months in the year. In 1887 the value of the iron ore
shipments through the canal was $8,744,995. Ten years later it exceeded
$30,000,000. Meanwhile it must be remembered that the Canadian Government
has built on its own side of the river very commodious canals which
themselves carry no small share of the Lake Superior shipments. An
illustration of the fashion in which superior facilities at one end of a
great line of travel compel improvements all along the line is afforded by
the fact that since the canal at the "Soo" has been deepened so as to take
vessels of twenty-one feet draught with practically no limit upon their
length, the cry has gone up among shippers and vessel men for a
twenty-foot channel from Duluth to the sea. At present there are several
points in the lower lakes, notably at what is called the Lime Kiln
Crossing, below Detroit, where twenty-foot craft are put to some hazard,
while beyond Buffalo the shallow Welland Canal, with its short locks, and
the shallow canals of the St. Lawrence River have practically stopped all
effort to establish direct and profitable communication between the great
lakes and the ocean. Such efforts have been made and the expedients
adopted to get around natural obstacles have sometimes been almost
pathetic in the story they tell of the eagerness of the lake marine to
find an outlet to salt-water. Ships are cut in two at Cleveland or at
Erie and sent, thus disjointed, through the canals to be patched together
again at Quebec or Montreal. One body of Chicago capitalists built four
steel steamers of about 2500 tons capacity each, and of dimensions suited
to the locks in the Welland Canal, in the hopes of maintaining a regular
freight line between that city and Liverpool. The vessels were loaded with
full cargo as far as Buffalo, there discharged half their freight, and
went on thus half-laden through the Canadian canals. But the loss in time
and space, and the expense of reshipment of cargo made the experiment an
unprofitable one. Scarcely a year has passed that some such effort has not
been made, and constantly the wonderful development of the ship-building
business on the Great Lakes greatly increases the vigor of the demand for
an outlet. Steel ships can be built on the lakes at a materially smaller
cost than anywhere along the seaboard. In the report of the Commissioner
of Navigation for 1901 it is noted that more than double the tonnage of
steel construction on the Atlantic