The Death and Life of the Great Lakes Dan Egan

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In memory of Michael Faricy
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: THE FRONT DOOR

Chapter 1. CARVING A FOURTH SEACOAST
DREAMS OF A SEAWAY

Chapter 2. THREE FISH

THE STORY OF LAKE TROUT, SEA LAMPREYS AND ALEWIVES

Chapter 3. THE WORLD'S GREAT FISHING HOLE

THE INTRODUCTION OF COHO AND CHINOOK SALMON

Chapter 4. NOXIOUS CARGO

THE INVASION OF ZEBRA AND QUAGGA MUSSELS

PART TWO: THE BACK DOOR

Chapter 5. CONTINENTAL UNDIVIDE
ASIAN CARP AND CHICAGO’S BACKWARDS RIVER
 Chapter 6. CONQUERING A CONTINENT
THE MUSSEL INFESTATION OF THE WEST

Chapter 7. NORTH AMERICA’S “DEAD” SEA

TOXIC ALGAE AND THE THREAT TO TOLEDO'S WATER SUPPLY

PART THREE: THE FUTURE

Chapter 8. PLUGGING THE DRAIN
THE NEVER-ENDING THREAT TO SIPHON AWAY GREAT LAKES WATER

Chapter 9. A SHAKY BALANCING ACT

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE FALL AND RISE OF THE LAKES

Chapter 10. A GREAT LAKE REVIVAL

CHARTING A COURSE TOWARD INTEGRITY, STABILITY AND BALANCE

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index
The Great Lakes watershed.
 INTRODUCTION

There are few views that can draw noses to airplane windows like
those of the Great Lakes. From on high, the five lakes that straddle
the U.S. and Canadian border can appear impossibly blue, tantalizing
as the Caribbean. Standing on their shores and staring out at their
ocean-like horizons, it hits you that the Great Lakes are, in one
significant way, superior to even the Seven Seas. The Great Lakes,
after all, are so named not just for their size but for the fact that
their shorelines cradle a global trove of the most coveted liquid of all
—freshwater.
The world’s largest freshwater system has captured the public’s
imagination since the first European explorers arrived on the shores
of the “sweet water seas” in the early 1600s convinced—or at least
ever-hopeful—that on their far shores lay the riches of China. In
1634 voyageur Jean Nicolet paddled his birch bark canoe across
northern Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinac and headed
for the western side of Lake Michigan—a place no white man had
evidently ever set eyes upon. Nicolet arrived in a bay on the far
shore of Lake Michigan apparently trying to look like a local—in a
flowing Chinese robe bursting with colorful flowers and birds.
Although he might have thought he had finally finished the job
Columbus started a century and a half earlier, he actually landed on
the southern end of an arm of Lake Michigan known as Green Bay.
There is a statue today of Nicolet in that robe that stands near the
reputed landing site. It’s 20 minutes north of Lambeau Field, some
7,000 miles shy of Shanghai.
It’s hard to fault Nicolet if he really did believe his journey had
taken him to Asia, because there were no Old World analogues for
the scope of the lakes he was trying to navigate. The biggest lake in
France, after all, is 11 miles long and about 2 miles wide; the sailing
distance between Duluth, Minnesota, on the Great Lakes’ western
end and Kingston, Ontario, on their eastern end is more than 1,100
miles. No, the bodies of water formally known as the Laurentian
Great Lakes are not mere lakes, not in the normal sense of the
word. Nobody staring across Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie or
Superior would consider the interconnected watery expanse that
sprawls across 94,000 square miles just a lake, any more than a
visitor waking up in London is likely to think of himself as stranded
on just an island (the United Kingdom, in fact, also happens to span
some 94,000 square miles).
A normal lake sends ashore ripples and, occasionally, waves a
foot or two high. A Great Lake wave can swell to a tsunami-like 25
feet. A normal lake, if things get really rough, might tip a boat. A
Great Lake can swallow freighters almost three times the length of a
football field; the lakes’ bottoms are littered with an estimated 6,000
shipwrecks, many of which have never been found. This would never
happen on a normal lake, because a normal lake is knowable. A
Great Lake can hold all the mysteries of an ocean, and then some.
In 1950, when Northwest Airlines flight 2501 flying from New
York City to Seattle disappeared from radio contact after it hit a
summer storm over Lake Michigan, it was at the time the worst
commercial aviation accident in U.S. history. The Coast Guard and
Navy dispatched five ships to look for the wreckage. They dropped
sonar devices, divers and drag lines into the lake to hunt for the
nearly 100-foot-long fuselage that carried 58 souls.
The wreck has never been found.
Here is a different way to grasp the scale of the Great Lakes.
Roughly 97 percent of the globe’s water is saltwater. Of the 3
percent or so that is freshwater, most is locked up in the polar ice
caps or trapped so far underground it is inaccessible. And of the
sliver left over that exists as surface freshwater readily available for
human use, about 20 percent of that—one out of every five gallons
available on the planet—can be found in the Great Lakes. This is not
an insignificant fact at a time when more than three-quarters of a
billion people don’t have regular access to safe drinking water.
In 1995, World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin made a
provocative prediction: “The wars of this century have been fought
over oil, and the wars of the next century will be on water . . .”
Perhaps. But the biggest enemy facing the Great Lakes in the early
21st century is not would-be profiteers seeking to siphon them off to
make far-away deserts bloom. The biggest threat to the lakes right
now is our own ignorance.
Nearly 500 years after Nicolet first nosed his canoe into the
waters of Lake Michigan we are still treating the lakes the same way,
as liquid highways that promise a shortcut to unimaginable fortune.
Nicolet might have made an honest mistake. The same won’t be said
for us, because continuing to exploit the world’s largest expanse of
freshwater in this manner is wreaking increasingly disastrous
consequences.

