by Porter Fox
Ancestors of western tribes lived around the shores of Agassiz before it drained, and they passed on stories of the flood through the generations. The Huron may well have drawn the lake on birchbark at Lachine Rapids, leading Champlain to assume it was still there. By the time Brûlé made it to Huron Country, there was nothing left of it. Today, the remains of Agassiz can be seen four hundred miles northwest in Lake Winnipeg.
THE MAN WHO BUILT the first Great Lakes freighter was never supposed to go to America. René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was born in Rouen, France, in 1643. His father and uncle were wealthy merchants, and his family was connected to officials in the court of the newly crowned king Louis XIV. As a child, La Salle excelled in math and science. When he was nine, he enrolled in the Jesuit novitiate that his older brother, Jean, attended.
La Salle was brawny for his age. He was an athlete, headstrong, and imaginative. He was attractive and cunning too—all of which made him a terrible fit for the regimented structure of the Jesuit school. He was a dreamer—like Champlain, Cartier, Hudson, Verrazano, and many others in the Age of Discovery—and it wasn’t long before he followed their path across the Atlantic.
La Salle’s father died while his sons were at the novitiate. French law disallowed inheritance to be paid to men of the cloth, so the family’s wealth was not passed down. La Salle received a small allowance when he left school. He used the money to sail to New France in the spring of 1666, where his brother had taken a post as a priest in Montréal. Before he left, he added the family’s estate to his name, “Sieur de La Salle,” to make him sound more like a nobleman and gain leverage with officials in America.
Montréal was the most dangerous city on the continent at the time. The outpost was set on the outer fringe of New France and was under constant and bloody siege from Iroquois raiding parties. Gruesome attacks, scalpings, kidnappings, and torture were routine. The town consisted of one street, two rows of houses, a windmill, a hospital, and a stone fort for the governor. The priests of the Sainte-Sulpice church in Montréal owned most of the land and assigned seigniories—feudal tracts—around Montréal’s perimeter as a buffer to anyone who would take them. Jean arranged for a large tract opposite Lachine Rapids to be given to his brother, and La Salle moved onto it immediately.
La Salle subdivided some of his land between settlers and built a palisaded village with them. He was energetic to the point of obsession and spent two dangerous years in the wilderness improving the plot. He learned to speak Iroquois and allowed a band of Seneca to winter on his land. They told him about a great river in the west that flowed to the sea. La Salle mistook the Gulf of Mexico for the Pacific and, thinking that he had found a waterway to China, prepared an expedition.
North America was still very much up for grabs then. The British, who preferred to conquer Indians instead of working alongside them, clung to the coasts and had made little progress inland. New France dominated the northland, stretching from Acadia to Lake Superior. Because the British held the Hudson and James Bays, the journey back to Montréal with tons of pelts was arduous and expensive. A route to the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific could change the colony and the future of the continent.
The following spring, La Salle sold his land back to the priests (at a handsome profit), bought four birchbark canoes, hired fourteen men, and made plans to travel west with little idea of where he was going or what he would do when he got there. His timing was good. The Jesuits were planning an expedition to the Ohio Valley at the same time and wrapped his mission into theirs. They hired the Seneca that La Salle had befriended and a veteran soldier, François Dollier de Casson, to be their guides. To venture west of Montréal in the seventeenth century was wildly dangerous. The terrain was rough, remote, and unmapped. If you got sick, you would probably die. Provisions included bags of dried maize and whatever the guides could hunt and gather. If supplies ran out, expedition members paddled all day without eating. Everyone slept on the ground, no matter their rank, hopefully next to a fire. If it rained, guides constructed rickety tents from overturned canoes, birchbark, and sticks.
The journey was a moderate success. La Salle paddled the southern shore of Lake Ontario past the mouth of the Niagara River, where he heard the great cataract a few miles away but did not see it. He continued to the western end of the lake, where the town of Hamilton, Ontario, now stands. He faked a fever there so that he could separate from the Jesuits and paddle Lake Erie and the Ohio River. He explored as far west as the Illinois River, looking for the waterway the Seneca had told him about. It is unclear if he made it to the Mississippi on his first trip west. He would on his next journey. In what became a pattern in his life, his maniacal drive pushed his men to mutiny near the river, and La Salle made his way back to Lachine Rapids alone.
