and Chicago on Lake Michigan--both
plotted in 1830--were very largely figures of speech at that time. The
day of miracles was at hand, however, for the little town of one hundred
people at the foot of Lake Michigan. The purchase of the lands of the
Potawatomies, the Black Hawk War in 1832, which brought steamboats to
Chicago for the first time, and the decision of Illinois in 1836 to
pledge her good name in favor of the Illinois and Michigan Canal made
Chicago a city of four thousand people by the panic year of 1837. So
absorbed were these Chicago folk in the building of their canal and
in wresting from their lake firm foothold for a city (reclaiming four
hundred feet of lake bed in two years) that the panic affected their
town less than it did many a rival. Although the canal enterprise came
to an ominous pause in 1842, after the expenditure of five millions,
the pledge of the State stood the enterprise in good stead. Local
financiers, together with New York and Boston promoters, advanced about
a quarter of a million, while French and English bankers, notably Baring
Brothers, contributed about three-quarters of a million. With this
assistance the work was carried to a successful ending. On April
10,1848, the first boat passed over the ninety-mile route from Chicago
to Ottawa, and the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin were united by
this Erie Canal of the West. Though its days of greatest value were
soon over, no one can exaggerate the importance of this waterway in the
growth and prosperity of Chicago between 1848 and 1860. By 1857 Chicago
was sending north and south annually by boat over twenty million bushels
of wheat and corn.

The awakening of the lands behind Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake
Michigan brought forth innumerable demands for roads, canals, and
railways to the ports of Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Milwaukee,
and Chicago. There were actually hundreds of these enterprises
undertaken. The development of the land behind Lake Superior was
particularly spectacular and important, not only because of its general
effect on the industrial world but also because out of it came the St.
Mary's River Ship Canal. Nowhere in the zone of the Great Lakes has
any region produced such unexpected changes in American industrial and
commercial life as did the region of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota
contributory to Lake Superior. If, as the story goes, Benjamin Franklin
said, when he drew at Paris the internat