YOU MAY THINK YOU KNOW THE MODERN HISTORY OF THE GREAT
Lakes. The story of how by the middle of the 20th century industrial
and municipal pollution smothered their beaches, of how hundreds
of square miles of open water at that time were so devoid of oxygen
they were declared “dead,” and of how the rivers that feed the lakes
suffocated under chronic slicks of chemicals and oils prone to
combust. And then the story of their revival, of how all the industrial
plundering and wanton polluting finally spurred passage of the
landmark Clean Water Act of 1972.
That law did indeed bring dramatic reductions in the wastes
tumbling into the lakes, and their recovery was as fast as it was
dramatic. This is why lakefronts from Toronto to Milwaukee today
glimmer with the glass of luxury condos and office towers, and why
the land they sit atop is among the most expensive real estate in the
Midwest. This is why Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, which famously
exploded in flames, now draws more fishing lines than punch lines.
And this is why when you cruise along Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive on
a hot summer afternoon you will see hundreds of people lounging on
the beach and splashing in the Lake Michigan surf, all literally in the
shadows of the John Hancock Center and its neighboring
skyscrapers. It all gives the impression that humans and the lakes
have finally learned to get along. It’s a mirage.
The story of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes takes you
beneath the lakes’ shimmering surface and illuminates an ongoing
and unparalleled ecological unraveling of what is arguably North
America’s most precious natural resource. It’s about how the Great
Lakes were resuscitated after a century’s worth of industrial abuse
only to be hit with an even more vexing environmental catastrophe.
Tragically for the Great Lakes, the Clean Water Act helped to lull
much of the public into thinking that the lakes had hit their nadir and
were on their way to recovery throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
But the law—or, more specifically, the agency charged with enforcing
it—in fact did unfathomable damage to the lakes. It turned out that
federal environmental regulators decided to exempt one industry’s
form of “living pollution”—biologically contaminated water
discharged from freighters. This exemption included overseas ships
sailing up the manmade St. Lawrence Seaway that links the lakes to
the Atlantic Ocean and to ports around the globe—China, finally,
included.
The Seaway, which opened in 1959 with all the hoopla of a lunar
landing, never lived up to its hype. Today an average of only about
two overseas freighters visits the Great Lakes each day during the
nine-month shipping season (the Seaway closes each winter due to
ice). The oceangoing ships that make the trip into the lakes aren’t
super-sized container vessels hauling high-value goods like Sonys
and Toyotas. The cramped shipping channels of the Seaway can only
accommodate 1930s-sized freighters, and these ships typically bring
in foreign steel and haul out U.S. and Canadian grain. But the
Seaway ships have also been hauling something not listed on their
manifests—noxious species from ports all over the world that are
inexorably unstitching a delicate ecological web more than 10,000
years in the making.
The Environmental Protection Agency apparently received no
statutory authority from Congress to make this exemption for
Seaway vessels and other freighters visiting U.S. waters. The
agency, for whatever reason, decided to quietly tweak the
regulations the year after the Clean Water Act was passed, probably
to save some hassle and money by giving the shipping industry a
free pass to dump their ship-steadying ballast water. The rationale at
the time was that ballast tanks weren’t full of noxious stuff like oils
or acids. They held nothing but seawater. The folly here is that
ballast water isn’t just water. It swarms with perhaps the most
potent pollutant there is: DNA.
It would be hard to design a better invasive species delivery
system than the Great Lakes overseas freighter. The vessels pick up
ballast water at a foreign port to balance less-than-full cargo loads.
When the ships arrive in the Great Lakes, cargo is taken onboard
and the ballast water—up to 10 Olympic swimming pools’ worth per
ship—and all the life lurking in it gets set loose in the lakes. As one
exasperated Great Lakes biologist once told me: “These ships are
like syringes.”
The Great Lakes are now home to 186 nonnative species. None
has been more devastating than the Junior Mint–sized zebra and
quagga mussels, two closely related mollusks native to the Black and
Caspian Seas. A college kid on a field trip in the late 1980s was the
first to discover them in the Great Lakes. In less than 20 years the
mussels went from novel find to the lakes’ dominant species. Sandy
beaches still rim the lakes, but if Lake Michigan, for example, were
drained it would now be possible to walk almost the entire 100 miles
between Wisconsin and Michigan on a bed of trillions upon trillions
of filter-feeding quagga mussels.
 The mussels, which have no worthy natural predators in North
America, have transformed the lakes into some of the clearest
freshwater on the planet. But this is not the sign of a healthy lake;
it’s the sign of a lake having the life sucked out of it.
The cumulative toll of the EPA’s long-standing ballast water
exemption (an exemption that it is now under court order to remedy
—someday, or decade) is far more dire than a burning chemical slick
on a polluted river. Native fish populations have been decimated.
Bird-killing botulism outbreaks plague lakeshores. Poisonous algae
slicks capable of shutting down public water supplies have become a
routine summertime threat. A virus that causes deadly hemorrhaging
in dozens of species of fish, dubbed by some scientists the “fish
Ebola,” has become endemic in the lakes—and threatens to spread
across the continent.