Being an explorer in America in the 1600s meant being a politician as well. You couldn’t simply head out and make a claim. Hundreds of charters, borders, territorial lines, and spheres of influence divided the northland. La Salle spent the next five years courting the new governor of New France—Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac—and securing a grant from the king to build a trading outpost at Cataraqui, on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. He built Fort Frontenac with stone ramparts, cannons, officers’ quarters, and a forge, mill, and bakery. He constructed a small chapel, watched over by two friars, and cleared a hundred acres of land, where farmers grew crops and raised livestock and fowl. Two military officers, a dozen soldiers, and a surgeon moved in. La Salle created a village for a few French families near the lake and granted them farms. He convinced a band of Iroquois to settle there as well. (His brash and manic way made it hard for Indians to tell whether he was friend or foe.) Four ships anchored on the lake were under his command as well, the largest a square-rigged forty-foot brig.
LA SALLE’S VISION OF RESTORING the family name was realized at Frontenac, but he had no intention of settling there. He sailed for France and returned in 1677 with a patent to explore pays d’en haut—the “upper country” around the Great Lakes. His plan was to transport supplies for a fifty-foot, two-masted ship above Niagara Falls on Lake Erie. Then he would build the first sailing freighter on the four Upper Great Lakes—and carry furs from the western shores of Lake Superior back to the Niagara River.
That fall, an advance team from Fort Frontenac sailed to the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario. The crew scrambled up the cliffs around the falls, found a building site on Lake Erie near Cayuga Creek, and contacted the local Seneca tribe. The Seneca lived along the western flank of Iroquoia. The French and Iroquois were enjoying a fragile peace, but the Seneca were not happy about the idea of Frenchmen setting up shop in their backyard. It was December and bitter cold by the time the builders arrived. Carpenters poured boiling water on the ground so they could dig footings for a fortified home and fell old-growth red maple and eastern hemlock for the ship. The snow was knee-deep, and temperatures dipped well below freezing.
The Great Lakes act as heat sinks, cooling the shoreline in the spring and summer and warming it in the fall. Warm fall air blowing off Lake Erie around the Niagara peninsula supports peach trees and grapevines, but when the first frost arrives, humid air becomes lake-effect snow. Lake-effect storms east of the Great Lakes drop more snow than anywhere in America—and left La Salle’s men to live and work in a continuous whiteout.
La Salle himself arrived a month later in a second ship, carrying cables, bolts, anchors, cordage, cannons, and other supplies. After landing, the boat dragged anchor in a big blow and was wrecked. La Salle and his crew dredged from a dory in below-zero temperatures, trying to salvage as much cargo as they could. Most of the provisions were lost.
Working in hostile territory in the middle of the winter with primitive tools and no food proved almost impossible. La Salle’s foreman, Henri de Tonti—a skilled, one-handed Italian officer—was a taskmaster. Carpenters milled lumber while their Mohegan guides built wigwams and hunted game to keep them from starving. Friar He
nnepin, the Récollet explorer who documented the journey, built a chapel and held services for the crew. The men hummed Gregorian chants and celebrated saint’s days when they weren’t shaping ribs and planking for the ship. Two weeks after they began, the crew managed to lay the keel. In the meantime, La Salle and two men walked 250 miles through three feet of snow—with a single bag of cornmeal to sustain them—to Fort Frontenac to resupply.
Historians have speculated that La Salle’s near-demonic energy could have been a symptom of mental illness. His risk-seeking spirit, grandiose visions, and violent mood swings are common signs of manic depression. He did not get along with his men, who thought his erratic behavior endangered their lives. In their journals, they described him as secretive, paranoid, and headstrong.
Tonti made great progress while La Salle was away. When the Seneca saw the massive skeleton of the ship take shape in the stocks, they made plans to sabotage it. The Iroquois traded with the English and Dutch. Even with assurances from Tonti and La Salle, they knew a French shipping route through the Upper Lakes would devastate their business. They made a plan to burn the boat in its stocks, but someone tipped Tonti off and he launched the ship early in May of 1679.
