“Business before pleasure.”

A great many people take trips on these big lake boats just as they do on the ocean—for pleasure; but the chief reason for the great number of ships that go from one end of the lakes to the other is not pleasure but business. The business is carrying things, which we call freight. It is much cheaper to send things by ship than by train, for one big ship can carry much more than many trains, and ships do not have to have land and tracks to run on, as trains do. When we send freight by train we also call that “shipping,” which seems strange. Everyone would ship by ship instead of by train if he could, because it is so much cheaper, but of course you have to be near the water to ship by ship.

Fortunately, eight out of our forty-eight States are on the Great Lakes, although some of the States have only a small “frontage” on a lake. Michigan has the most frontage, by far. It fronts on four of the Great Lakes, all except Lake Ontario.

You remember that the Potomac Indians were great traders, paddling their canoes up and down the river, and swapping things they had for things they wanted. The Indians of the Great Lakes used to do the same thing. Nowadays the white man’s huge ships—thousands of times bigger than the Indians’ canoes made out of a single log—do the trading. They carry huge loads of freight from one end of the Great Lakes to the other, unloading at different places along the way the things that people want, and loading up with other freight to go back.

Most of the ships start at the far end of Lake Superior at a place called Duluth. Trains loaded with wheat come to Duluth from the wheat-lands west of that city, and other trains loaded with iron ore from mines near-by. Then huge machines on the shores of the lakes, with giant hands of iron, lift whole cars of wheat and ore and dump them into the ships waiting to be filled, as you would lift a toy car of your toy train and empty its load with two fingers. Other ships collect copper ore and also iron from that part of Michigan which is on Lake Superior. They then carry their loads through the Soo Canal and unload at a place called Detroit, between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, or carry their iron ore to Cleveland and Buffalo on Lake Erie. Most of the ships do not go past Niagara Falls.They load up again with things that have been made in New England, or in the east of the United States, or with coal from Pennsylvania, and go back to Duluth.

But when winter comes, all this trading up and down the lakes has to stop, for this part of the country is very cold and ice forms and stops the ships.