ICONIC DISASTERS HAVE A HISTORY OF PROMPTING GOVERNMENT

action. Three years after the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, Congress
passed the Clean Water Act. Two decades later, when the Exxon
Valdez ran aground and dumped 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into
Alaska’s Prince William Sound, images of cleanup crews using paper
towels to cleanse tarred birds helped press Congress into doing
something it should have done years earlier. It mandated double-
hulled oil tankers.
But the disaster unfolding today on the Great Lakes didn’t ignite
like a polluted river or gush like oil from a cracked hull, and so far
there is no galvanizing image of this slow-motion catastrophe,
though a few come to my mind. One is the bow of an overseas ship
easing its way into the first navigation lock on the St. Lawrence
Seaway, the Great Lakes’ “front door” to fresh waves of biological
pollution. Another is a satellite photo of a green-as-paint toxic algae
slick smothering as much as 2,000 square miles of Lake Erie.
 Yet another is the grotesque mug of an Asian carp, a monster-
sized carp imported to the United States in the 1960s and used in
government experiments to gobble up excrement in Arkansas
sewage lagoons. The fish, which can grow to 70 pounds and eat up
to 20 percent of their weight in plankton per day, escaped into the
Mississippi River basin decades ago and have been migrating north
ever since. They are now mustering at the Great Lakes’ “back
door”—the Chicago canal system that created a manmade
connection between the previously isolated Great Lakes and the
Mississippi basin, which covers about 40 percent of the continental
United States. The only thing blocking the fish’s swim through
downtown Chicago and into Lake Michigan is an electrical barrier in
the canal—one that has a history of unexpected shutdowns.
The Chicago canal has also turned the Great Lakes’ ballast water
problem into a national one, because there are dozens of invasive
species poised to ride its waters out of the lakes and into rivers and
water bodies throughout the heart of the continent. Species like the
spiny water flea, the threespine stickleback, the bloody red shrimp
and the fishhook water flea. All organisms you probably haven’t
heard of. Yet.
Few out West, after all, had ever heard of quagga mussels—until
they tumbled down the Chicago canal and metastasized across the
Mississippi basin and, eventually, into the arid West, likely as
hitchhikers aboard recreational boats towed over the Rocky
Mountains. The mussels have since unleashed havoc on
hydroelectric dams, drinking water systems and irrigation networks
in Utah, Nevada and California and the federal government
estimates that if the mussels make their way into the Northwest’s
Columbia River hydroelectric dam system they could do a half billion
dollars of damage—per year.
The engineers, water managers and biologists out West who
view the Great Lakes as a beachhead for invasions that inevitably go
national look at the Seaway and are incredulous at the recklessness
of leaving this door to the entire continent open. So are most
people, once they understand the vastness of the problem, and the
tiny industry causing so much of it.
If we can close these doors to future invasions, we may give the
lakes, and the rest of the country, time to reach a new equilibrium, a
balance between what is left of the natural inhabitants and all the
newcomers (there are already signs in some areas of the lakes that
native fish are adapting to a diet based on zebra and quagga
mussels). And if we do this, then we can focus on the major
problems that still plague the lakes, which include the
overapplication of farm fertilizer that is helping to trigger the
massive toxic algae outbreaks, the impact a warming globe is having
on the lake’s increasingly unstable water levels and the need to
protect lake waters from outsiders seeking to drain them for their
own profit.
Like generations of the past, we know the damage we are doing
to the lakes, and we know how to begin to stop it; unlike
generations of the past, we aren’t doing it.
This situation reminds me of those black-and-white photos of
settlers standing next to a mountain of bison skulls during the Great
Plains slaughters of the late 1800s. The skulls were considered
garbage at the time. Some were crushed and used as a cheap form
of pavement, before they became so rare so quickly that by the early
1900s they were already fetching $400 apiece from collectors trying
to cling to a fragment of what had been squandered.
Every time I see one of those pictures I’m struck with two
thoughts. What in the hell were they thinking? And, more
importantly: Is what we are we doing to the Great Lakes today going
to leave our own great-grandchildren equally baffled?
PART ONE
THE
FRONT
DOOR
 Chapter 1