Le Griffon was a forty-five-ton barque with two masts. Nothing like it had ever been seen on the Upper Lakes. It was about fifty feet long and fifteen feet across, with high gunwales and a lofty galley. Beneath the bowsprit, shipwrights had carved an intricate griffon, sign of the Frontenac family. The ship was armed with five cannons, and the crew lit them all off at the launch ceremony. The show terrified and impressed the Seneca, who called the builders otkon, or “supernatural beings.”
The crew spent the next two months outfitting Le Griffon, rigging it with masts, sails, and lines. By the time La Salle returned in July, the ship was ready to push off. Twelve men dragged her to Lake Erie. They dropped anchor in a sheltered cove, far upstream from Niagara Falls, and waited for a following breeze. The wind turned on August 7, and thirty-four men unfurled the sails and headed west on a broad reach.
The crew was sailing uncharted waters that had been crossed only by canoe. A birchbark canoe draws about six inches in the water. Le Griffon’s keel likely reached at least five feet beneath the surface. Hundreds of underwater shoals and rocks—now marked by lighthouses, buoys, and charts—were invisible to the pilot. La Salle used a rough map created ten years before by René de Bréhant de Galinée and sounded continuously with a lead line. The pilot passed Long Point, then the grassy shores where Cleveland and Toledo stand today. Le Griffon reached the mouth of the Detroit River in three days—a three-hundred-mile journey that would typically take a trader a week or two in a canoe. From there, Le Griffon sailed north to Lake Saint Clair and the Saint Clair River, then waited two weeks at the southern end of Lake Huron for the weather to settle.
Not one to take things slowly, La Salle wanted to sail to the edge of Lake Huron on Le Griffon’s maiden voyage. The crew set out on the first calm day, but hours later a violent gale blew down the lake. The wind howled from the southeast all day and night. Deckhands lowered the topmasts to keep them from breaking. They lashed sails to booms and let the boat drift for an entire day. At one point the pilot fell to his knees and prayed. The crew followed, promising to build Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of sailors, a chapel if he rescued them from the storm. Saint Anthony came through. The wind blew Le Griffon northwesterly through open water, past Presque Isle and Rogers City. When the wind died, the ship was a short sail away from a Jesuit mission on Mackinac Island—seventy miles northeast of Traverse City.
Huron, Ottawa, and a dozen Frenchmen who were camped on Mackinac gawked at the ship as it approached. La Salle put on a show and lit off Le Griffon’s cannons as a hundred birchbark canoes paddled out from shore to see the spectacle. It was La Salle’s moment. He arrived on land wearing a plumed hat and scarlet cloak trimmed with lace. He attended mass at a small chapel and was welcomed by all, though most seethed at his accomplishment. Jesuits in black robes, coureurs des bois in deerskin shirts and moccasins, Récollet priests, and even his own sailors prayed alongside him, while wondering what the madman’s next move would be. With one trip, La Salle had changed the fur trade in America and carved a commercial artery deep into the continent. He had also rendered the services offered by most traders at the camp obsolete.
La Salle departed for Green Bay, Wisconsin, on September 12 to meet an advanced crew he had sent out months before to gather furs. He found fifteen of his men with the Pottawatomi Indians, along with twelve thousand pounds of pelts. It was a massive haul to move at one time. And to move it with such ease, on a defensible floating fort, was unheard of.
La Salle wanted to continue his mission to the Mississippi by canoe, and because Tonti was in Sault Ste. Marie arresting men who had abandoned the advance group, he was forced to send his pilot and Le Griffon back to the Niagara River without him. The ship set out on a calm day, but a violent storm blew in that night. La Salle’s fleet of canoes was driven up on a rocky inlet for several days. Le Griffon was never seen again.
La Salle speculated that the pilot had scuttled the ship and taken the furs. Others guess that competing traders or Indians attacked it to save their business. Father Hennepin’s journal states that the ship was lost in a storm, but many theories have circulated since. The wreck of Le Griffon has never been found.
