[Illustration:  A VANISHING TYPE ON THE LAKES]

At the present time, when the project of a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans at the Central American Isthmus has almost passed out of the sphere of discussion and into that of action, there is suggestiveness in the part that the canal at the “Soo” played in stimulating lake commerce.  Until it was dug, the lake fleets grew but slowly, and the steamers were but few and far between.  Freight rates were high, and the schooners and sloops made but slow passages.  From an old bill, of about 1835, we learn that freight rates between Detroit and Cleveland, or Lake Erie points and Buffalo, were about as follows:  Flour, thirty cents a barrel; all grain, ten cents a bushel; beef, pork, ashes, and whisky, thirteen cents a hundred pounds; skins and furs, thirty-one cents a hundred weight; staves, from Detroit to Buffalo, $6.25 a thousand.  In 1831 there were but 111 vessels of all sorts on the lakes.  In five years, the fleet had grown to 262, and in 1845, the year when the first steamer entered Lake Superior, to 493.  In 1855, the year the “Soo” canal was opened, there were in commission 1196 vessels, steam and sail, on the unsalted seas.  Then began the era of prodigious development, due chiefly to that canal which Henry Clay, great apostle as he was of internal improvements, said would be beyond the remotest range of settlements in the United States or in the moon.

At the head of Lake Superior are almost illimitable beds of iron ore which looks like rich red earth, and is scooped up by the carload with steam shovels.  Tens of thousands of men are employed in digging this ore and transporting it to the nearest lake port—­Duluth and West Superior being the largest shipping points.  Railroads built and equipped for the single purpose of carrying the ore are crowded with rumbling cars day and night, and at the wharves during the eight or nine months of the year when navigation is open lie great steel ships, five hundred feet long, with a capacity of from six thousand to nine thousand tons of ore.  Perhaps in no branch of marine architecture has the type best fitted to the need been so scientifically determined as in planning these ore boats.  They are cargo carriers only, and all considerations of grace or beauty are rigidly eliminated from their design.  The bows are high to meet and part the heavy billows of the tempestuous lakes, for they are run as late into the stormy fall and early winter season as the ice will permit.  From the forward quarter the bulwarks are cut away, the high bow sheltering the forecastle with the crews, while back of it rises a deck-house of steel, containing the officers’ rooms, and bearing aloft the bridge and wheel-house.  Three hundred feet further aft rises another steel deck-house, above the engine, and between extends the long, flat deck, broken only by hatches every few feet, battened down almost level with the deck floor.  During the summer, all too short for the work the