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ONTRIBUTIONS TO

GEOGRAPHY OF MICHIGAN

MATERIAL FOR
GEOGRAPHY OF MICHIGAN

MARK S. W. JEFFERSON
Michigan State Norvial College

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YPSILANTI, 1906

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MATERIAL FOR GEOGRAPHY OF MICHIGAN

MARK S. W. JEFFERSON
Professor of Geography, Michigan State Normal College

The chief material offered is the series of diagrams, to which much atten-
tion may be given. The text serves mainly to interpret them and aids to
picture conditions prevailing over wide areas. Any teacher should go to the
diagrams for the facts of the home locality in which she teaches ; to the relief
map for her height above sea level and the character of the surface of her
neighborhood; to the map of extent of Michigan for other illustrative exer-
cises of the same sort in other directions. The diagrams are capable of being
read for any locality in the region or for all localities; how high, how smooth
or rough they are, what sort of rocks or soils are probably prevalent there,
how cold it is there in winter and how hot in summer, what grows there, how
thickly settled, when settled. Whatever things can be shown in their rela-
tion to the environment gain an importance for geographic study that may
not be intrinsically theirs. Very important characters of Michigan that can-
not be shown to be related to configuration, soil or climate have no present
value from a geographic point of view. Michigan is truly a group of people
and not a portion of North America, yet such is not a geographic point of
view. This must concern itself with the part of the earth that Michigan
occupies and in how far its life is affected by its home. If this is borne in
mind, it will perhaps explain the lack of some things about the state that
might be told here.

In connection with the paragraphs on Physiography, students are referred
to the admirable report of the state geologist for 1904, just issued, and to
Taylor's Short History of the Great Lakes, in "Studies in Indiana Geog-
raphy," Inland Publishing Co., Terre Haute, Ind.

Authorities for the relief map are: F'rank Leverett for the lower penin-
sula and the country to the southeast; U. S. relief map and Gannett diction-
ary of altitudes for Minnesota, Wisconsin and upper peninsula ; and the
Canadian dictionary of altitudes for Canada.

Michigan is a large state with great natural resources,
likely in the future to support a population little inferior to
the .greatest of the United States. Massachusetts has today
a population of nearly three millions ; Michigan with seven
times as much territory, and richer territory, should some day
have twenty millions within her boundaries. In a new coun-
try like ours the near places are first occupied, the easy things
first done. It is for this reason and the great importance that
contact with Europe has had for us in the past that the states
of the Atlantic seaboard have proceeded so much further in

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developing their resources than the newer communities of the
west. There are today 18 states larger than Michigan, but
most of these are west of the 100th meridian and many of
them limited for human occupancy by insufficient rainfall.
In parts of our state the rainfall is light, but everywhere
sufficient for agriculture. If a circle be drawn with its center

at the southeastern corner of Mich-
igan large enough to extend across
Isle Roy ale, it will also include
New York, Washington, Rich-
mond, Va., and Raleigh, N. C.
The radius of the circle would be
five hundred miles. No state has
so long a coast line. None has a
greater variety of valuable re-
sources. Lying far to the north
the lakes save it from the rigor of
Fig 1. Extent of Michigan an interior climate, yet is it in
that invigorating zone of the spells of weather, now warm,
now cold, now wet, now dry, in which are found the most
prosperous and progressive peoples, the world over.

Our state is a part of the physical region of the great
lakes. All parts of this area drain to the St. Lawrence river;
all parts enjoy the milder climate that comes from the pres-
ence of these great bodies of water, loth to heat up under the
sun of summer and equally slow in winter to yield up what
warmth they have. The great economic distinction of the
region lies in the enormous transportation possibilities of broad
and deep water ways between the pass over the almost imper-
ceptible divide at Chicago leading to the Mississippi basin
and the prairie states and that in the Mohawk valley leading
to the Atlantic seaboard and to Europe. It is no coincidence
that the growth of the Northwest territory has been parallelled
by the expansion of New York, the only Atlantic port con-
nected by an easy pass with the interior of the continent. We
observe at once that to study the physical aspects of the state
we must consider a wider area than state or country. The

political boundaries by no means coincide with the natural
ones. This is true from every point of view from which we
consider the state. We can never let ourselves be stopped by
the state or national boundaries.

There are, however, striking contrasts between the north-
ern and southern parts of the region, and Michigan, like Wis-
consin and Ontario, lies in both northern and southern zones.
The northern zone is a region of forests in which wild animals
still abound, of thin human population, of scattered pockets
of thin soil among frequent rocky knobs, a region where rocks
are everywhere in evidence, hard and complicated in structure,
and abounding in iron and copper. This zone is well shown

Fig. 2. Old hard rocks in the north

on diagram 2 of "Old hard Rocks." It includes northern
Ontario, northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota and the
western part of the upper peninsula of Michigan. Of this
territory Michigan has about 7,000 square miles, with 150,000
inhabitants.

South of this is a region of deep soils, of agriculture and
of denser population. It stretches across peninsular Ontario,
southern Michigan and Wisconsin and the northern parts of
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. This zone is well shown on the
diagrams of population and all those representing farm ani-
mals and farm products.

The earth is a great ball of rock. When no rock appears
at the surface a moderate boring always reaches it beneath and
in some countries, like our northern zone and Norway, it
forms the greater part of the visible surface. Along the north
shore of Georgian Bay the trees in summer are unable to
mask with their green leaves the brown of the ledges between.
Soils begin with the decay of the rock under the action
of the weather. In the mountains this decayed rock may be
washed down the slopes by the rains as fast as it forms and
the rocks remain bare, but in most places the rocky core of
the earth soon becomes buried beneath this coating of decayed
rock. If you take up a handful of dirt you find bits of the
rock in it, but in the southern lake zone the bits of rock found
in the soil are often quite unlike the ledges buried beneath.
Many of them are plainly bits broken from the hard rock
ledges of the northern zone. So are the common field stones
that have afforded so much excellent building material in the
southern zone. We learn from this that the northern zone is
thin of soil partly because much of its rock waste has gone to
the southern region. This was done by the ancient glaciers.
In the northern zone only firm rock was left and this often in
knobs and ridges, rounded, smoothed and grooved by the
passing of the ice. One of these knobs near Marquette is
shown in the picture.

These rocks of the upper lake country are among the
oldest in the world. They have existed much in the present

Knob of Greenstone Schist near Marquette. Mich.

condition since a period when nothing lived upon the earth,
not even the sea weeds and sea creatures that were the earliest
forms of life. The landscape must have been barren and
brown, dreary and monotonous in the extreme, everywhere
naked rock and dirt, without any green thing to rest the eye
or moving insect, bird or animal to interrupt the stillness.
The great beds of copper and iron ore that are the wealth of
this district today are due to the concentrating action of the
weather through the enormous length of time that they have
been exposed to the elements. / The deep soil of the south
has resulted from the addition to its own rock waste of much
waste from the north. Naturally the people of these two
regions do different things for a living and probably they
always will. There are great differences, too, in the rocks
that underlie the soils of the two zones. When we call the
northern rocks hard rocks we are using a name that covers a
great variety of kinds. Hard they all are, and very old, per-
haps there are no older rocks on the earth's surface; some are
granite like, with large crystal grains of different shapes and
colors. These usually have no layers in them. Others are
in layers commonly a good deal bent and twisted and others
where freshly broken have an appearance not unlike a broken

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surface of glass or pottery. But the best way to get an idea
of these rocks is to look at them in the field stones. In
northwest Michigan they abound in the ledges and in the rest
of the state they have been so much used for underpinnings
that they are easy to see.

Such ridges are shown on the relief map in the Copper
range, backbone of Keweenaw peninsula, the Mesabi range
near the 48th parallel west of Lake Superior, where are the
greatest iron_mines of thejworld, the Porcupine Mountains on
the south shore of the same lake, just east of the 90th
meridian and the mountains on the 88th meridian west of Mar-
quette. In all these hills and ridges of the mineral country
rock is everywhere in evidence. In the hills of the southern
peninsula rock can only be reached by boring, and the boring
would be deeper on the hills than in the valleys.

The weathering and wasting of these ancient rocks is

Fig. 5. Bock Falls, near Harbor Beach

work that was done long before the time of the glaciers,
which merely did the final chiselling and sandpapering.

Under the deep soils of the southern region are other
rocks. This picture, fig. 5, of a creek falling into Lake
Huron on the eastern side of the thumb of Michigan, with
the waters tumbling down over the edges of the rocks shows
how they lie in smooth flat layers like the leaves of a book.
Here and there they are a little uneven, their edges are usually
much frayed and worn, as if the book had been badly handled.
One of these layers — the hard Niagara limestone — forms, with
its slightly upturned edge, a long line of peninsulas and islands ;
between Erie and Ontario, where it gets its name from the
famous cataract that tumbles over it, — in the high land
running across the province of Ontario and ending to the
northwest in the peninsula between Lake Huron and Georgian
Bay, in Manitoulin and Drummond Islands, in the eastern
part of the upper peninsula and the long points that separate
Green Bay from Lake Michigan. The great leaf whose edges
form this long ridge extends under Lakes Huron and Michi-
gan, passing under lower Michigan perhaps a mile beneath
the surface of the lakes, in a shallow basin form, shallow
because it is three hundred miles wide to one mile deep.
A bit of tin three inches wide and bent down a hundredth
of an inch in the middle would represent its shape very well.

Inside the hard Niagara ridge the Monroe rocks came to
the surface where are now the basins of Lakes Erie, Huron
and Michigan. These lake basins are believed to be due to
the softness of these rocks, limestones, themselves easily dis-
solved by rain water, and containing layers of still more sol-
uble salt and gypsum. Bits of these rocks occur still above
water, as Mackinac Island and the mainland of St. Ignace
and the shores and islands about the western end of Lake
Erie.

The layered rocks of the southern zone were formed as
sands and more or less limy muds on the bottom of an ancient
sea which opened southward to the Gulf of Mexico, and had
the hard rocks of the northern zone for their northern shore.

and also for a floor under them. The material worn from the
hard rocks in their long exposure to the elements was washed
into this ancient sea and went to form the sandy and earthy
layers of the southern zone of rocks. This old sea itself lasted
a very long time. Its shores were not always in the same
place, its waters not always of the same depth. The limy
layers must have been formed when the water was clear. Had
there been any mud in it this would have settled to the bottom
and left earthy matter with the limy stuff of the bottom. Some
of the limy layers abound in corals which we may often see in
the bits of the rock that we pick up now with impressions of
shelled creatures that lived in the sea at that time. Near
Alpena and in the Garden Peninsula such corals abound. It
is bv studying the material of the layers and the remains of
the living things found preserved in them that we learn the
story of the region. At times the water became shallow and
broad stretches of briny marsh alternated with pools where the
salt water evaporated in the sun, leaving deposits of rock
salt and gypsum that are preserved among the layers of the
southern zone. Thismust have been at times when the climate
was as dry here as today in the Southwest. Later the land
must have sunk again, for new layers of sandy and limy rock
are found above the salt. Again for a long time the sea with-
drew, and broad swamps covered the land. The water must
have been fresh then, for the swamps were full of plants that
could not live in salt water. There were ferns and moss-like
plants, but giant in size, quite as big as our forest trees. Our
trees, and the plants that flower, did not then exist. From
these ferny swamps have come our beds of coal, and in the
coal are numberless impressions of the plants that tell us the
story. The forests grew old and died, sunk and lie now under
layers of slate and sandstone; other similar forests grew later
above them, and after a long time all have become buried
under thick rock layers which must now be penetrated by
shafts to get out the coal. There are many signs in the rocks
that each rise in the land and each sinking was very slow, so
slow that no one would have noticed it if he had lived through

that time, until he saw dry land where before had been
water. Just such slow changes are now going on about us.
The land at Chicago is sinking at the rate of nine or ten
inches a century. Of course that is very little in a year, too
little for any one to notice. It is plain that all these layers of
rock, with their different conditions and plants and animals,
have been a very long while making. Perhaps it is easier now to
see that the hard rocks of the north, which were there before,
and whose fragments went to form some of the layers, are
thought to be so old.

But ages and ages ago, the layered rocks, too, had hard-
ened from the soft mud and ooze to form solid rock and risen
out of the old gulf whose waters ran off southward long before
there were any men on the earth, before there were even trees
or animals even remotely resembling those of today ; when the
nearest thing to a four-footed animal was probably a huge
thing more or less like a frog, at least in his water-loving
habits. Ever since then the rocks of this region have
remained dry land, and it is a time so long that we can-
not measure it at all well. A being who had lived as many
centuries as any man is likely to live days would almost
certainly not be old enough to remember back to then.
Day and night there have been through all the interven-
ing time, and seasons of heat and cold. Rain has fallen,
winds blown, and frost followed on sunshine and sunshine
on frost, racking, splitting and wasting the rocks as they
are wasting today. Have you ever noticed a marble stone
in the graveyard? Find one with date fifty years back
if you can, and see how rough and cracked it is; how its cor-
ners and edges are rounded and crumbled. Marble is a very
soft rock, but the hardest rocks must have weathered and
crumbled a great deal since the remote period we are thinking
of. No wonder soft rocks, some of them softer than the mar-
ble of the gravestones and having salt and gypsum among
their layers for the rains to wash away, have worn into great
valleys like those of Lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan on the
Monroe rocks, while the harder Niagara limestone has come

to project above the country on either side of it in the long
ridge referred to. No wonder, too, that great quantities of
that crumbled powder of rock that we call earth or soil have
accumulated over the ledges for the plants to grow on and
make life possible to us.

