Booms and Busts on the Great Lakes: Shipping, Cordwood and the Manitou Passage

Between 1878 and 1898, 6,000 vessels wrecked on the Great Lakes — 1,000 of them total losses of ship, cargo and everyone aboard. In the Manitou Passage alone — the 16-mile channel between the Lake Michigan shore and North and South Manitou Islands — there were hundreds of wrecks.

Why the lakes are so dangerous

• Ice: fresh water freezes at 32°F, salt water at about 28°F, and waves breaking over a ship can quickly coat it in ice.
• Waves: ocean waves are long rollers about 12 seconds apart; Great Lakes waves are steep, often breaking, and 3 to 5 seconds apart. Water crashes over boats instead of boats riding over it, and such waves can roll even large ships over — "turtle" them.

So why ship on them at all? The answer is economics.

Why roads couldn't compete

In the early 1800s, moving a cart of flour one mile cost 3 cents — 60 cents for twenty miles — when a pound of flour cost 4 cents (Massachusetts, 1811). Every mile cost almost the value of a pound of flour.

Roads were awful: mostly widened Native American trails of packed dirt, with potholes, rocks, swamps and roots, few bridges and long detours. Charles Dickens, touring America in the 1840s, called them "a series of alternate swamps and gravel pits." Even on turnpikes, freight cost at least 15 cents a ton per mile — about $3.58 today — and shipping a ton 300 miles overland cost more than shipping it from Philadelphia to Europe by sea.

Boats could carry far more, far faster — but only where there was water, and most ocean-linked waterways didn't reach far inland; even the St. Lawrence had impassable rapids. The Great Lakes could be a vast inland highway, if they could be reached from cities like New York.

The Erie Canal

Governor DeWitt Clinton proposed digging one: about 350 miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Critics mocked "Clinton's folly" and "Clinton's big ditch"; Thomas Jefferson reportedly called it "little short of madness" — a good idea, he thought, but too big for the young nation, and one that would hand the North great economic power.

It was unprecedented: 8 years, 3,000 laborers, 700 horses, about 192 million dollars in today's money — designed by four engineers who had never seen a canal, and built, it was said, "by guess and god." It opened in October 1825 and made New York an economic powerhouse. Freight from Buffalo to New York City fell from $100 a ton and 20 days to $5 and 6 days; by 1827, central New York wheat sold cheaper in Savannah than Georgia's own.

Great Lakes shipping exploded: boats went from hundreds to thousands, mostly sailing ships hauling grain, ore and wood from Buffalo toward Chicago. By 1846, lake commerce was worth an estimated $81,000,000, led by Buffalo ($49,000,000), Cleveland ($12,549,000), Toledo, Detroit, Erie and Chicago.

Boom: port towns of the Manitou Passage

Where boats went, settlers and immigrants followed — and so did trade. From the 1830s, steamships needed huge amounts of cordwood, and Michigan had it. Immigrants sailed from New York, stepped off at a stop on the way to Chicago, worked in the lumber mills, then cleared their own land and sold that lumber too.

The area that is now Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was perfectly placed. By cutting between the islands and the shore, ships saved 60 or 70 miles, and found deep, sheltered harbors, cordwood for their engines, and canned fruit and potatoes to carry to Chicago. Port towns sprang up all along the passage; a little under a century ago, the harbor off Glen Haven could be clogged with hundreds of vessels.

The shortcut had a price: rocky shoals, shifting sandbars and strong currents — visible by day, invisible at night — wrecked dozens of ships and drove many more ashore. The storm of 1913 lasted four days, with hurricane-force winds and 38–50-foot waves: 19 total losses, 20 ships stranded, 248 lives and $10,381,000 lost. Yet shipping was so big that even such losses barely dented it.

Sail versus steam

Steamers cost far more but earned far more. Schooners were often turned into barges, towed in strings of up to six behind a steamer — a train on water.

The difference in volume between cordwood and coal for the same energy: a ton of seasoned hardwood gives 12–20 million BTUs, a ton of coal 20 million. NPS photo / R. Klammer

Bust: coal, clearcuts and rail

Coal packed far more power into far less space, leaving more room for cargo, so ships gradually switched. Meanwhile the forests ran out. Benjamin Franklin had foreseen it in 1744: "Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man's Door, must now be fetch'd near 100 Miles to some towns…"

• South Manitou, with the better natural harbor, was settled first — and ran out of wood first.
• North Manitou, larger, was completely clearcut before coal came into wide use.
• Then Glen Haven, Glen Arbor and Port Oneida became the main ports.

Once ships burned coal — which the area didn't have — they no longer needed to stop. They still used the passage to save time, but sailed right through. Just after the turn of the century, rail became the cheapest way to move freight: costly to build, but no shoals, and a crew of two instead of about ten. Ships fought back with size: today's thousand-foot lake freighters each carry the equivalent of 700 rail cars.

The size difference between a hundred-foot schooner and a thousand-foot lake freighter. NPS photo / R. Klammer

Today

The port towns didn't survive on shipping; the settlements survived on tourism — when lumber ran out, they offered tours and buggy rides on the dunes. From the beach at Glen Haven, you can still see the remains of the cordwood dock — and thousand-foot freighters passing through the Manitou Passage, where 150 years ago boats crowded the water by the hundreds.

Sources

Based on "Booms and Busts of the Great Lakes and Manitou Passage," Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source's worked "mule math" example does not add up and is left out; its "Eerie" is corrected to Erie. Photographs credited to the National Museum of the Great Lakes and a private archive are not reproduced.