty strokes a minute. These men measured distances by the number of times they had stopped on the journey to smoke, and would tell you that a place was “three or four pipes away,” because the call had been three times given for “pipes--pipes” by the steersman, and at the word every paddle had been drawn in, every pipe lighted, and a few whiffs taken before the three-minute rest was up and they started on again. Sometimes these rests were once in every two miles, sometimes less frequently, and with