In the Lake country the differences in the rocks of the
two zones must have made great differences in the landscapes.
In the north the long-continued weathering sought out every
softer bit of the crumpled, disordered rocks, leaving the
harder parts standing in elevated knobs and ridges. In the
south the flat layers tend to make the surface level except
where the streams had carved their valleys. But after most
of the long time elapsed that separates us from the period
when warm salt waters reached from the Gulf of Mexico into
northern Michigan, another great change befell. The sea
waters had now shrunk back to the shape of the present Gulf,
North America had much the same outlines on the map as
now, except that there were no great lakes, — all sorts of lakes.

Fig. 6. Snow on ground December 27, 1904

Fig. 7. Snow on ground January 10, 1905

indeed, were scarce then, and many rivers ran in courses
other than today. Yet it was a long time ago, long before
the beginnings of history. The change came in with a great
increase of rainfall, causing Great Salt Lake and the neigh-
boring hollows of the great basin of Nevada and Utah to fill
and overflow into the Columbia by channels still plain to see
among the mountains. Possibly the winter was somewhat
colder here than now. It is certain that much increase of
winter snowfall occurred. So great was it that summer heats
could not melt it all, and accumulation began that grew from
year to year. Fig. 6 shows the snow on the ground Decem-
ber 27, 1904. Fig. 7 shows it two weeks later. Where the
shading is cross-lined the snow was more than a foot deep.
Evidently it snowed in that fortnight. The snow field grew
still further. Sometimes it covers even lyouisiana for a day.
Then it dwindles again and fades away northward until in
March or April all the ground is bare. This is a stagnant ice

sheet. It lies where it falls until it melts away, snow at the
top, but before the winter is over, ice below. In days we call
Glacial, however, it failed to melt all summer long, and year
after year added a layer, thin or thick we have little idea, until
it reached a thickness close north of us of some thousands
of feet, thinning to a southern margin along the Ohio river.
A curious feature about this huge heap of northern snow is
that besides crushing to ice of its own weight the whole mass
flattened down, thrusting its edges outward like a mass of
pitch. Mr. Willard D. Johnson has imitated this on a small
scale by cutting away a wooden barrel from the pitch it con-
tained as it stood on a patch of sand. That pitch did just
what we have learned by observation that the ancient ice
sheets did, — flattened down and thrust out its edges, scraping
and pushing away the sand in every direction. Two hundred
years ago when the French Academy was earnestly discussing
whether the earth spheroid was oblate or prolate (flattened or
pointed), Childrez declared for the latter view because, he
said, the long-time accumulations of snow and ice about the
poles must amount now to great heaps there that would add
notably to the earth's polar diameter. So it would but for the
property of ice just described of flowing out sidewise as it flat-
tens down under great pressure. The polar ice caps push out
their margins which break off and float away as icebergs toward
the equator every summer, and the snow heaps there can prob-
ably never reach up more than a mile or two in height. A
consequence of the flattening out of the great ice heap north
of us was an enormous sweeping away of all decayed or weak-
ened rock from the northern region to accumulate in the south,
forming the deep soils of the prairie states in which now lies
the center of population of the country. In doing this it blot-
ted out most of the variety of landscape that the weather had
wrought in the flat rocks.

As a result of the drift coating in the southern peninsula,
the rocks are not much seen there. Whole counties have no
outcropping ledge. The known ledges are almost invariably
in the beds of rivers, where they cause falls, and towns grow

up with suggestive names like Grand Rapids, Big Rapids,
Grand Ledge and Flat Rock, or at the shores of the lakes as
at Point aux Barques, on the tip of the "thumb," or in Lit-
tle Traverse Bay. Deep well borings usually encounter rock
at a moderate depth, and we have had to learn much of what
we know about it in this way.

The rocky "knobs" of the northern country are shown on
the relief map all about the shores of Lake Superior, where
the country has been carefully mapped in making charts for
ships. Hills that are visible from the lake are important to
vessels, as they serve as landmarks for their guidance. Back
from the lakes and through all the hard rock country these
knob-like hills are seen everywhere, but the country is much
of it wilderness, no good maps exist, and we should not know
where to put the knobs. Most of them must, therefore, be
left out of all maps until the country is better known. The
picture of a hill near Marquette (Fig. 3) gives a good idea of
them. They should be thought of as dotting the hard-rock
area everywhere. The smaller knobs and ridges that the
relief map shows in the lower peninsula of Michigan are of
sand and gravel, moraines left by the ice sheets as they melted
away. Their material, like most of the surface of the south-

/;:;> fm. -€W^= '^KKKF

Fig. 8. Morainic hills near Eagle, Wisconsin

€rn zone, is bits of the northern ledges. They are just as
characteristic of Wisconsin and southern Ontario as of Michi-
gan, but only in our own state have they been traced out well
enough to put them in on the map in their right places.

These knobs and ridges of moraine make most of the
steeper hills of the southern landscapes. Fig. 8 shows the
appearance of such moraines. All this material that the gla-
ciers brought down from the north is known as the Drift.
Parts of it, especially near the hard-rock country, are too
sandy for the most successful agriculture. Forests have been
the best crop there in the past, and may perhaps be made to
abound there again. Something of these forests is still left,
as will be shown later. Farther south the land shares the
excellent quality for farming of northern Ohio, Indiana and
Illinois.

That the land is higher as one goes farther north is seen
by the relief map. South of the Saginaw Valley the highest
point is a small area over 1300 feet in Oakland county. North
of the valley quite a large area exceeds that elevation and a
small region on the boundaries of Osceola and Wexford is
above 1600 feet. But in the upper peninsula is much land
well above that level and 1900 is reached and passed north of
Lake Superior. Peninsular Ontario shows the same ascent to
the north. The drainage of Lake Superior accordingly goes
south into Huron, that of Lake Huron south to Lake Erie by
St. Clair, but Michigan and Erie empty to the north against
the slope of the land. This is one of the many consequences
of the glacier work here. Of old the whole region drained
south to the Gulf of Mexico. Lakes Michigan and Erie are
now walled off on the south by glacial drift.

II.

OLD BEACHES AND MORAINES.

At the time when great sheets of ice lay on this region,
the country south of the Ohio was so warm that the ice all
melted before reaching it. The ice here crept forward, pushed
by the weight of the mass accumulated mountain high east
and west of Hudson Bay. But for a long time there was a
region just south of the great lakes where the ice melted and
ran off as water as fast as it crept forward. Since the ice
dragged quantities of drift in its lower portion, causing all
this region to be coated over with the rock fragments from
Canadian ledges, all this drift must have dropped at the line
where the ice melted. Such is believed to be the origin of a
long low ridge, uneven of crest, and following the outline of
the lakes at some distance that is traced on the map by the
heaviest black line on Fig. 9. It is seen that the front of the
ice was uneven; that it pushed furthest south along the hol-
lows now occupied by lakes and bays. Such a ridge of stony
detritus at the front of a glacier is called a moraine. Lines
of moraine are numerous throughout the lake country. This
is one of the plainest.

As the climate grew warmer the front of the ice retreated.
That is, it melted back faster than it crept forward. Lakes
now began to gather between the moraine and the new front
of the ice, filling the basin with water up to the level of the
lowest notch in the rim of moraine. There the lakes ran
over. As all the country to the north was covered by ice,
hundreds of feet thick, this overflow had to go south, where
it all found its way, sooner or later, into the Mississippi.

Many such lakes were formed, with shores and outlets that
changed as the ice kept melting back and uncovered now and
then a new and lower notch in the rim, or allowed two of the
water bodies to run together. Duluth, Green Bay, Chicago,
Saginaw and Toledo must each have had one of these ice-
dammed lakes, draining to, the southwest and excavating with
its waters the channels in which are the great portages between
the great lakes and the Mississippi.

These outlet channels have thus become of great import-
ance from the cities they have fostered. They are still trace-
able on the ground. The waves of these lakes cut beaches
on the slopes of the moraine that held them in. Such beaches
are traceable from the outlets for many, many miles. One of

Fig. 9. Moraines and old lake beaches

OF THE A

IVERSITY I

the lakes that has left a very visible beach is traced in out-
line on Fig. 9 with a black line, the area of the lake that
made it by cross-lining over the land. At this time the ice
front had melted far enough to the northeast to uncover half
of Lake Erie, and the southern third of Lakes Huron and
Michigan. Lower land was now uncovered on the "thumb"
of Michigan than on the moraine further south, and across
this low land the water flowed until its level had fallen to that
of the Saginaw lake. This in turn emptied through the val-
ley of the Grand river into the lake at Chicago. The relief
map shows how the elevation and shape of the land surface
moulded these bodies of water. The water finally escaped to
the Mississippi by the valleys of the Desplaines and Illinois.
A number of such beach ridges are found one above another,
corresponding to various lake levels, with escape at various
outlets. The most important line of travel in the United
States, the Mohawk valley, was in part excavated by the
waters of the great lakes escaping in this way to the Hudson
river when the ice had mostly withdrawn from the lakes, but
still blocked the St. Lawrence channel.

The waters of the ice-dammed lakes were doubtless kept
muddy by the silt from the lower layers of the melting ice.
The flat-lying clays about Chicago, Saginaw and Detroit were
formed by the slow settling of these sediments to the bottom.
The shore ridges and moraines have given the rivers of the
lake country a curious arrangement (See Fig. 4). The Mau-
mee, that flows northeastward into Lake Erie at Toledo,
receives its headwater tributaries much as the shank of a fish-
hook is met by its barb, the St. Joseph from the northeast and
the St. Mary from the southeast. Another pair of tributaries
lower down the Maumee behave in the same way. So the Cass
and Tittabawassee join the Saginaw, and quite similar is the
flow of the St. Louis at Duluth, the Wolf river near Green Bay,
and the Chicago river at Chicago. The tributaries in each
case are obliged to go along behind the ridge to the place
where the main stream breaks through before they can begin
to approach the lake.

Very different from these are the old shore lines about the
northern lakes. Here the beach is a strong feature in the
landscape, rising in distinct terraces from the present lake
shore, as seen in the picture (Harbor Beach, Fig. 10), and at
Petoskey and Mackinac island. One of these is indicated on
the diagram by a solid black line about the northern shores of
the lakes, with numbers giving its elevation above the lake
from place to place. The outlet was to the northeast on the
79th meridian just north of the 46th parallel, across the Cana-
dian lake Nipissing to the Ottawa river and the St. Lawrence,
which was now free of ice. It will seem strange that the
water should find its outlet there where the land is now high
above the lake, but it is certain that the land in the north
was lower then than now. The shore lines must have been
as level as any modern lake shore when made, while now
they rise higher and higher as we go to the north. The ele-

HiG. 10. Elevated beach. Harbor Beach, Mich.

vations of the beach above the lake surface show this. It
seems a very surprising thing,. but it cannot be doubted, that
the land has risen out of the water in the north without rising
so much in the south, pretty much as a trap-door in the floor
rises most at the edge away from the hinges. There are
many ways of showing that this sort of thing, a rising or
sinking of land, is happening in many parts of the world all
the time. It is quite as certain as that the earth is turning
around on its axis, or that we are swinging around the sun at
a tremendous speed, and just as. hard to realize. The move-
ment in this case is really very slow and very slight. It
sounds a good deal when we say the laud has risen 100 feet
more in Georgian bay than in Alcona county, but the distance
is 150 miles, and the slope of such a tilting only 8 inches to
the mile. If you- go out and stand on a beach that has a slope
of 8 inches to the mile it looks perfectly flat. Moreover, it has
been tilting for a good many hundred years before it got so
much out of level as that. The movement is neither so great
nor so rapid as the ordinary settling of the ground that cracks
the walls of our houses. When those old shore lines were
bathed by the waves, the basin of our lakes was down to the
northeast and the lake waters were high at that side. For the
same reason the Nipissing outlet was lower than the St. Clair
at Port Huron, and the waters of the upper lakes went to the
sea without passing through Erie or Ontario at all. In this
channel from Georgian bay to the Ottawa river there is now a
low divide between the Nipissing and Ottawa drainage over
which the early French explorers made a portage in their trips
to the lakes, for Lake Erie was discovered later. Since the
day of the old north lakes the basin has been tipping back to
the south, the northern shores coming higher and higher out
of water, and the water in the south is steadily advancing on
the land.

The tiny lakes that dot the surface of Michigan and Wis-
consin, thousands in number, are also due to the presence of
ancient glaciers here. South of the outer moraines of the ice
sheets such lakes are unknown either in America or Europe.

Fig. U.

Sand dunes about the lakes

They are due partly to hollows among the irregular heaps of
drift left on the surface of the country and partly to the burial
in gravel and sand of ice blocks from the glaciers as they at
last melted away and covered the country with streams of
muddy and sand-laden water.