La Salle continued his journey south to the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers and became the first European to navigate from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Once there, he planted a flag and claimed the region for the king. He called the territory “Louisiana.”
Governor Frontenac had been replaced by the time La Salle made it back to Montréal. The explorer did not receive a hero’s welcome. His creditors wanted their money back and seized his property. The new governor accused him of threatening the fragile peace with the Iroquois. La Salle’s discoveries on the Mississippi were deemed insignificant, but the volatile explorer returned to the river anyway. He traveled to the Gulf of Mexico to set up a French colony in Texas and a string of others reaching all the way back to Montréal. In the end, the man who had claimed a third of America for France died in an ambush carried out by his own men.
It would be fifty years before another ship was built on the lakes. It, too, was constructed by a Frenchman—Louis Denis, Sieur de La Ronde—to move copper from the Keweenaw Point and Isle Royale mines. Thirty years later the ship was replaced by four more. Following the collapse of New France, the British operated sixteen boats on the lakes. By the mid-1800s, the number of freighters had grown to 1,300, and the Great Lakes had become the main corridor of trade and travel in the northland.
7
IT LOOKED LIKE NIGHT. THE SKY AND LAND WERE DARK. FLAMES blazed above tall, cylindrical smokestacks, casting orange light on the ship. The waterfront was barricaded by dunes of iron ore pellets and coal. It was nine in the morning. The water was oily green. I looked through the porthole in my cabin and saw a truck pour molten slag into a ditch. A bright-orange splash flew into the water and incinerated a duck swimming by.
We were north of the border, in Hamilton, Ontario—the same lakeside outpost where La Salle faked his fever and left the Jesuits. The city sits on the western tip of Lake Ontario, thirty miles west of Niagara Falls. The scene outside was the ArcelorMittal Dofasco steel mill. The Equinox docked there at 5:15 a.m., and the crew began unloading iron pellets from the holds forty-five minutes later.
Hamilton Harbor had been the western terminus of shipping on Lake Ontario for more than three centuries. Fur passed through first. Then timber, grain, and coal. When iron mines around Lake Superior met Appalachian coal in the 1800s, the Great Lakes became the steel center of North America. Hamilton was a keystone in the evolution of the Great Lakes industrial and agricultural complex that shaped much of the northland that we know today.
Innovators around the lakes fueled the transformation. John Deere developed the steel plow in 1837 in Grand Det
our, Illinois—fifty miles from the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Joseph Dart invented the steam-powered grain elevator in 1842 in Buffalo. Chicago’s streets hadn’t been paved yet when Cyrus McCormick started producing mechanical reapers there in 1847. Patent lawyers were more in demand than investors at the time. McCormick battled Abraham Lincoln and George Harding, both patent lawyers, in court to protect his copyright. Lincoln worked and traveled on freighters on the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes and later filed his own patent for a bellows mechanism to help float ships over shallow shoals.
Industry expanded, and people followed. The first major cities in the northland cropped up in lakeside centers like Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, Traverse City, and Green Bay. Industrial, civilian, and maritime networks connected factories, farms, mines, and cities, creating a singular, multistate economic region now known as the Great Lakes megalopolis. Nearly sixty million people live in the megalopolis today. With a gross regional product of $4.5 trillion annually, it represents the third largest economy in the world.
Third Mate Ian D’Mello was alone in the wheelhouse. He was the youngest officer on the boat. He had a baby face and wide, brown eyes that made him look incredibly excited about every day he spent on the Equinox. He graduated from the marine training program at Ontario’s Georgian College—along with most other mates sailing the lakes. He grew up in Toronto and sailed on ocean freighters for two and a half years to China, Japan, and South America. “That was more monotonous,” he said. “You leave the harbor and go in a straight line for two weeks. On the lakes, most of the time you are in a river or navigating a tight lock. You only get to relax on the long runs.”
At eye level from the wheelhouse, two crane operators suspended in glass cabs controlled clamshell loaders over the Equinox’s cargo holds. One dropped the claws a hundred feet into a pile of iron ore. It emerged five seconds later with fifteen tons of pellets. Two bucket loaders the size of a two-story garage drove around the bottom of the hold, pushing pellets into piles.