CARVING A FOURTH SEACOAST

DREAMS OF A SEAWAY

In 1957 legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite—lauded as the

most trusted man in America —stared into the camera and told
viewers that the “greatest engineering feat of our time” was under
way. He wasn’t talking about the Soviet Union rocketing the stray
dog Laika into orbit, or that year’s development of the first wearable
pacemaker, or the recent opening of the United States’ first
commercial atomic power plant. He was talking about humans
“conquering” nature on a scale and in a fashion never before
attempted.
“Right now the greatest concentration of heavy machinery ever
assembled—over 3,000 pieces of equipment—are at work on one of
the greatest projects in the history of mankind,” Cronkite said as he
stood in front of a map of the deep blue Great Lakes and the even
deeper blue Atlantic Ocean. He fixed his eyes on the camera and
spoke boldly of a construction project that would, in effect, do no
less than move the Atlantic Ocean more than 1,000 miles inland, to
the middle of North America.
The idea was to scrape and blast a navigation channel along and
through the shallow, tumbling St. Lawrence River that flows from the
Great Lakes out to the ocean in a manner that would allow giant
freighters to steam from the East Coast into the five massive
freshwater inland seas. This manmade nautical expressway, as
narrow as 80 feet in places and, in one particularly tight section,
crossing over a roadway, would open up some 8,000 miles of U.S.
and Canadian coastline to ships from around the world. The hope
was that essentially landlocked Great Lakes cities like Chicago,
Cleveland, Detroit and Toronto would blossom into global ports to
rival commercial hubs such as New York, Rotterdam and Tokyo.
The project, Cronkite told his viewers, was big, big as “reshaping
a continent, completing the job nature had begun thousands of
years ago—of creating an eighth sea . . . a sea of opportunity!”
More than a half century later, the hoped-for flood of global
cargo has yet to roar into the lakes from overseas, but something
else has—an environmental scourge whose scope and costs are
spreading by the day. The St. Lawrence Seaway, you see, didn’t
conquer nature at all.
It unleashed it in the form of an ecological catastrophe unlike any
this continent has seen.