A feature of the lakes of which Michigan enjoys almost a
monopoly is the sand dune coast, best developed on our shore
of Lake Michigan between the 44th and 45th parallels (Fig.
11). Ontario's fragment is less well developed for lack of
sand. Wherever a shore that is well supplied with sand stands
facing the prevalent westerly winds, the sand is flung up on

shore by the waves of storms and the winds then pile it up
along the coast in long series of sand hills and hummocks.
How the wind tends to drive these landward is well shown by
a prostrate pine in the dune at Pentwater as it appeared in the
summer of 1902 (Fig. 12). The tree grew erect above the
spot where the roots are now. The sand in and on which it

Fig. 12. Dune at Pent water, Mich.

grew has long ago been blown to eastward. The tree was
first blown over in the same direction, and before the footing
was removed by blowing, the tip had become firmly embedded
in the position in which we now find it. The chief use men
make of the dunes is to build summer homes on them for the
coolness of the winds from the lake that piled them up. The
picture (Fig. 13) shows both the cottages and the strong wind
in the trees. Sand abounds greatly on this eastern shore of

Lake Michigan, building long sweeping borders to the land.
The sand is not merely moved landward np the dune, but
travels northward along the shore in the play of the waves.
In this travel alongshore it has swept across the mouths of
the lower peninsula rivers entering this lake and sought to
bar them from the lake. Thus each of these rivers has a
lake at its mouth inside the line of the dunes, and access to
the Big Lake must be maintained by dredging a channel

Fig. 13. Houses on dune. Pentwafer. Mich.

across the beach. Such lakes are admirably shown on the
chart of Lake Michigan published by the U. S. Lake Survey
(Campau Building, Detroit, 20c.) characterizing this whole
shore line. Ludington has fine examples of the dunes at
Ep worth Heights, and the bar partly enclosing the Pere Mar-
quette Lake is of this origin.

Figure 14 shows some of the principal ancient outlets of
the lakes. Those numbered 1 draining the lakes formed near
Duluth, Chicago and Detroit in the southern and western ends

of the basins when most of the lake country was still under ice ;
those numbered 2, leading off the lake waters to the valley of
Mohawk and Hudson when the ice had bared most of the lake
basins but still blocked the St. Lawrence ; and 3, emptying all
but Erie at a later period to the great arm of the sea that then
occupied the basin of Lake Ontario and the valley of the St.
Lawrence. The discharge of the great lakes is considerable
enough to wash out a broad, deep channel such as those of
the St. Clair and Detroit rivers of today, and all these older
channels, now abandoned by the waters that carved them,
exerted distinct influence on early lines of exploration and
communication and upon subsequent history. Abandoned
river channels always drain their rain water off in opposite
directions at the two ends with a divide somewhere between.
The divide in most of these channels is that separating the
basins of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, represented in
the figure by the dotted line. Thus the old channel at the
west end of Lake Erie drains northeastward to Lake Erie by

the Maumee and south-
westward by the Wa-
bash with the divide
between these rivers
where Ft. Wayne now
stands. In early days
when travel was by
canoe, parties went up
the Maumee from Lake
Erie, made a portage
(or carry) across the
divide and on down
the Wabash. These
portages were natural camping spots, which travelers would
naturally tend to reach before nighttall. Here parties traveling
in opposite directions would often meet and exchange neces-
sities, here the trader would often pitch his camp and defend
his precious goods by a stockade or fort, under whose shelter-
ing walls clustered the huts ot the half-breed families of the

-^ 1 u

p*i

Fig. 14. Older outlets of the great lakes

U IN I V C. )-^ ^ I

Fio 15. T/ie Hurons (Iroquois) about Lakes

Erie and Ontario with friendly Alonquin

tribes in most of the lake country

voyageurs; here grew up the earliest important towns of the
region, Chicago is the best example of such a history. The easy
portage at this point early made it a pathway to the interior
of the continent. The French traveled over the lakes to the
southwest, looking for a passage to the Pacific. Their set-
tlements were mere forts along this route, utilized later for
the highly profitable fur
trade, it is true, but with-
out real colonization such
as characterized the Eng-
lish settlements along the
Atlantic coast.

The French first entered
the lake country by the
portage from the Ottawa to
Lake Nipissing along the
line of the old northern out-
let. There is no doubt
they were guided in their choice of this northern route by the
possession of the lands about Lake Ontario and Lake Erie by
the redoubtable Huron tribes (Fig. 15), while the upper route
was through the country of friendly tribes of the great Algon-
quin family. To these facts is due the importance of Mackinac
and the Sault Ste. Marie in the early history of Michigan.
Mackinac, Sault Ste. Marie, Green Bay, Chicago and St. Joseph
were reached by the whites long before Detroit. LaSalle did
not make his first trip up Lake Erie until 1679. The settle-
ment of Detroit, 22 years later, seems to have come of a desire
to cut off the English of the New York colony from the fur
trade ot the northern lakes. Nicollet made the first post at the
Sault and coasted as far as Green Bay in 1635. Marquette 38
years later passed over the same route and on to Lake Win-
nebago, up the Fox river to the Wisconsin by the portage
where the town of Portage, Wis., now stands. This is a region
of lakes. In times of heavy rain the Wisconsin sent surplus
waters down the Fox river to Green Bay. On his return from
the Mississippi in 1674 Marquette ascended the Illinois and

Desplaines to the Chicago portage. Here, too, the landis very
flat and in wet seasons loaded boats floated from Lake Michigan
to the Mississippi. In dry weather they must be carried thirty
miles In 1679 we find LaSalle at St. Joseph, probably mak-
ing the portage to the Kankakee from South Bend and getting
to the Mississippi by the Illinois. It was an explorer's trip.
He had no map to show how far he was going out of his way.
As the divide lies just beyond Michigan territory none of these
old portage towns are included in the present state of
Michigan.

Traffic on the lakes then as now largely passed through
Michigan waters between outside points on either hand. The
portage at Sault Ste. Marie differs from the others in not stand-
ing on a divide but at the rapids in which the waters of Lake
Superior descend to the eighteen feet lower waters of Lake
Huron.

III.

CLIMATE

Michigan and southwest Ontario consist of peninsulas
projecting into lakes. A result of this position is to mitigate
extremes of temperature. Water is slower to heat up than
land, so a hot day in summer is hotter on shore than over the
lakes. One of the hottest days of the year 1904 was the 24th
of August. Fig. 16 shows diagramatically all the highest tem-
peratures observed in the reg^ion that day. The greatest heat
wfis, of course, south of the Lakes, wh-^re the thermometers
rose above 90°. Next north of this comes a belt which has
been shaded with rulings in the diagram, where temperatures
between 80° and 90° were noted. Two outlying islands of
this shading are seen in southern Michigan, and three in
peninsular Ontario. These isolated warm spots lie a little
back from the lake shores, or touch them only to eastward.
West-facing shores on both Huron and Michigan are seen to
be cooled by the winds that prevail here from the west. Erie,
too, shows something of the same sort. This has brought us
across the blank to the dotted area of temperatures under 70°,
perhaps the greater part of the coast country on the upper
lakes. In this again lie islands of more than 70°, in Wiscon-
sin, a little back from the lake, and in Upper Michigan,
where it only touches the lake shore to eastward as before.
It would be hard to find a shore on the map wlxere a trip
straight inland would not bring us to higher tempera^ture. I
have no doubt this would have been true in the Canadian
country east of Lake Superior, though the country is little

settled, and we have no knowledge of thermometers there.
The cooling effect of the lakes is apparent in every part of the
diagram. Lake Erie, which is barely 60 feet deep, does not
cool its shores so effectively as the other lakes, which are
much deeper. In each of the lakes the water is observed to
be coldest where it is deepest. Out on mid I^ake Michigan,
near the 45th parallel, there is a patch of cold water, so well

Pig 16. Maximum temperatures of the afternoon of Aug. 24, 1904, a very hot day showing

less heat on the shores

known to masters of vessels that they fill their water casks
there. This "Cold Island" is over the greatest depth of the
lake. Out on Lake Superior, far the deepest of all, the water
keeps a temperature of 39° to 41° in midsummer. Only near
the shores, where the sun penetrates to the sandy bottom, is
the water warm. Not only is the effect of these cool waters

borne to eastward on the prevailing west winds, but they
extend their influence shoreward on hot summer days with the
landward breathing of the lake breezes that then prevail.

This tempering of
summer heat by the
lakes must not be
supposed to make
Michigan cooler
than places east and
west of it. On an
average it has about
the same tempera-
ture as places in the

over 50 45-50 40-45 35-40 ^^^^^^ latitude fur-

Fig. 17. Mean annual temperature, 1871-1896 •,■,•,

ther from the lakes.
Fig. 17 will make
this clear. It records
the average temper-
atures of the period
1871-1896 as record-
ed by observers of
the U. S. Weather
Bureau. Neither
does it mean that
our summers are
cool. One time or
another Michigan
has known as high
temperatures as
southern Louisiana.
The reader should
make this out on
Fig. 18 , which shows
the distribution of
the highest temper- ,(^105 over 10s 95-100

atures recorded in F'gIS. The highest temperatures recorded from 1871 to 1896

eastern North America, from 1871 to 1896. It appears by

90-95

this that neither
southern Louisiana
nor Michig^an north
of the southernmost
counties have exper-
ienced greater heats
than 100° during
that period. Usual-
ly, of course, Louis-
iana is the warmer
of the two, yet not
greatly. Fig. 19
shows the average
of the highest tem-
peratures reached
each July day in
the 25 years. From
this we may say that
the region west of
Saginaw Bay is like-
ly to have a tem-
perature of 75° to
80° any July afternoon, Louisiana more than 90°. On Jan-
uary mornings, Louisiana's average is 45°, lower Michigan's
15° (Fig. 20), For its coldest moments, Louisiana has known
temperatures from zero to ten degrees above ; lower Michigan
from twenty-five to thirty degrees below. (Fig. 21). In a
word, Michigan reaches summer heats on any day in July
almost as great as those of Louisiana, and the hottest record
is the same for both places, but January sends down our ther-
mometers thirty degrees lowierthan Louisiana's.

Cold winters and hot summers characterize our climate,
but as Fig. 16 showed us the great lakes mitigate the greatest
summer heats along their actual shores. Facts for particular
localities may be read from the diagrams in the same way.

In winter the effect of the lakes is reversed. Water can-
not cool below 32°. Air below that temperature must, when

80-85 85-90 75-80 under 75

Fig. 19. Mean of the hottest temperatures observed on
July days. 1871-1896

near the lakes, be warmed by radiation from the water. The
winds should distribute this mitigating effect a moderate dis-
tance inland from the lake shore. Let us look over, in this
connection, the diagram of the lowest temperatures observed

Fig. 22. Minimum temperature of the morning of Jan. M, 1904, showing less cold

near the shore

in January 24, 1904, when a cold wave was central in north-
west Wisconsin. Its effects reached into Ontario, but were
notably lessened at every lake shore, while the interior of
Ontario has 10° below, inland parts of the lower peninsula of
Michigan 15° below, with 35° below on the Wisconsin high-
lands. These mitigating effects do not indeed reach far from
the water, but the shore counties have extremes of tempera-
ture much moderated by them. It is on such days as August

24, that Chicago people become eager to flit across the lake
to Michigan shore resorts. Such summer coolness constitutes
an asset of singular value in that its continued use and enjoy-
ment does not involve any diminution of future availability.
In this it surpasses mines, lands, forests, or fisheries, and is
to be classed rather with beautiful scenery, good iUvStitutions,
and a reputation of citizens for good character.

In the main our temperatures are of the class usually

iOy\J

30-20

'L'Tr

wS"

yfiy

^^g

/Ty'/'

^ft

j/O

lis^l.

->- _ ^

^N>^

i^40

^^^ ^3 ZZ3

^ ^ ^^

20-10

0 to -10

Fig. 20. Mean of the coldest temperatures observed on
January days 1871-1896

-20 to -10 -10 to -30 -30 to -40 -40 to -SO

Fig. 21. The lowest temperature recorded 1871 to 1896

grouped as temperate, because their average values are
moderate, but their ranging through extremes is their most
striking character. These extremes occur not merely in the
transition from day to night, and from summer to winter, but
also in the spells of weather that sweep in unending proces-
sion from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and distinguish our

weather from the experiences of regions nearer the equator
The columns of numbers at

the side of this page are the Mi5ANDAiLvTEMPKRATURh:s,i904
averages of the thermometer Ypsilanti. Havana,

readings for each of the
twenty-four hours every day
in January and July at Ypsi-
lanti and at Havana, Cuba,
in 1904. As the eye runs
down the January values for
Ypsilanti, it is struck by the
great changes. In fact, if
we group the days as cold or
warm, according as their tem-
peratures are below or above
17°, the mean of the whole
month, it appears to have con-
sisted of four cold spells and
four warm spells; cold: 2 to 5,
10, 17 and 18, and 24 to 29;
warm: 6 to 9, 11 to 16, 19 to
23, and 30 and 31. The dif-
ference from warm spell to
cold is often greater than from
day to night. A glance shows
that Havana lacks such spells
in summer and winter, while
our summer shows them much
diminished. This is seen again by comparing the highest
and lowest temperatures of the month, Ypsilanti showing a
difference in winter of 34°, in summer of 27°, and Havana 9°
and 4°. The same thing is true of the individual days. To
show this I have selected the coldest and warmest dates at
each place in the two months, and give now the temperatures
for every two hours those days, with the somewhat surpris-
ing showing that not merely is our cold day nearly 65°

Day

Jan.

July

Jan.

July

19°

58°

67°

80°

72,

74
70

Mean

Lowes

t u

Highe

St 34

HouRLv Temperatures, 1904.

Ypsilanti. Havana.

Hour

Jan. 24.

July 18.

