job, but Duluth has unloaded 10,074 tons of coal in less than seven hours.

Of course the high tonnage of a port like Duluth, or of a passage like the Lime Kiln Channel below Detroit, is due to the fact that the same boat makes many round trips in the course of a month. Duluth has more clearances than Liverpool, but not by so many different vessels. A 13,000-ton ship will pass the Lime Kiln loaded with grain for Buffalo, and be back, headed west with a new cargo of coal in five days. Naturally, in the tonnage of Buffalo or Duluth she will count for much more in the course of a season than a ship pulling forth from Liverpool for a month's run to Asiatic waters.

We find that on the lakes expedition in loading and unloading are qualities sought in marine architecture and in the management of ships. Most of the big carriers are "liners" making regular trips between docks owned by the same companies, and the latter are equipped with handling facilities that make the famous docks of Hamburg seem second rate in comparison. It is estimated that delay costs a loaded ship $10 a minute, and therefore everything-the ship herself, the locks and canals through which she passes, and the docks to which she ties up for cargo-are designed to avert delay. The Government is keenly alive to this need. The new Livingstone Channel below Detroit was cut out of the limestone bed of the river in order that the lines of vessels that every season waited to get across the neighboring Lime Kiln crossing might be diverted. The new 1,000foot locks at the Soo were not completed before busy seasons saw as many as forty ships waiting to get through the old locks. Even today it sometimes happens at Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit that eager vessel men jockey and jostle in the effort to get their ships up

to the overcrowded docks, much as if they were trying to park an automobile at the curb of a crowded theater street.

The future of lake shipping and shipbuilding? There seems to be no reason why it should lag behind the past. Europe will presently begin to raise much of its own food again, and the rush of the grain carriers will be perhaps less furious, and the need to extend seasons at both ends beyond the danger point will be past. But always the great Northwest of the United States and Canada will be the granary of the crowded East, and the European world. The rich iron deposits of the Mesaba region seem inexhaustible. For decades, probably centuries, to come they will keep the furnaces of Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio stocked with ore. For these products the lakes already afford the most expeditious and economical road to market. And inevitably, as surely as any obvious development of the industrial field of man can be foreseen, the ship canal from the lakes to the sea will be built. Already men know that it can be done more cheaply than was the Panama Canal. The nation has learned through war's dread needs to think in billions and not in millions. No longer will the money needed to cut the ridge which nature raised between Lake Erie and the Hudson be grudged. An improvement which, costing less than our unhappy governmental experiment in aviation, will bring increaesd prosperity to millions of our people, and open new oceans to the commerce of all peoples cannot long be deferred. And with it concluded lake shipyards and lake sailors will assume first place in the records of the nation's merchant marine.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MISSISSIPPI AND

TRIBUTARY RIVERS THE CHANGING PHASES OF THEIR SHIPPING-RIVER NAVIGATION AS A NATIONBUILDING FORCE THE VALUE OF SMALL STREAMS - WORK OF THE OHIO COMPANY-AN EARLY PROPELLER THE FRENCH FIRST ON THE MISSISSIPPI -THE SPANIARDS AT NEW ORLEANS - EARLY METHODS OF NAVIGATION - THE FLATBOAT, THE BROADHORN, AND THE KEELBOAT - LIFE OF THE RIVERMEN PIRATES AND BUCCANEERS LAFITTE AND THE BARATARIANS - THE GENESIS OF THE STEAMBOATS CAPRICIOUS RIVER - FLUSH TIMES IN NEW ORLEANS - RAPID MULTIPLICATION OF STEAMBOATS RECENT FIGURES ON RIVER SHIPPING COMMODORE WHIPPLE'S EXPLOIT- THE MEN WHO STEERED THE STEAMBOATS THEIR TECHNICAL EDUCATION THE SHIPS THEY STEERED-FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS-HEROISM OF THE PILOTS - THE RACERS.

IT

T is the ordinary opinion, and one expressed too often in publications which might be expected to speak with some degree of accuracy, that river transportation in the United States is a dying industry. We read every now and then of the disappearance of the magnificent Mississippi River steamers, and the magazines not infrequently treat their readers to glowing stories of what is called the "flush" times on the Mississippi, when the gorgeousness of the passenger accommodations, the lavishness of the table, the prodigality of the gambling, and the mingled magnificence and outlawry of life on the great packets made up a picturesque and romantic phase of American life. It is true that much of the picturesqueness and the romance has departed long since. The great river no

longer bears on its turbid bosom many of the towering castellated boats built to run, as the saying was, on a heavy dew, but still carrying their tiers upon tiers of ivory-white cabins high in air. The time is past when the river was the great passenger thoroughfare from St. Louis to New Orleans. Some few packets still ply upon its surface, but in the main the passenger traffic has been diverted to the railroads which closely parallel its channel on either side. The American travels much, but he likes to travel fast, and for passenger traffic, except on a few routes where special conditions obtain, the steamboat has long since been outclassed by the railroads.

Yet despite the disappearance of its spectacular conditions the water traffic on the rivers of the Mississippi Valley is greater now than at any time in its history. Its methods only have changed. Instead of gorgeous packets crowded with a gay and prodigal throng of travelers for pleasure, we now find most often one dingy, puffing steamboat, probably with no passenger accommodations at all, but which pushes before her from Pittsburg to New Orleans more than a score of flatbottomed, square-nosed scows, aggregating perhaps more than an acre of surface, and heavy laden with coal. Such a towfor "tow" it is in the river vernacular, although it is pushed-will transport more in one trip than would suffice to load six heavy freight trains. Not infrequently the barges or scows will number more than thirty, carrying more than 1000 tons each, or a cargo exceeding in value $100,000. During the season when navigation is open on the Ohio and its tributaries, this traffic is pursued without interruption. Through it and through the local business on the lower Mississippi, and the streams which flow into it, there is built up a tonnage which shows the freight movement, at least, on the great rivers, to exceed, even in

these days of railroads, anything recorded in their history. No physical characteristic of the United States has contributed so greatly to the nationalization of the country and its people, as the topography of its rivers. From the very earliest days they have been the pathways along which proceeded exploration and settlement. Our forefathers, when they found the narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast which they had at first occupied, becoming crowded, according to their ideas at the time, began working westward, following the river gaps. Up the Hudson and westward by the Mohawk, up the Susquehanna and the Potomac, carrying around the falls that impeded the course of those streams, trudging over the mountains, and building flatboats at the headwaters of the Ohio, they made their way west. Some of the most puny streams were utilized for water-carriers, and the traveler of to-day on certain of the railroads through western New York and Pennsylvania, will be amazed to see the remnants of canals, painfully built in the beds of brawling streams, that now would hardly float an Indian birch-bark canoe. In their time these canals served useful purposes. The stream was dammed and locked every few hundred yards, and so converted into a placid waterway with a flight of mechanical steps, by which the boats were let down to, or raised up from tidewater. To-day nothing remains of most of these works of engineering, except masses of shattered masonry. For the railroads, using the river's bank, and sometimes even part of the retaining walls of the canals for their roadbeds, have shrewdly obtained and swiftly employed authority to destroy all the fittings of these waterways which might, perhaps, at some time, offer to their business a certain rivalry.

The corporation known as the Ohio Company, with a