Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783–1933

9. Commerce, Community Growth, Industrial-Urban Development, and the Changing Fish Habitat

9 Commerce, Community Growth, Industrial-Urban Development, and the Changing Fish Habitat Gill Nets Filled with Filth Accompanying and complementing the development of farming, lumbering , and mining in the rural landscape, the growth of commerce, transportation systems, manufacturing, and village, town, and city population centers introduced other kinds of physical changes in the Great Lakes drainage basin that altered lake waters and the kinds of fish life they supported . Nature's ready-made transportation system, the waterways, appealed to the first generation of developers as a way to move people and goods without the expense and delay of building roads. Moreover, the Great Lakes and the river systems radiating from them created the possibility of access to a very large part of the midcontinent, to the Atlantic Ocean by way of the St. Lawrence River, and to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi. The region's early eritrepreneurs dreamed of creating a great interconnecting waterway system to stimulate trade and develop markets. Budding communities along the lakes soon aspired to becoming important ports for trade and business, and well before the mid-nineteenth century, city fathers sought to dominate the commerce of their hinterlands and hoped to expand into national and international markets. A boomer 137 PART II. A DEVELOPING DRAINAGE BASIN, I8I5-I900 spirit permeated their thinking. Harbors had to be developed first. Then came canals to improve on nature's connections between lakes and rivers and, most elaborate of all, the grandest of waterway dreams, a series of canals to link the Great Lakes ports with the St. Lawrence River in a seaway , an all-water route to the North American midcontinent. That dream was very much a mid-nineteenth-century vision, as was that of railroad dominance of the North American land transportation system. Railroads quickly overtook waterways in importance, but never replaced them for certain kinds of traffic, particularly heavy, bulky cargoes. Instead, a kind of interdependent relationship developed between the two systems over time, and in this the Great Lakes and their canal systems continued to serve very important transportation functions. Ports became focal points linking railroads and waterways. Initial port development in the nineteenth century seems simple compared with the complex of facilities that had arisen in such cities as Toronto , Hamilton, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Duluth by the end of the century. Early improvements usually involved dredging to enlarge harbor entrances and to deepen rivers that flowed into the Great Lakes and building breakwaters, piers, docks, and warehouses. Wet, swampy lands often disappeared as construction crews extended shorelines and dug short canals to improve ships' access. Such canals included the one that cut through Minnesota Point to improve the harbor in Duluth . Once railroads became a reality, land-filled shore areas permitted rail lines to run close to the water and onto loading docks, making it easier to transfer cargo to and from ships. As the major ports grew into urban-industrial centers between 1870 and 1900, the disruption and extensive alteration of the naturallakefront escalated.I The most conspicuous example of massive physical change to accommodate industrial-urban development began before 1900 at the southern end of Lake Michigan, now Indiana's industrial duneland, with plans projected for East Chicago in 1887. Its promoters boosted it as a choice location for expansion of overcrowded Chicago industry. In Whiting, Indiana, Standard Oil began building a major refinery in 1889. Early in the twentieth century, U.S. Steel developed its mill in Gary, Indiana. Such industrial growth involved the extensive rearrangement of dunes, rivers, and wetlands and the construction of canals. The beneficial effects of vast areas of Lake Michigan's southernmost wetlands as water purifiers, water-flow control mechanisms, and feeding and breeding grounds for fish and other wildlife greatly diminished.2 Developers, like the majority of their contemporaries , gave scant thought to the consequences of their actions for the well-being of the natural world in general and certainly not to the fate of natural spawning and feeding grounds for the fish population. In yet other ways, growing port cities produced substantial changes in 138 Commerce, Growth, Industrial-Urban Development the habitats of the Great Lakes during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. The largest urban-industrial centers developed in the southern Great Lakes, with high concentrations of population and manufacturing activity. A combination of advantages-accessible means of transportation, bountiful natural resources, plentiful labor and...