Jan. 15

July 8

5°

76°

61°

77°

Noon

colder than
their 's, but our
hot one con-
siderably warmer.
This would not
always happen,
however. The
July of 1904 was
2° or 3° cooler
than usual at
Havana, and a
little warmer than
usual at Ypsi-
lanti, while the day cited was an exceptionally warm one.
But all the data given serve to justify the statement that
our climate is one of hot summers and cold winters, mitigated
on the lake shores by the more constant temperatures of the
lakes. But these spells of weather have more in them than
heat and cold. The warm ones bring most of our rain and
snow, while the cold ones give us fine bracing days,
under a sky unsurpassed even in Italy. And though the
lowering skies of the warm ones are less agreeable, they alone
make life possible here. As they swing eastward across the
continent the winds blow in toward them in every direction,
forming a great eddy often a thousand miles across. Thus it
happens that it is preceded as it draws near us by easterly and
southeasterly winds that bring moisture from the Atlantic,
and then, if it pass by on the north, by southerly winds from
the Gulf of Mexico. From these most of our rainfall is
obtained. All of southeastern North America is well watered
for the same reason, and the lake country lies near the north-
west margin of this region of sufficient rain. North of Lake
Superior the annual rainfall soon falls away to 25 inches, a
scanty amount. South of that lake the whole region of our
study has an annual fall of rain and melted snow of 33 or 34
inches, abundant for successful agriculture. The great lakes
are to be regarded as mighty pools of this rainwater, standing

awaiting its chance to run off by Niagara to the sea. From
their surface it is believed that as much as 20 to 30 inches are
evaporated annually, and of this there is reason to believe
some 4 or 5 inches fall a second time on the lake country.
The lakes do not cause the rainfall on their shores, but they
may well increase it by a few inches as explained above. For
this reason rainfall maps of the whole continent show a dis-
tinct widening of the rainy eastern area toward and over the
great lakes, which seem to possess the beneficient power of
enabling us to receive as rain twice over a portion of the
moisture brought us on the winds from the Atlantic and the
Gulf. We should now turn to Fig. 23, the diagram of our
annual precipitation. The data cover the last 25 years, and
though still imperfect in some parts of the area, the main facts
are doubtless as represented here. Perhaps the most conspicuous
feature of the map is the general increase of the rainfall to the
south, of which we have just spoken. Next to that in inter-
est come the patches of increased rainfall on every distinct
elevation that stands to southeast of one of the lakes. The
relief map in the November issue (Fig. 4) must be referred
to. The Ontario highland has 40'^ of rain between its crest
and Lake Huron. This is some of the water reprecipitated
from the lakes as is shown by rains at Saugeen and Parry
Sound, with northwest winds. In our lower peninsula, the
highlands north and south of the Saginaw-Grand Valley are
similarly favored on their northwest slopes; the highest point
of the whole peninsula, in Osceola county, having 40^' to
windward like the slope in the south from Berrien up through
Cass and St. Joseph, to Branch. Ball Mt., the highest part
of the southern highland, has a similar increase over neigh-
boring counties. Similarly, the highland of northern Wis-
consin has an area of 35^^ while the Mesabi Range, northwest
of Lake Superior, will probably be found to have larger pre-
cipitation than the country about, as soon as gauges are set up
there, thanks to its considerable elevation. To leeward of
these elevations are noted the scantier records — under 30^^ —
on the thumb of the lower peninsula, and other patches south-

ward from there to the west end of Lake Erie, as well as the
west shore of Lake Michigan, from Milwaukee to Manitowoc.
The most curious adjustment of the precipitation to the topog-
raphy will be found south of Lake Erie, where the rapid rise
of the land sends up the precipitation as suddenly from 35^' to

HiG. 23. Rain and snow^ Blank areas have from SO to 35 inches, dotted areas less than
SO, lined areas from 35 to 40, and cross lined areas over 40 inches for the average
year between 1880 and 1904

40. The dryer belt extending into Pennsylvani a between the
80th and 81st meridians, coincides with a long valley in the
upland, an ancient drainage line that is easy to make out on
the relief map. Newcastle and Pittsburg are the two stations
in the valley. Further adjustments will be found if explana-
i-ions are sought on the relief map for the 40^^ close east of

the 80th meridian in the same region and the 44^^ near 82
30^ west longitude.

The rain usually comes rather heavier in the growing
season than at other times, as the diagrams of Fig. 24 show.
In occasional years this does not happen, and it is probably less
pronounced in the patches to windward of the chief elevations.

fKr.

HJJ
Mi)
NDJ

La Crosse Detroit
5 10 . 5

MARQUETTt DuLUTH

Lansing
5

Fig 24. Inches of rain and melted snow that fall in February, March, April, May, June
July, and so forth, showing that our heavier rains come in summer

Thunderstorms are the occasion of much of the summer rain-
fall, but are much less frequent than in the prairie states to
the southwest. Tornadoes, the cyclones of the newspapers,
rarely come into our territory. The windfalls of the older
forests were silent evidences of their occasional passage, and
a few have been since recorded.

Fig 25. Pears in 1902 hil. :6 Peaches in 1902

Dark lining over 20, cross lines over 10 and Bark lininii over 500. cross lines over
light lines over o bushels per square mile 100 bus els per square mile

Fig. 27. Plums in 1902 Fig. 28. Cherries in 1902

Dark lining over 10, cross lining over S and Dark lining over 5, cross lining over 2, light
light lines over 1 bushel per square mile lines over 1 bushel per square mile

Fig 29. Strawberries in 1902
Dark lining over 50, cross lining over i
light lines over 10 bushels per
square mile

Fig. .10 Grapes in 1902
Dark lining over 10,0(X) lbs., cross lines
over 1.000 lbs., light lines over 200
lbs. per square mile

IV.

THE FRUIT BELT

The prevalent west winds from Lake Michigan, with their
mild, moist air have doubtless made the southwestern coun-
ties of our state the fruit belt of the region. Perhaps the
simplest presentation of this fact is in the group of diagrams,
Figs. 25 to 30, showing the crop of pears, peaches, plums,
cherries, strawberries and grapes in Michigan in 1902.
Raspberries and blackberries show the same distribution.
Three-quarters of our fruit, other than apples, comes from the
shore counties between Grand Traverse Bay and the Indiana
boundary (see Fig. 31) and two-thirds from the four southern

All Michis^an

3 4

All Wisconsin

—

Fig. 31. Millions of bushels of fruit, 1902. The fruits are, for Michigan—strawberries,
blackberries, raspberries, peaches, pears, plums and cherries; for Wisconsin— Straw-
berries, blackberries, raspberries, currants and grapes, the only ones reported.
Michigan grapes are omitted, being only known in pounds

counties — Kent, Allegan, Van Buren and Berrien. Not merely
are May frosts prevented from injuring the fruit by mild airs
from the Lake, but a too early swelling of the buds in March
warm spells is likewise avoided. Lake Michigan literally
blows hot and cold or rather warm and cool ; the fact being
that the lake water changes much less in temperature than
the land and so moderates extreme temperatures on shore,
either of heat or cold. Nearness to Chicago markets must
exercise a very stimulating effect on the crop of the southern

counties, but the Lake counties of Indiana, Illinois and Wis-
consin have no share in the business, although still nearer.
This appears more clearly in Fig. 32 which gives in thousands

of bushels the
peach crop of
the region.
Only Michigan
and Ohio give
the data by
counties. In-
diana, how-
ever, reports
the number of
bearing t re es,
which are noted
here for the
Lake country,
also in thous-
ands. Call it a
tree bears two
bushels or even three or four, and the inferred yield is still
far from great. The whole state of Illinois only produces as
much as the tenth among Michigan counties; Wisconsin not
enough to report at all. From statements made to me there I
judge that Ontario produces considerable quantities of peaches.
It certainly is situated as well as our fruit counties, but no
statistics are available on this point. The Ohio figures show
an especially large yield from Ottawa county and this again
illustrates the advantage of position to leeward of the Lake, as
Ottawa peaches come mostly from the peninsula north of San-
dusky and the American islands in Lake Erie. All the facts
go to show the importance of the west winds from the Lake
for fruit raising rather than nearness to the Lake or the mar-
ket. Fig. 30 shows that Van Buren and Berrien lead the
state in producing grapes; as a matter of fact they produce
twenty-seven million of the state's thirty-four million pounds
(see Fig. 33). So California, under the west winds from the

Fig. 32. Tfiousands of bushels of peaches, 1902

Pacific, is far in the lead of American states as grape and wine
producer. Similarly situated are Chile and Peru, the finest
grape countries in South America, and Portugal and the Bor-

All Michigan
Fruit Counties

Fig. 33 Millions of pounds of grapes, 1902

deaux country in Europe. It is not the least interesting fea-
ture of the study of the home country that it quickly leads us
to see things abroad in a clearer light. Our fruit industry has
had great developments in the last few years and its adjust-
ment to geographic features seems to assure its future as long
as the central states are the seat of a great population. The
imperative need of the present is prompt and economical
refrigerator car service to the markets. Fro.n an examination
of Detroit market prices it is certain that this crop was worth
on the farm from three to four million dollars in 1902.

The apple crop, worth over five millions, was much more

scattered. Apples are raised
with us wherever men live,
their keeping quality making
them a significant item of
food for home consumption
as well as for marketing.
The principal sources of the
crop are shown in Fig. 34.
The fruit belt produced but
sixteen percent of the whole.
SUGAR BEETS

Fig. 34. Apples in 1902. Dark lining, more Not a little of the hundred
than 900, cross lines more than 600, and
light lines over 300 bushels per square mile and fifty million dollars WOrth

of vegetable products of Michigan enters into manufacturing
processes, which add another hundred and thirty million of
dollars to their value. Usually these manufacturing processes
have followed on the farm and forest occupations and have

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V OP THE

UNIVERSITY

been located near the supplies of raw material. The diagram
of wheat production shows that the breakfast food factories of
Battle Creek are in the heart of the wheat country. Grand
Rapids, too, grew into eminence as a furniture center while
still in the belt of abundant hardwood lumber. The lumber
is now mostly cut off and large supplies are imported from
outside the state.

The beet sugar industry differs from these in that the
beets are raised to ship to some factory rather than the factory
placed where beets are raised. This tends to concentrate the
sugar beet farming as no other agricultural product is concen-
trated. The diagram (Fig. 35) shows the large production of

Fig. 35. Sugar beet crop of 1903. Darkest shade is 140 tons to a square mile, then 60, 20,
and 2 tons. Circles are factories

the Saginaw valley along a line of dense population, and a
diminishing production as one recedes from Bay county in any

direction. Bay county, where the industry now centers, is
rather north of the best farming country for other products, as
the other diagrams show. For the present, beet raising is
largely centered about the larger factories. This is because
of the newness of the industry in the state. Only California
up to 1904 and Colorado in that year produced more beet sugar
50 100 150 200 250

U. S,. cane
U. S.. beet
California, beet
Micliigan. beet

Fig. 36. Sugar crop in thousands of tons in 190S-4, Michigan's banner year

than Michigan, which makes about a quarter of the total quan-
tity produced in the United States. Evefi including the cane
sugar of Louisiana, Michigan is the third producer in the
Union, and cane sugar is rapidly losing in importance the
world over. In 1854 there were but 182,000 tons of beet
sugar produced in the world. In 1904-5, of a total world-pro-
duction of nine and a half million tons of sugar, five million
were made from beets. Michigan built her first sugar factory
in 1897. In 1903 she produced 57,064 tons of beet sugar in
twenty factories; in 1904, 46,659. All the world has benefit-
ted by the substitution of the beet for cane as a source of
sugar, as it has reduced the price to one-half that formerly
paid. The mitigating effect of the Lakes makes Michigan
favored territory for the beet, from the sensitiveness of the
plant to the frost. A mean summer temperature of 70° seems
to be about what it demands. California has its climate tem-
pered by the winds that prevail from the Pacific. It may be
that the western counties along Lake Michigan would prove as
favorable to this cultivation as the Saginaw Valley.

AGRICULTURE

The dominant geographic note that appears in all the fol-
lowing diagrams, as in those of fruit, is their strict limitation
to the southern two-thirds of the area. We see here a result
of the twofold geography described in the earliest pages of

these Materials. Nevertheless, Wisconsin, southern Michi-
gan and southwest Ontario are great agricultural regions.
Not quite a quarter of the states of the Union excel ours in
the total value of their agricultural products. Most of these
have their whole extent available for farming.

Fig. Zl gives the relative values of our main farm pro-

Hay.
Corn

Wheat

Oats

Potatoes

Wool

Poultry and Eggs

Beans

Fig. 37. Valxie of Michigan farm products, millions of dollars, 1903

ducts. Fruits, it wi^l be remembered, amount to ten millions
more and milk and meat to other large items of which the

92 91 90 89 a» W M M «4 MM»I «0

K 81 SO 79

Fig 38. Corn in 1902. Darkest shade. 3200 bushels to 1 square mile, then
640 and 64 bushels

value cannot be ascertained. Beans are produced here in
greater quantity than anywhere in tlie country. The pepper-

mint produced from some of the western bog's is of very mod-
erate total value.

Perhaps the most instructive of the distributive diagrams
is that for corn, Fig. 38, in respect to the sharp limits to the
agricultural country on the north. The sensitiveness of the
corn to sunshine seems to account for the fairly even east and

HiG. 39. Wheat in 1902. Darkest shade, 640 bushels to amwre, then 160
and 64 bushels

west lines that separate the grades of production roughly
along the 42nd and 44th parallels of latitude. The wheat crop,
Fig. 39, is much more scattered as well as much less import-
ant. Here Ontario is seen to excel American territory, lati-
tude for latitude as well as in its oat crop, Fig. 42.

Figs. .^5 to 45 are original diagramb made on the basis of farm and agricultural statistics
published by Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois for 1902-3. New York, Minnesota
and Pennsylvania appear to publish no such data and Michigan has suspended their publi-
cation with the year 1902-3. All similar diagrams in the current text-books are copies of dia-
grams taken from the Statistical Atlas of the U. S. Census. Most of these date from the
year 1890 and the rest, though often dishonestly supplied with later date-;, from 1900, and will
until about 1912. None of them include Canadian data.

