The Old and the New, General Cass’s Canoe and a Modern Freight Steamer ” 360 Grain Elevator and Lumber Jam ” 370 PART I DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION CHAPTER I THE GREAT LAKES Standing in Lake Park, Chicago, beside the statue of General Logan, the supporter of Douglas and, later, of Lincoln, one has behind him the most marvellous city of modern times, and before him the southwesternmost of the Great Lakes. In front, glitter the waters over which La Salle journeyed three centuries ago. As in those days, they respond to the play of wind and weather, now calm as a sheet of glass, and now swept by sudden gales into turbulent waves and breakers; but the aspect of the land is such that were La Salle to visit it he would not recognize the spot. In place of a wilderness with an occasional group of low-lying Indian wigwams he would see a mighty city of buildings towering one hundred and fifty feet above the street and reaching down from twenty-five to fifty feet below ground. In place of a few canoes with their loads of furs and crews of savages, emerging from the narrow mouth of the Chicago River, seven thousand freighters and steamers with an aggregate tonnage greater than that floated in any other port in the world touch annually at the wharves along her splendid harbor front. These vessels and thousands of trains, running on tracks whose mileage is more than a third of that of the whole railway system of the United States, bring to her stockyards, her grain elevators, and her markets the herds and flocks of the western plains, the crops of the wheat-fields of the Northwest, and the merchandise of Europe and of Asia.