Michigan's wheat crop has fallen off steadily since 1880,
if we make exception of single, unusual years. The acreage
in wheat in the state in 1903 was little more than half that of

10 20 30

40 50

70 80 90 100

1840
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1901
1902
1903

Fig 40. Michigan Cereals (wheat, oats and corn), millions of bushels

1880. This falling off is very likely the cause of the rather
irregular distribution of the crop with us. In that case
Ontario is not having the same experience, as the yield there
is more evenly distributed. How much of this falling off is
due to diversion of interest, to fruit and stock raising, how
much to the development of manufacturing industries is a
subject of inquiry for agriculturist and economist rather than
for the geographer. It is not due to a falling off in the pop-

1840
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1905

1 2

Fig. 41. Population Michigan in millions since 1840

ulation. The great cereals, corn, wheat and oats are still
produced in quantities roughly corresponding to the density
of the population. There seems good geographic ground for
expecting that considerable crops of grain will always be pro-
duced here. The market is near, means of transportation
good, and much soil seems entirely suitable with proper meth-
ods of agriculture. The demand for grain is permanent and

bound to increase. Fig. 40 illustrates the combined crops of
corn, wheat and oats since the state was settled. Fig. 41
shows for the same period the number of citizens that produced
the crops. Except for the year 1880, there is much similarity
between the two diagrams; 1880 may have been an unusually

Fk). 42. Oats in 1902, Darkest shade is S200 bushels to a square mile,
then (>40, IftO and 64 bushels

favorable year and 1903 an unfavorable one. All such data
collected and compiled for the single year of the census are
liable to such accidental influences on their values that make
them not wholly suitable to use. An average value for each
ten years would be much preferable. Yet it is clear enough
from the figures that there has been little increase of cereal
crops within Michigan territory for many years. Ontario is as
notable for its oat crop, Fig. 42, as northern Illinois. One
wonders if the frequent derivation of its citizens from Scotland
has influenced this crop.

Potatoes, Fig. 43, are widely grown, none the less prob-
ably because they enter so directly into the food of all the peo-

n »i "» 89 M «/ at as mm « «i

an 7« 76

1' J'^l/

f V^

^, J__L

49
4S

47
46

44
4}
42

fefr^

r^'S

\
,1.

li:

t J.

'^■.^

1 J
/ 1

1. __]^^^^^pi^^^

^^ /

■'if--''^

Cj^^^^^

^^H

91 90 d9 as 37 66 as 64 &3 K

ei . ao 7s

Fig. 43. Potatoes in 1902. Darkest shade, 500 bushels to a square mile, then 100

9! 91 90 89 88 87

89 84 81 a2 81 BQ 79 76

91 50 69 aa 67 66 85 84 Oi 62

Fig. 44. Cattle in 1902. Darkest shade is 75 to a square mile, then 50, 25 and 10

Fig. 45. Sheep in 1902. Darkest shade ,50 to a square mile, then 25 and 10

Fig. 46. Swine in 1902. Darkest shade 100 to a square mile, then 50 and 25

pie that an effort is likely to be made to supply at least home
demands on every farm. The best potato yield seems to occur
well to the north of the regions favored by grain.

Cattle, sheep and hogs, Figs. 44, 45 and 46, are raised
about where the cereals are cultivated. Ontario is seen to be
as successful in stock raising as in raising cereals. There
seems to be distinctly more sheep raising on the uplands of
Ontario, of Michigan south of Saginaw Bay, and of Ohio south
of Lake Erie. Perhaps there will be a future development of
this industry in the other uplands, in Michigan southwest of
Grand Traverse Bay and of northern Wisconsin.

The foregoing should be regarded as a review, not of
agriculture in this region, but of the geographic distribution of
its great agricultural staples. They with the kindred lumber
crop of the northern country represent an annual value of from
150 to 175 million dollars, now and probably always the main
natural productions of the state and the basis of industries
that create the still larger manufactured values.

IV.

FORESTS

When Michigan was first settled it was covered by a
superb growth of hardwood in the southern three or four tiers
of counties, broken only by lakes and occasional openings,
while northward from this line and across Ontario and Wis-
consin stretched the finest forests of pine and mixed pine and
hardwood on the continent. There were splendid trees, hem-
locks twelve feet around and white pines thirteen to fifteen
about, three feet above the ground and rearing their summits
sometimes 150 feet in the air. Great groves of solid pine or
mingled growth of elm, maple, sycamore, poplar and hemlock
darkening the soil beneath and keeping it free from under-
growth, alternated here and there with dense wet growths of
tamarack and cedar, the forest dark but passable, the swamps
light but trackless, like the occasional windfalls marking the
passing of storm winds that were fortunately rare, but each
one recorded in an overthrown part of the forest. Of this
great forest the pine is mostly gone. Probably the Ward
estate in northwestern Crawford county has the only untouched
pine wood in the southern peninsula. Of mixed growth,
culled over for the little pine it once contained, there can be
few areas in the lower peninsula finer than the forests of
southern Cheboygan, eastern Otsego and western Montmor-
ency counties. Lumbering began at Port Huron in 1833.
The output of St. Clair county for that year was four million

feet. The industry crept along the shore into Saginaw Bay
to the Saginaw Valley that was long the seat of an enormous
lumbering activity. In 1888, the great year of the business,
Michigan produced nearly four billion three hundred million

1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
IQOO
1904

) 60

Fig. 47. Lumber cut in Mlchipan, millioiu of dollars

feet of lumber, in large part white pine. Since that time the
product has steadily diminished as the forests have vanished
before the lumberman's axe. In 1904, over one billion six
hundred million feet were cut, but of this three-quarters was
hemlock and hardwood. This product is estimated to be
worth fifty-four million dollars, but a portion of this value has
been given in the various processes of sawing, planing and
finishing the logs into manufactured lumber. Since 1884,
more than fifty-six billion feet of lumber have been made in
the state, and thirty-six billion shingles. A better concep-
tion of the meaning of these numbers will be had when we
think that Michigan is said to consume two billion feet of
lumber a year at present. Vast as the cut has been, Michigan
is still second only to Wisconsin in this industry. The tim-
ber diagram attempts to show where well informed men believe
there is now in 1905 the best standing timber in the Great
Lake region. It is only an estimate. No forest survey has
been made, except for Wisconsin. The black areas in
Ontario aud Roscommon and Crawford counties, Michigan,
are forest reserves, where old trees are preserved or new plan-

tations attempted. Comparison with the diagrams of popula-
tion and farm products shows how widely in the north forests
take the place of the southern farms. In Ontario, the com-
plete removal of forests in the lake peninsula corresponds well
with the large farm returns from the same district, while the
dense forests towards Hudson Bay are in the same region

Fig. 48. Standing timber in 1905. Cross lined areas have much good lumber,

single lined and dotted areas have less and less. Forest reserves in black. Not

based on any survey, but the estimate of competent men

where population and agriculture are alike wanting. The
lumber diagram shows where the lumber of 1904 has been
manufactured. The reports being from sawmills, the lumber
is often reported a long way down stream from the forests
where it grew, as along the Mississippi river down which the
logs were rafted as far as Rock Island, Illinois. All show
clearly the transference of the great undertakings of the Great

Lake comitrv from the lower peninsula of Michigan to Georg-
ian Bay and Wisconsin. It is readily understood that unim-
proved lands predominate in the north, often more than 90
per cent of all the area. It is beginning to be realized now

Fig 49. Lumber made in 1905, Solid circles are Pine, open circles Hardwood,
and triangles Hemlock. Large marks indicate a hundred million feet each,
small ones ten million feet. Data from American Lumberman, Jan. 21, 1904

that much of this land ought to remain unimproved here as in
the older states and in Europe, that it is not good farm land,
while it will yield a continuous crop of timber for all time if
protected from fire and trespass and cut over as the timber
matures, without waste.

Of delinquent tax lands, the state has some six million
acres left on its hands, much of it thin, sandy soil where pine
grew, where fire followed the lumberman and where agricul-
ture will never yield a crop of such value as the lumber that
may be grown on it. It is three townships of this land that
have been set aside under the protection of the state Forestry

5.7

Commission as the state's first forest reserve. Ontario's
liberal reserve will be noticed. ir,

MINERAL PRODUCTS OF MICHIGAN

In 1903 Michigan's mines yielded a value of fifty-six
million dollars, much the greater part of which consisted of
iron and copper.

One-tenth of the world's iron ore and one-sixth of the

1850

1860

..,

1870

1880 '

._...

.— r

1890

1900

1904

^^^^

Fig. 50. Copper mined in Michigan, thousands of tons

world's copper was produced that year in this state; ten mil-
lion tons of iron ore, worth over twenty-five . million dollars,
and ninety-six thousand tons of copper, valued at another
twenty-five millions. Both minerals come from the Hard
Rocks of the northern region, where mining is the predomin-
ant industry. The copper comes from the Keweenaw penin-
sula that projects into Lake Superior near the middle of its
southern coast. The so-called Copper Range is easily recog-
nized here on the relief map.

1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1903

(

7 S

^ H

—

FIG. 51. Iron ore mined in Michip an, millions of tons

The iron is mined a little further south toward the Wis-
consin boundary. Both metals are won in steadily increasing

quantities. At the beginning of 1905, nearly $500,000,000
worth of copper and more than $200,000,000 worth of iron ore
had been produced within the state. Up to 1887, Michigan
was the leading producer of copper in the United States as
also of iron ore up to 1902. Since those dates she is second
to Montana in copper and Minnesota in iron, not that her own
production shows any sign of falling off, but that of the other
two states has had an enormous increase. Michigan has
increased her copper output two and a half times since 1886,
but Montana five times. So our state is raining twice as much
iron as she did ten years ago, but Minnesota ten times as
much.

The Minnesota ranges also belong to the hard rocks of
the northern Lake region, west of Lake Superior. The
deposits have the advantage of lying near the surface in great
dirt-like beds, so soft that it can be taken out by steam
shovels directly into railroad cars as soon as the surface
gravels are taken off. Such mining goes faster and is much
cheaper than the usual process of constructing deep shafts
andJDlasting out hard ore. There are still vast quantities of
this soft ore in tlie Minnesota ranges, but the quality is not
equal to that of Michigan ore. The ten million tons of Mich-
igan ore taken out in 1903 were valued at over twenty-five
million dollars, while the fifteen million tons of Minnesota
ore were worth less than twenty-seven million dollars. Cop-
per and iron centers are all shown on the diagram of mineral
resources as well as the lines over which the iron ores are sent
to the coal fields of Pennsylvania, where coal and limestone
are at hand to smelt it. The whole product passes through
the canals about the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie and down the
lakes to Erie ports in lanes as well defined as a path upon
land. Commonly enough in the season one may see these
vessels stretching out in a long line to the horizon where
patches of smoke indicate that still others are beyond. The
shipping ports, Duluth, Two Harbors, Superior, Ashland,
Marquette and Escanaba have developed great facilities for
handling this commodity. The ore is stored in great cribs

OP TH!

UNIVERSITY

along the dock, from which it falls by its own weight to the
steamers below. These are built especially to carry ore, and
are of a type of their own, quite unlike the ocean steamers
that carry all sorts of cargo. Figure 53 shows this well. The
engines are well back in the stern, leaving the middle of the
vessel clear free for the ore that is poured in through long

92 91 90 89, 68 8/ 86 85 84 8J 82 81 80 79 ?«

Fig. 5i Minerals in the Lake country 1904 Solid triangles show iron mining

points, solid circles smelting cities. Dots in circles are "principal shipping

points. Open triangles show salt production, and size indicates importance.

The large dots in the coal rocks are active mines. Gypsum and cement

are indicated by name where they occur

rows of hatches into the hull of the ship which is quite with-
out the many room-like subdivisions of ocean steamers. This
enables great scoops, operated by steam, to take out the cargo
almost as rapidly as they were loaded. Anyone who will
figure it out how many loads for a 5000-ton vessel there are
in the twenty-five million tons of Lake Superior ore, will have

a better idea of the commercial activity of the lakes, especially
when he adds mentally some thought of the movement of
grain and lumber. Of course the ores might be carried by
rail, but at greatly increased cost and the presence of the
great Lakes between the coal fields of Pennsvlvania and the

Hio. 53. Lake Steamer— St. Clair River, May, 190£

iron deposits of the northern lakes is a vast advantage to the
people of this country, who use immense quantities of iron
and make a use of copper that is rapidly increasing with the
increasing use of electricity.

The last ten years have seen a cement industry spring up
in Michigan in which the state is already third among the
United States and the business grows rapidly. Nearly three

million dollars' worth was made in 1903, not a little of which
went into the construction of admirable walks in many a
Michigan town and village. The uses of cement have multi-
plied of late years, especially in bridge and building construc-

1896
]898
1900
1902
1903

I'l

^^ ^^

1
1

.«_

...^

„^^

„_

.I.

...

i_^

Cement mi'le in Mlchioan. huwlreds of thousamls of barrels

tion. There are materials in the marls of the countless lake-
lets and in the extensive limestone deposits of the state for a
great future output, and the market is increasing.

Salt was recognized here from the earliest times. When
the state was admitted to the Union in 1837, seventy-two
sections of salt spring land were granted to the new state from
the National land, providing that they were selected before
1840. The selection of these lands and the study of their
possibilities was the first undertaking of Douglas Houghton,
the first state geologist. This remarkable man recognized all
the chief mineral resources of the state and pointed out the
lines for their development. In almost every case, experience
has proved the wisdom of his plans. The salt springs have

1870
1880
1890
1900

1901
1902
1903

12 3 4 5 6 7

Fio. ss. fialt iiinnvfartnred hi Micliiaan. millions of barrels

their origin in the layers of salt among the rocks that under-
lie the state. The rainwater, percolating through the soil and
rocks, dissolves the salt and brings it to the surface in occa-

sional springs. The process of manufacturing the salt is
mainly one of getting rid of the water again from brine pumped
up from wells and the great item of expense that of the fuel
needed to evaporate it. For many years Michigan led the
country in this industry, but since 1902 she has been second
to New York. The business has here been growing less and
less profitable to the manufacturers, being now regarded as
hardly more than an inexpensive way of disposing of the
waste wood or lumber mills. In 1903 the product fell off
from eight to four million barrels and the lead in the business
went from the Saginaw Valley to Ludington and Manistee on
Lake Michigan. It is significarit that the decline in the bus-
iness of salt manufacturing has closely followed the decline of
lumbering, just as the salt block and the lumber mill have
been associated in their activities. While the decline in price
has diminished the profits to the manufacturers, the people
are getting salt for 26 cents a barrel that cost them three dol-
lars in 1840. If a mine can be sunk 800 or 1000 feet, layers
of clear rock salt will be reached that may be taken out with-
out dissolving in water and the subsequent expensive evapor-
ation. An attempt to do this is now being made near Detroit.
Coal is a product that is only moderately developed as
yet. Michigan is the fifteenth state in the Union. But the
industry is growing vigorously, and may be considered in
some measure as a reaction of the Saginaw Valley against the
decline in its lumbering activity. Up to 1895 barely 100,000
tons a year were mined. At present it is chiefly centered in
Bay and Saginaw counties, but the coal rocks extend almost
across the central part of the state, as seen on the diagram.

10 11 12 13 14

1893
1898
1903

Fig. 56. Coal mined in Michigan, hundreds of thousands of tons

It is all soft or bituminous coal, lying in flat layers among the
slates and sandstones. These coal layers are believed to be

the remnant from marsh plants of which fossils abound in it.
The product in 1903 was 1,367,000 tons worth $2,707,527.
This is a million dollars more than was mined in any previous
year.

Of gypsum, more is produced here than in any other
state. In total value it is the least significant of our minerals,
though rapidly increasing. It is quarried or mined at two
points, near Grand Rapids and at Alabaster near TawasCity,

5 10 15 20 25

Iron ore

Copper

Cement

Salt

Coal

Gypsum _

Fig. 57. Value of Michigan mineral products, millions of dollars. 1903

as the name indicates. Brick clays are widely distributed
over the state.

Great as are these mineral resources, none of them come
up to the value of the annual hay crop, twenty-seven million
dollars, while the total agricultural product is much more
than twice as great in value as the whole output of minerals.
The lumber, too, even in these declining times, is worth
more than the product of all the mines. The people of the
state have a more general participation in its agriculture than
in the mines, which are almost necessarily worked by com-
panies using capital from many lands. It is said to be com-
mon enough among the Lake Superior copper miners to have
holdings in the mines where they are employed, an advantag-
eous arrangement, but not common in mining life. The
greatest gain the mines bring to the people of the state is the
one- they share with all the people of the nation, the increased
availability of these useful substances from increase in output
and lowering of price.

MANUFACTURES
The manufactures of Michigan have depended largely on
her product of lumber and minerals. Though the lumber is

now rapidly declining, it still is the basis of the great indus-
try of the state. Lumber and planing mill products were
worth $55,000,000 in 1904. Based on the great iron mines is
the f oundry and machine shop output, in which we include
Detroit^s large business in stoves and furnaces, in all $37,000,-
000. Flouring mills in the state in the same period yielded a
product worth $26,500,000, and copper smelting $21,000,000.
Other great industries are the manufacture of carriages,
wagons and automobiles, valued at $20,000,000. Detroit has
seen the making of automobiles grow from nothing in 1900 to
a sale of 9,000 machines in 1904, a third of the output of the
whole country. Lansing and Grand Rapids also have active
automobile industries. Lansing is reputed to make more
automobiles than any other city of its size in the world. It
is the home of the well-known Oldsmobile machine. It is
said that Lansing has an automobile on its streets for every
150 inhabitants. The central position of the state, its abund-
ant raw materials, and sufficient supply of skilled mechanics
makes the future of the automobile industry in Michigan look
very promising.

An application of the state's lumber product is in furni-
ture making, in which the state is third in the Union. Grand
Rapids is the great center in the state, formerly getting its
hardwoods from the country around, but now going out of the
state for much of it. The Grand Rapids product is very
widely and favorably known for its quality. The furniture
made in the state in 1904 was valued at $18,400,000.

Apart from the iron ores which go to Lake Erie and
Pennsylvania, Michigan finishes much of her raw materials
within her own borders. Her industries are well diversified.
The four chief industries of Detroit in lumber, iron, chemicals,
and vehicles produce among them barely a quarter of the whole
manufacturing output of the city. There are then a great
number of small establishments in many different branches of
industry whose aggregate product is the bulk of the whole
product. No state indeed produces and manufactures things
more essential to modern lite and modern civilization or

a greater variety of them than Michigan. Grand Rapids pro-
duces more furniture than of any one other product, yet the
aggregate of the other industries amounts to more than twice
the value of the furniture. Furniture making may be the
greatest one business in Grand Rapids, but it figured in 1900
for only seven and one-half million dollars in a total manufac-
tured product of nearly twenty-five millions.

Battle Creek makes a specialty of breakfast foods, but in
a total manufactured product of $12,000,000 they represented
but $5,000,000.

Saginaw and Bay City have been at one time more nearly
dependent on a single industry — lumbering. They grew
phenominally from 1880 to 1890, through the culminating
period of that business. In the next decade they barely held
their own. Yet the great developments of coal mining and
beet sugar manufacturing have done much to make up for
the decline of lumbering and are ample proofs of the vitality
of the Saginaw Valley. Both cities are now growing again
on a basis of prosperity more solid than ever before because
more varied. Manufacturing is city business. Three-quar-
ters of the manufactures of the country are made in cities and
towns. In Michigan population is well distributed through
the area and so is manufacturing industry. The output is
greatest in the south where cities and towns are more num-
erous. Detroit is the greatest producer. Grand Rapids sec-
ond, followed by Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, but all four
together produce only $185,000,000 of a total for the state of
$429,000,000, considerably less than half. How different
from Chicago which makes three-quarters of the goods manu-
factured in Illinois!

The six chief manufacturing states of the country are
New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio and
New Jersey, after which comes a group of five states differ-
ing little among themselves. Of these five Michigan is one.
In almost every one of the six leading states more or less
specialized industries are found centered in huge groups of
population like that at the mouth of the Hudson, which gives

New York and New Jersey their leading position. The dis-
tribution of Michigan industry through the state may pass
with time, but it is an advantage to the people of the state
while it lasts, for it allows the numerous people who seek
industrial employment to find it in small communities that are
large enough to offer social opportunities and small enough
to make possible a style of life and a freedom that is
denied to many of those who dwell in large cities. The
last ten years of the nineteenth century saw a distinct tendency
all over the United States for industries to grow more away
from the larger cities than in the preceding decades. As
Michigan is wholly young in history and development she may
never see her people concentrated in cities that contain a
large part of all her people.

COMMERCE OF THE GREAT LAKES

The commerce of the Great Lakes has now reached very
great proportions. It is mostly grain from the head of Lake
Superior or Chicago for Buffalo, lumber and iron from Lake
Superior to Lake Erie ports from which much smaller return
shipments of coal are made. The routes are all marked on
the diagram of mineral resources. They are unlike ocean
lines of travel in all following the length of the lakes. Travel
here is more along than across. The single exception is the
railroad ferry across Lake Michigan between Milwaukee and
Ludington, the only service on the lakes that is maintained
all the year around. This is operated by the railroads as a
part of their lines between Wisconsin and the east.

The water route of the lakes offers cheap carriage of
goods from the producing west to eastern markets. Minnesota
and Dakota grain and Lake Superior iron ores have been
rendered immensely more available by the opening up of the
passages between the lower lakes and Lake Superior. In
1895 a ton of iron ore was carried from Duluth to Cleveland
by lake for 80 cents. The lowest freight by rail was $2.59.
The ore itself was only worth on the dock at Cleveland $2.80
Everyone that uses iron is a gainer by lake transportation.

The surface of Lake Superior is 18 feet higher than Lake-
Huron and Lake Michigan. This fall of 18 feet in the St.
Mary's River causes the rapids called in French Sault (leap
or fall) Ste. Marie. Here the early missionary explorers had

to land to carry their canoes around the rapids. Here they
naturally encamped and here grew up a fort and trading sta-
tion ot much importance. Great canals have been built on
each bank passing around the rapids and provided with locks
to enable vessels to overcome the difference in level. One of
these locks is shown in the picture (Fig. 58). It is a part

Fig. 58. The American Locks at the Satilt Ste Marie. The ship has come from Lake

Superior as now she has come down to the level of the river below the rapids, the

gates are being opened to let her proceed southward

of the canal 800 feet long and 100 feet wide, fitted with strong
water-tight gates at each end. The upper gates are now
closed and the boats above it float as always at the level of
Lake Superior. The gates below are just opening to let out
the steamer. When they are wide open the gates will fold
back into the hollows seen in the side of the canal, quite out
of the way. Half an hour ago the lower gates were shut and
the upper ones open. At that time, of course, the water on
which the steamer floats in the lock was as high as in the
canal above and in Lake Superior. The steamer entered the
lock and the upper gates were closed behind her. The

engineers in the building at the left then opened valves in a
great number of pipes in the bottom of the lock which allowed
the water to run out into the part of the canal below. The
steamer was gently lowered on the surface of the sinking
water until the level of the lower reach of the canal was
attained; As soon as the gates are wide open the vessel will
steam off for Lake Huron or Lake Michigan, some other
waiting ship will enter the lock, the lower gates will be closed,
the water allowed to enter gently from above through pipes
in the floor, until the ship is lifted by the rising water to the
upper level. Then the upper gates will be opened and the
ship will pass on to Lake Superior. Two such locks in the
American canal and another on the Canadian side have been
constructed at an expense of six and four million dollars
respectively.

During the nine months of navigation there is an immense
activity at these locks. In 1904 there were carried eastward
on these waters between American ports 130,000,000 bushels
of grain, 21,000,000 tons of iron ore, 1,770,000,000 feet of
lumber, and 1,000,000 tons of flour; and westward, 14,000,000
tons of coal. This is estimated to amount to fifty-one million
tons of freight, of which thirty-one million and|a§half passed
through the Sault canals. This is not very different from the
foreign and domestic trade of the great port ofjNew York and
three times greater than the tonnage that passes through the

NY.
Sault Canal

Suez Canal
ChicaKO S. Chicago

Cleveland
Detroit

Suez canal. The figures apply only to the bulk of the goods;
coal, iron and grain are all bulky commodities and of little
cost. Imports to this country from abroad include many

materials like silk, coffee, tea and spice, the value of which
by the ton would be enormous. Thus the New York freight
is three or four times as valuable as all that passes along the
lakes. The same thing is true of the Suez canal. Think of
a shipload of tea. Can you reckon the value of 5,000 tons of
tea? The charge that the owners of the Suez canal make for
the passing of steamers is itself about two dollars a ton. The
canals at the Sault are free to all. The money expended on
them represents but a small part of the outlay of the govern-
ment on navigation on the Lakes. The United States, and in
much smaller degree also Canada, has been constantly occu-
pied for many years deepening connecting channels, con-
structing harbors of refuge, mapping the lakes and rivers and
marking the safe passages by buoys in the water and light-
houses and range-marks ashore. The harbor building that
has been done by the national government on the Great
Lakes is a vast work in itself. Except on Lake Superior the
American shores of the Lakes are mostly of sands that work
along shore incessantly in wind-driven currents. Where the
wind gets hold of such sands, dunes are built, as described at
pages 23 and 24. The harbors on these sandy shores are
mostly river mouths where land waters have always main-
tained an uncertain channel across the beach, rarely more
than five or six feet deep at the most favorable seasons and
liable to constant changes of place and depth with the contin-
uous shifting of the sands. The general plan of improvement
at these river mouths has been similar to that used in the
Eads Jetties at the Mississippi mouth, which confine the
waters of one of the river mouths between narrowing walls
and cause the current to scour out its own bed. So on the
Lakes, piers have been built on each side of the natural stream
entrances at a moderate distance apart and extending well out
from the shore line, as shown in the picture. This always
improved the entrance, but a difficulty not found at the mouth
of the Mississippi exists in the Lakes in the shallowness of
their waters. The piers across the beach compel the stream-
ing shore sands to go out around their ends, soon shallowing

the water there. In the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico
this is an immensely slow process, but on the Lakes a few
years suffice to fill up the angles on either side of the piers
and shallow its entrance with a bar. The obvious remedy
has been applied of extending the piers further into the Lake
and many of them have now become so long as to involve
heavy expense for repairs, the material being invariably
wooden piling. Sheboygan, Wis., has piers that extend 2500
feet beyond the shore Hue, Menominee 2150, St. Joseph 2040,
Milwaukee 1650 and Muskegon 1550. The relief afforded.

Fig. 60. Piers of Kincardine Harbor, Ontario, looking out.

moreover, is only temporary. Dredging had finally to be
resorted to and if continuously applied is an effective remedy.
Dredging is further necessitated by the demands of modern
navigation for channels eighteen to twenty feet deep, which
are not attainable by the unaided scour of any streams that
flow into the lakes. Besides improving a large number of har-
bors of the sort, the national government has undertaken even
greater works in some of the connecting rivers, in the Sault
canal, the channels leading thence to Lake Huron and in the
St. Clair and Detroit rivers. A continuous channel of twenty
feet depth is in process of construction throughout the course,
from Buffalo to Duluth. A. most difficult part of this work is
the excavation of the bed rock that underlies the Detroit
river at the Limekiln Crossing near Amherstburg, where drill-
ing, blasting and removal of fragments has been going on for
many years. The maintenance of the desired depth at this

point is rendered more difficult by the oscillation of Lake
Erie in the wind. An east wind raises the water at the mouth
of the Detroit river and lowers it at Buffalo and the much
commoner west winds produce the opposite effects. Thus
the violent west wind of Nov. 21, 1900, raised the lake at Buf-
falo over seven feet and lowered it at the Limekilns nearly
three. At such times a number of north-bound freighters
may usually be seen tied up below Amherstburg waiting for
depth of water sufficient to let them pass the Limekilns. An
automatic gage at this point indicates day and night the depth
on the crossing in feet and tenths of feet. An important part
of the government's activity on the lakes has resulted in the
preparation of admirable charts of all 'the shores and
waterways.*

With all this activity of the United States, it remains a
dangerous navigation. No day in the lake voyage is free from
that greatest of all sea hazards, the approach to land, which
threatens ocean ships only at the end and beginning of a voy-
age. On the lakes the land is rarely out of sight and for hun-
dreds of miles navigation is within a few rods or even feet of
dangers that menace the safety of the ship.

Over the deeper, colder waters fogs are frequent as a
result of the chilling of the moisture laden air below its dew-
point. This, of course, happens oftenest on Lake Superior.
TheU. S. Weather Bureau has pointed out that fogs are less
usual on the southern route from the Sault to Duluth, that
crosses Keweenaw peninsula by the passages and canal at
Portage Entry, in warmer waters. This route is, however,
little used, perhaps from the added danger of coming nearer
land. At the west end of Lake Superior lurks yet a greater
danger in the great and irregular attraction of the country
rocks for the needle of the compass.

It has been well known since the first voyage of Columbus
that the compass needle does not in most parts of the world
point to the true north. An accurate ;nap of the variation of

* The admirable colored maps of the separate lakes deserve to be in every Michigan
schoolroom. They may be obtained at the Lake Survey oflfice, Campau Building:, Detroit,
tor IS cents each.

12>

the compass for the lakes has recently been prepared by the
Lake Survey and is here reproduced. All places through

Pig 61 Lines of equal rmgnetic v triation for 1905 qivinq the number of degrees that the

compass points east and west of true north hy the solid lines and the change in

this variation per year by the dotted line, west variation increasing,

east diminishing

which passes the heavy line numbered 0° have no variation,
i. e. the compass at those places does point to the north.
At a point like Chicago on the line marked 3°e. the compass
points three degrees east of north, and so of other places on
the map. The broken lines indicate the number of minutes
by which the variation is changing per year, westerly variation
increasing and easterly variation diminishing. Thus at
Sault Ste. Marie where the variation was in 1905 4° west, the
annual change is 6 minutes which by 1915 will have amounted'
to another degree. The variation will be then 5° west. At
some localities near the Lake Superior coast of Minnesota
variations are as great as 26° east and within 650 feet change

to 6° east. This cannot be shown on a map and, of course,
is only noted very near shore. Along such a shore the com-
pass cannot be relied upon.

It is possible for vessels drawing leSs than fourteen feet
of water to pass from the lakes to the St. Lawrence and Europe
by making use of the Welland canal around Niagara through
Canadian territory. The passages both in the canal and the
river are narrow, difficult and dangerous and accidents are so
common that insurance for ships going over this route is very
high and the traffic does not pay. The small size of the ves-
sels that can be used in it is another difficulty. The largest
ships that can pass the Welland canal are of about 3,000 tons,
and a 3,000 ton ship can never carry goods so cheaply as the
great ships built for the ocean freight, some of which are now
of 23,000 tons.

But it is perfectly feasible to deepen the Welland canal
and the channel of the St. Lawrence so that the largest ves-
sels can pass. If that is ever done the lake ports will be put
in direct communication with the sea,atleastin the open season.
The dangers of this long course of inland navigation must al-
ways, however, far exceed those of the open ocean. Perhapsthis
extra hazard will always offset the cost of an extra handling
involved in shipments of western goods from Atlantic ports.

Great as the carriage of Michigan lumber and iron on the
lakes is, most of the lake-carried goods move between points
beyond the territory of the state. But the existence of this
vast and ceaseless traffic gives the state facilities of transpor-
tation that encourage the growth of her industries and she
shares with her sister states in the development and cheapen-
ing of these great natural resources for feeding and housing
the people of the land.

LAKE NAVIGATION IN WINTER

Through navigation on the Great Lakes is usually sus-
pended in January, February and March, on account of ice in
the connecting rivers. Probably none of the lakes freeze over
solid, but the bays do and St. Mary's river at the Sault is

generally crossed on foot in January and February over the
ice. Put-in Bay and Kelley's Island in Lake Erie usually
have team connection with the Ohio shore for a longer or
shorter period in February and so does Mackinac Island with
St. Ignace.

Communication between St. Ignace and Mackinaw City
is kept up by train ferries through the winter across the Straits

Fig. 62. A Lake Michiaan car ferry baltlinu with the ice

of Mackinac. Detroit and Port Huron maintain a hardly
interrupted service across the Detroit and St. Clair rivers by
train and other ferries. Lake Michigan, too, is crossed
throughout the year by powerful train ferries between Luding-
ton, Frankfort, Grand Haven and Wisconsin ports, but pas-
sengers are not much carried by this route, the service being
a good deal interrupted by the drifting of ice floes on the
westerly winds against the Michigan shores, as shown in Fig.
62. For great fields of ice form along the shores in quiet
weather, which are driven out into the lakes when the wind
rises. At times these fields are so extensive that no open
water can be seen from the shore. In the bays the ice remains
firm most of the cold season. In Green Bay, Grand and Lit-
tle Traverse Bays and Saginaw Bay the ice cover enables much
fishing to be carried on through the ice. Shanties are built
and little villages of the fishermen occupied on the ice all
winter long. Occasionally these men stay too long in the
spring and the warm south winds melt the shore ice and leave
them drifting on a more or less rotten ice floe. Many lives
are thus endangered every year and occasionally some are lost.

PEOPLING THE LAKE COUNTRY

Michigan is a part of the earliest addition to the territory
of the original thirteen states. The region was known as the
Territory northwest of the Ohio river. It was ceded by Eng-
land in 1783 at the close of the Revolutionary war, but had
been British ground barely twenty years. For this reason the
old English place names that abound in New England are
wholly absent here, their place being taken by French words.
The French trails that crossed it in many directions between
the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico were protected here
and there by forts from the savage Indians who were the real
inhabitants. Of Europeans there were barely 4,000 in the
whole territory, between French and half-breeds. These were
grouped in three settlements; one at Detroit, where aforthad
been built by the French to keep the English in New York
from ascending the lakes in the pursuit of the fur trade, in

which they were serious rivals, and the other two at the Illi-
nois towns near St. Louis and at Vincennes on the Wabash.
The British had put an officer and a few troops in each of
these posts at the close of the French and Indian war, in 1763,
and from them fitted out foraging parties of Indians against
the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania and Kentucky through
the Revolution till Captain George Rogers Clark invaded the
territory from Kentucky, capturing the Illinois towns and
Vincennes in 1778-9. The Americans held them from that
time on, but though the whole territory became American by
treaty in 1783, the British were able to put off giving posses-
sion at Detroit till 17'^6 by reason of the distance from the
principal seats of population of the young nation and its
weakness. Congress planned to divide the territory into three

HiG 63. The Northwest Territory. Heavy north and
south lines divide it into three states as sucigested by
Conaress. The heavy lines across through the
foot of Lake Michigan the northern bound-
ary suguested for those three states if two
were made to the north

states as indicated by the black lines on the map. Power was
reserved, however, to make two or more states out of that
part of the Territory north of an east and west line through

the southern point of Lake Michigan, drawn heavy on our
map. Had this division line been actually held to, Illinois
and Indiana must have been left without frontage on Lake
Michigan, and a glance at the map shows that, as the site of
Chicago would have been withheld from the western state,
so Ohio would have lost Toledo and the much -prized Maumee
Bay, though this was not then certainly known, since such
maps as existed at that time made the line pass well north of
Toledo. It is not strange that the three southern states should
have wanted to change the boundaries thus set for them when
they came to seek admission to the Union. Ohio added a
little on the north in her own constitution of 1802, but failed
to get it specifically described anew by Congress, Indiana
added rather more when she was admitted in 1816, and Illi-
nois still more on her admission in 1S18. The feeling was
strong that Michigan had an enormous coast line from which
she could easily spare a little to them. Yet their action was
in plain violation of the Ordinance of 1787, laying out the
original lines, as well as of subsequent acts of Congress. In
1837, when Michigan was seeking admission to statehood,
the dispute over the boundary with Ohio led to much anxiety
and the period of excitement exaggeratedly called the Toledo
War.

The way in which little communities of men with organ-
ized local government spread over this region may be seen on
Fig. 64. The counties colored darkest were organized before
1810. Of Michigan there was at that time only Wayne
County. Of course that meant that governmental affairs for
the whole region had to be transacted at Detroit, the only
considerable settlement. By 1830 Chippewa and Mackinac
were added and the counties adjoining Wayne. Between 1830
and 1850 the state was admitted to the Union and a consider-
able movement ol people took place into the country between
Detroit and the Saginaw Valley and the extraction of copper
was begun in Houghton countv. Can you see evidences of
these things in the diagram? It was at this same period that
Wisconsin, too, had its greatest expansion. In Ontario set-

tlement was earlier but slower to spread. In the years from
1850 to 1870 people spread along the shores of the lower pen-
insula and iron in Marquette and lumber in Menominee began
to be sought for actively. In 1890 there remained unorgan-

,9?

91 90 99 Sa/ 87 « AS S4 6S Bt SI

80 79 78 "

47 L^

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T: J.

'^^

. ■?<'

A
ip'

L_-(

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TTT*!

iJI

^■^

.^^ >

m^^^m

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■\ 1

SB-

^^^^^^w^^^

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P4_

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90 , 89 e« 87 86 85 84 , aj 8? .

81 80 79

Fig. 64. Date of on/itiii-lini roujity governmenl; black, organized before 1810. heavy
lines before 18SU, light lines before 1840, dotted before 1870-

ized only Oscoda and Ogemaw in the lower peninsula and Iron
in the upper. This was added in 1891, the last county in the
state. North of Lake Superior and Georgian Bay Ontario has
all its territory still governed as territorial districts.

Nearly a quarter of the people of Michigan were born in for-
eign countries, nearly half of them in some British territory and
a quarter more in Germany. Six per cent of our people came
from New York and two per cent each from Pennsylvania and
Indiana. The distribution of population in the region in 1900
is shown on the map. (Fig. 65).

i..uiLiJimu^..:\u ?-..*^. i ■"&..»... J- ^'i^.,. I ji^^..s.^y:..::i

91 S>0 89 «S 67 06 W

a ii e< BO 79

Fig. 65- Population of I he Lake Country in 1900. Scheme to left gives number of
inhabitants to one square mile

FISHERIES

When the white man first came to Michigan it is the
testimony of all the early writers that the Great Lakes teemed
with valuable food fish — whitefish, lake herring, lake trout
and sturgeon. Brook trout abounded in the upper penin-
sula and in the coast streams of the lower peninsula from
Mackinaw to Traverse City in Lake Michigan and to Rogers
City on the Lake Huron shore. Grayling were common in
streams still further south.

The excellence and abundance of the native fish is a fre-
quent theme in early days. The store was indeed inexhaust-
ible for the first thin population. Following Michigan's
admission to statehood, however, settlers came steadily pour-
in;.,^ in, and so in all the lake states. There has been no
interruption to this growth of population from that day to this.

The ease of capture joined with the excellent quality and
abundance of the fish exposed this resource of the lakes to
heavy inroads. Before 1880 trout and grayling- were driven
from many streams by lumbering operations, the discharge of
sawdust alone rendering many rivers unfit for fish and spoiling
not a few fishing grounds on the Great Lakes themselves. Of
the Great Lake fisheries in general they were getting "played
out" in 1878. About the year 1850 the pound or trap net
was introduced, a device consisting of a fence or wall-like net,
reaching out from the shore sometimes two or three miles into
the lakes, that intercepted the fish as they swam along paral-
lel to the shore, guided them outward to a pound or trap
whence they were lifted by the fisherman at his leisure. This
proved the most; destructive of fishing devices and has been
held largely responsible for the rapid decline of the fisheries.
The rough estimates available for the earlier years put the
catch of 1830, seven years before Michigan became a state, at
8,000 barrels; of 1857, at 13,500 barrels; of 1857, at over
80,000 barrels, valued at $640,000. In 1885 the value of the
catch had passed one and a half million dollars. The same
thing was going on in the waters of other American states and
of Canada. It has been well said that the commercial fish
never had a chance. In 1878 the fishermen had to set their
nets twenty, thirty and even forty miles from shore and not so
good lifts were had even at those distances as were had a few
years earlier five or ten miles from shore right in sight from
city harbors. In 1842 the discovery was made in Europe that
brook trout could be propagated artifically. Protection of the
fry during their helpless stage of infancy made it possible to
place in the streams a new generation vastly outnumbering
those that nature reared. In 1873 the Michigan Fish Com-
mission was created for the "propagation and cultivation of
whitefish and such other kinds of the better class of food fishes
as they may direct." They were given an appropriation of
$7500 which has now increased to $33,000. They at once
began their attempt to restock the lakes with whitefish, with
the theory embodied in the following statement: In a state

of nature from a thousand whitefish eggs not more than one
survives; artificially 940 may be obtained. As one fish yields
about 25,000 eggs, fish culture gives a whitefish 24,000
descendants where nature gives her 25. Already in 1874 a
million and a half young whitefish were "planted," twelve
and a half million in 1878, fifty million in 1886, a hundred
million in 1890 and two hundred million in 1892. The results
of this vast fish nursery were somewhat disappointing, yet in
1885 small whitefish were becoming abundant in the Lakes,
presumably the result of the Fish Commission's "plantings,"
especially as they were not observed at unplanted places. But
the catch of whitefish declined from eight million pounds in
1891, the first year of statistics that the Commission regards
as reliable, to six, five, four and little more than three million
pounds in the four years that followed. Meanwhile the Com-
mission had taken other fish in hand ; great numbers of eels
were brought from the Hudson river at Albany and released in
the lakes, where they were observed to thrive and grow large.
But the little eels that had been hoped for never appeared ; it
was evident they reared no families. Presently naturalists
learned that the eel has to go to salt water to spawn and
indeed passes the earliest stage of its life in the deep ocean
waters in a form as little like an eel as a tadpole is to a frog.
Sturgeon, salmon, brook trout and bass of various kinds
were successfully reared and planted in lakes and inland
waters. Here success was as marked as failure had been on
the lakes. Trout were not only restored to streams once
completely fished out but introduced to streams all over the
lower peninsula, which was reported changed (1892) "from
a land barren in brook trout to one in which good trout fishing
is abundant, giving farmers food and attracting thousands of
tourists." Attempts were repeatedly made to domesticate and
propagate the grayling which was fast disappearing as lumber-
ing operations advanced in the northern part of the lower pen-
insula. In this there was no success either in finding them
spawning in the wild state to obtain eggs to rear or in per-
suading them to spawn in captivity.

Attention was given to the food supply on which the
whitefish fed to solve the doubt whether the small fish released
so numerously were able to find a sufficient supply of their
natural sustenance. From the toothless, sucker-like, down-
turned jaw of the mature whitefish it was inferred to be a bot-
tom feeder, as well as from the presence of numerous stones
in its stomach, supposed to have been caught up hastily as it
took its food. Two-thirds of its food in cases examined in
the Charlevoix region consisted of two forms of minute life of
the lakes known as the plankton. These are pontoporeia hoyi

Fig. 66. Plankton of great lakes on which the whitefish probably feeds— much enlarged

and mysis relicta, 43 and 20 per cent respectively. Of these
forms of life there was found a great abundance. There
was certainly food enough to maintain again today

the teeming multitudes with which the lakes had one
time swarmed. "If one draws through the water a net
of finest gauze and collects its gleanings into a
small glass there will be seen a myriad of minute forms almost
or quite invisible to the eye. The mass of material obtained
depends not only upon the length of the haul and size of the
net, but upon numerous other conditions as well. Under no
probable circumstances, however, will the net fail to collect a
certain amount of material which the microscope shows to be
composed of living organisms of varied character. Among
these are both plants and animals, the latter so insignificant
that their own motion does not suffice to carry them over any
considerable distance, and hence both plants and animals are
dependent upon waves, currents and winds for their wide dis-
tribution. Their entire existence is passed floating freely in
the water and both plants and animals possess characters of
form or structure fitting them for maintaining their position.
This mass of living forms is known as the plankton. One may
justly call it the primitive food supply of the water, and as
such it is of course the origin of fish food." There is much
less plankton it appears in the Great Lakes than in the ocean,
but abundance to maintain a fish life much greater than now
exists. Not merely is there plenty of the two forms mysis
and pontoporeia, and the others on which whitefish
feed, but the still lower forms in the plankton on
which these feed. Of the fry it is only known that as soon
as they absorb the food sac with which they are hatched from
the ^%g they are unlike the mature whitefish in having "rap-
tatorial" teeth with which they dart upon their prey, not on the
bottom, but free swimming through the water. Just what
these are is not certainly known, but the fact that captive try
greedily chased and ate two copepods, cyclops thomasi and
diaptomus cicilis suggests at least that their natural food
resembles these crustaceans. These, too, abound in the Great
Lake waters.

It could no longer be doubted that the greater success in
peopling the streams with trout than the lakes with whitefish

was due to the protection enjoyed by the former of a close
season and a legal size below which they might not be caught
under penalty. The lakes were overfished. While the
hatcheries were doing all their capacity would admit to replen-
ish the waters, their work was to a great extent neutralized
by the persistent catches of immature fish by the fishermen.
The substitution of steam vessels for sail boats and the intro-
duction of large capital had resulted in hastening the destruc-
tion of the whitefish enormously. The establishment of depots
where the fish might be frozen and preserved for future use
had offered a temptation to those engaged in the business to
prosecute their work at all seasons of the year. Many locali-
ties formerly known as good whitefish grounds had by the
multiplication of methods of capture, been fished to death and
now made poor return, while many other grounds had been
wholly abandoned because of their unproductiveness. Still
more serious was the nature of the catch. It was reported
from Alpena in 1892 that "tons of immature whitefish were
taken in the pound nets there, many of them so small that
they could not be salted, neither could they be put upon the
market and sold fresh, and as a last resort they were smoked.
In other cases the fish caught were so small that they could
only be disposed of to grind up for fertilizers. It was felt that
if the millions of small fish put in the lakes could escape this
shameful manner of fishing until they attained a spawning
age and a commercial size, the fruits of artificial propagation
might be realized. A detail that was noted in Charlevoix
waters throws light on what was going on: — The fishermen,
highly skilled in the practice of their art and easily distinguish-
ing varieties among the fish they handled that seem quite
identical to the uninitiated, looked with little tolerance on the
early labors of the Fish Commission and maintained entire
incredulity as to the validity of their conclusions. When the
whitefish, coregonus clupeiformis, began their rapid disappear-
ance from Charlevoix waters in the years following 1880 the
fishermen held the fact to be simply that the fish had gone
away to some other locality. The increasing presence in the

lake of sawdust from the lumber mills was regarded as a suf-
ficient cause. But coincident with the "going" of the true
whitefish arrived another, sold commonly as a whitefish but
well known to the fishermen as distinct and named by them
"longjaw" (coregonus prognathus) (Fig. 67). The longjaw
had not been unknown before, it merely became now a greater
part of the total whitefish catch. Now the true whitefish
yields the best catches at depths of twelve fathoms or less
while they are not found at depths of twenty to twenty-five
fathoms where the longjaws are most abundant. There- is no
evidence that the habits of the two species have changed in
the period of time considered. The simplest explanation of
what has occurred would seem to be that as scarcity of the
whitefish drove the fishermen to set their nets further from

Fio. 67. Lonajmv WliUefish

shore it necessarily drove them into deeper and deeper waters.
The whitefish had been exhausted, not driven away, and the
longjaws had not come in, but were being caught more because
the nets were invading the deeper waters where they lived.
A singular confirmation of this explanation was afforded by
subsequent experience in the same waters. As the fishermen
worked further and further away from shore the longjaws in
turn began to "go away" and give place to another form, the
"blackfin" (coregonus nigripinnis) . The black-fin is
rarely found in depths less than forty fathoms. There
is no ground to doubt that he has always lived there and is

caught now first in growing numbers because the nets have
again pushed out into deeper waters.

The writer was present on a fishing trip in 1905 from a
Canadian port into Lake Huron that gave an idea of how
strenuous an assault is being made on fish life. It is probably
a fair example of legal lake fisheries. The little tug steamed
out at sunrise to a buoy some sixteen miles offshore, marked
by a red and white flag. It seemed a very obscure object but
was easily made out by the experienced fishermen. The buoy
was taken in and its line lifted until the ends of the nets came
over the rail at 9:30 a. m. From that time till noon the tug
steamed slowly along, taking up seven miles of net which was
lifted inboard, net, fish, and all, by a steam-winch patented
from Charlevoix, Mich. A rod was run through the rear wall
of the pilot house to the engine room by which the engines of
the boat and the fish lifter could be stopped and started from
the pilot house. Here at the door stood one of the crew of
five with a gaff to help heavy fish over the side but ready to
stop the engines when needed. Another pulled the net hand
overhand from the fish lifter and laid it, fish and all, in the
net boxes as evenly as possible. The rest busied themselves
freeing fish from the meshes of the net in which they were
tightly entangled, carrying off boxes filled with fish and net
and bringing empty ones. There were 56 nets, each 800 feet
long and eight feet wide, with lead sinkers all along one edge
and wooden floats along the other. The sinkers were altogether
too heavy for the floats to lift, but the floats were able to make
the net stand up on the bottom like a fence, seven miles long
and eight feet high. Two hundred and thirty-eight fish were
taken, a third of them whitefish fifteen or twenty inches long
and weighing from three to six pounds. The fish were liter-
ally pumped on board by steam, coming over the side from
one to two a minute, an average of one to every 150 feet of
net. To take these from the nets, straighten the net, untie
the nets from each other as a joint came up and lay them and
the fish in their boxes, called for the incessant activity of all
hands. Even then the engines had frequently to be stopped.

Quite as many stones as fish were lifted, mostly jagg-edbits of
limestone greatly honeycombed by the solvent action of the
water and v/eighing up to ten pounds. These are probably
entangled in the net by the fish in their struggles to escape
from the meshes, struggles which are further evidenced by the
way the net strands are forced into their bodies. A depth of
sixteen fathoms had been carefully selected by sounding as
the net was laid. At the end of the line the rush was followed
by a twenty-minute rest for lunch. Then the tug steamed
over her course again at a three-mile pace that kept all hands
on the jump to lay out the net straight and clear so that it
would stand upright on the bottom. When a "foul" comes
the engines are stopped and all hands go to work at it till the
net is clear. At the end of the line, as at the beginning, a
heavy stone anchors a cedar buoy with pole and flag and the
net is set. Two other similar lines will keep the tug busy
tomorrow and the day after. On the third day this will be
again taken np. From the stake in, all hands clean fish, with
an occasional turn at engine and wheel. When the landing is
made the catch is ready for the ice or for sale.

The hope of the Fish Commission, to maintain a constant
supply of food fish to the lakes by securing the growth from
the egg to maturity of as many fish as were annually caught,
had failed of realization. Much has been said when we state
that fishing paid so good a return on the capital it employed
that its appliances improved and the zeal with which it was
prosecuted increased much too fast for the fish introduced
into the lakes by the Commission ever to have a chance to
grow up unless their capture in infancy were legally prevented.
The Commission is satisfied that a whitefish does not spawn
before attaining a weight of at least two pounds, yet a million
pounds of the total of three million pounds caught in 1895
were individuals weighing less than one and a quarter pounds.
As a specific example a firm in Grand Haven shipped a barrel
of whitefish to Detroit which was found to contain between
twenty-five hundred and 3000 individuals. The shippers
offered a similar lot every day in the season. The diminishing

size of the mesh of the nets used contributed much to this
result. The legal mesh in 1870 had already contracted some
since earliest days. It was then 4Hnches, not open as in use,
but stretched out to its greatest extent. In 1896 it had
diminished to 2% inches and illegally nets were doubtless used
even smaller than this. In 1894 an attempt to pass a law
enforcing penalty for having in possession whitefish under a
standard size, met defeat at the hands of the fishermen who
saw in it rather the present limitation of their catch than the
protection of their future interests. In 1894 Lake Ontario
was declared "fished out," while from Lake Erie fishing firms
were moving to Lake of the Woods at least for summer work.
The U. S. Fish Commission that year suspended work in
Lake Erie for lack of whitefish from which spawn could be
obtained. In 1897 a protective law was at last obtained. It
was now illegal to use pound nets with meshes of less than
3^2 inches in the pockets, to have the following fish in pos-
session of less weight than — sturgeon, 15 pounds; whitefish,
2 pounds; lake trout, i pound; walled-eyed pike or pickerel,
1 pound; catfish, 1 pound; perch, 4 ounces; all in the round,
to net fish between October 13 and December 15, when the
whitefish are spawning, to take trout, salmon or grayling
between September 1 and May 1, to kill them at any time in
any other way than by fishing with hook and line, to have
them in possession under 7 inches long, or to have trout or gray-
ling for sale. The results are regarded as distinctly satisfactory,
yet the period during which protection has been had is brief and
the whitefish, to which most attention has been given, shows
only moderate increase. The average value of the whitefish,
however, has risen from less than 4 cents per pound in 1892 to
nearly six cents in 1902. If this result from the elimination
of the smaller, immature fish it is a great gain. It may merely
point to an increased demand for the same qualities that were
formerly cheaper. The herring catch is known to have
increased with increasing demand. Early statistics are not
relied on but it is not questioned that whitefish and trout

formerly made up much the g^reater part of the total catch.
Kinds of fish are now caught and sold for which there was
then no market. The total value of the Great Lake fisheries
in 1900 was over five million dollars, of which one and a half
were reported for Michigan. Michigan and Ontario led in
value of the catch among all the neighboring states.

AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS

WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN
THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY
WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH
DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY
OVERDUE.

JAM 25 1^5

QAN DEPT.

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