IT IS HARD TO FAULT CRONKITE TODAY FOR HIS OPTIMISM, BECAUSE

the nautical magic he and so many others were convinced the
Seaway would uncork had happened before. Some six million years
ago, the Mediterranean Sea itself was isolated from the Atlantic
Ocean. It was little more than a salty puddle at the bottom of a vast
basin laced with dusty canyons, some of which plunged more than a
mile below sea level. This arid wasteland had previously been a
massive Atlantic Ocean inlet, as it is today. But then a tectonic fusion
of Africa and Europe created a narrow strip of land that plugged the
Mediterranean’s connection to the Atlantic Ocean near what is now
the Strait of Gibraltar. This pretty much killed the ancient
Mediterranean Sea, which owed its existence to a constant inflow of
ocean water, just as it does today. With that Atlantic input plugged,
the rivers feeding the suddenly landlocked basin proved too feeble to
keep pace with evaporation, and the sea all but vanished in about
1,000 years—which is to say, geologically speaking, nothing. But on
a human scale the sea would have shrunk at an imperceptibly slow
pace; each day on its shores would have seemed exactly like the
last.
The Mediterranean Sea basin, one popular theory goes, remained
in this desiccated state for the next 700,000 years or so. But about
5.3 million years ago a seismic hiccup at the Gibraltar isthmus
opened a small channel for the Atlantic Ocean to begin dribbling
back in. The trickle soon turned to a torrent, many of today’s
geologists reckon, as an ever-widening and deepening tongue of
saltwater roared back into the basin with incomprehensible speed,
volume and violence. It carried the equivalent of some 40,000
Niagara Falls flowing at about 90 miles per hour. This all happened
around the time our ancestors’ thigh bones formed a bridge with
their hips strong enough to allow them to walk upright and, perhaps
—if any of them happened to be in the area at the time the Atlantic
came roaring back—to run.
At the peak of the Atlantic cascade the new Mediterranean Sea
was rising at a rate of about 30 feet per day, and geologists
hypothesize that the entire basin—roughly 2,500 miles long and 500
miles wide—could have filled to sea level in less than three years.
The Mediterranean’s revival indubitably wrought devastation for
the terrestrial creatures scratching out a life in the scorched basin,
including dwarf elephants and hippos. But it proved a boon for the
dolphins and fish and even microscopic life sucked in from the North
Atlantic. The devastation also, eventually, opened the door for
civilization to blossom, because the Mediterranean Sea connected
cultures and economies in a manner that would not have been
possible had the basin remained a desert. Today the Mediterranean
gives 21 countries from three continents nautical access to each
other and—thanks to the eight-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar carved
by the Atlantic Ocean—to the rest of the globe.
 About 7,600 years ago, the Black Sea was isolated from the
Atlantic Ocean. It was an inland freshwater lake cut off from the
Mediterranean Sea to the west by a spit of land called the Bosporus
Valley. At the peak of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago, so
much of the earth’s water was tied up in glaciers that, according to
some estimates, sea level was nearly 400 feet lower than it is today.
As the glaciers melted and the oceans rose, so did the
Mediterranean. And eventually the Mediterranean did to the Black
Sea what the Atlantic Ocean had done to it more than 5 million
years earlier: it came crashing in.
The speed with which this happened, as well as its scale, is a
matter of some controversy, but a popular hypothesis is that the
salty water tumbled in at a force equivalent to 200 Niagara Falls. The
inundation that submerged some 60,000 square miles under
hundreds of feet of water happened so swiftly—some geologists
estimate the sea was rising at a rate of about six inches per day—
that it would have sent scrambling any humans who had found the
lakeshore an oasis in an otherwise parched landscape. The salty
water also ravaged the lake’s freshwater biological community,
rendering extinct the species that could not adapt and sending
others—like the Black Sea sturgeon—darting for safety in the
freshwater rivers that still feed the sea today.
To call this a natural disaster of biblical proportions is what two
Columbia University geophysicists did when they published a book in
1998 titled Noah’s Flood. They argue that this geologic event, which
is commonly known as the Black Sea Deluge, could be the
inspiration for the great flood stories of the past, including the one in
the Book of Genesis. That two geologists contend a real flood could
be tied to a story in the Bible was not without some controversy in
the academic community—and, of course, among believers. But
leaving aside any biblical implications, their geological evidence for
the disaster itself is solid. And, like the torrent that roared through
the Strait of Gibraltar millions of years earlier, there was an upside to
it; the merging of the Black and Mediterranean Seas opened up a
critical nautical link stretching from Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. Today
the Bosporus Strait is one of the world’s busiest shipping channels,
with freighters sailing from the once-landlocked Black Sea to ports
around the globe.
About 200 years ago, North America’s Great Lakes, the largest
expanse of freshwater in the world, remained essentially isolated
from the Atlantic Ocean. For thousands of years, the five inland seas
wrapped by more than 10,000 miles of shoreline (islands included)
sat cloistered in the middle of the continent. The four “upper” lakes
—Erie, Huron, Michigan and Superior—lie some 600 feet above the
level of the ocean, which made them unreachable from the Atlantic
by boat. Much of that elevation is gained at the dolomite cliffs that
are Niagara Falls, over which the collective outflows of all those lakes
tumble on their way into Lake Ontario and from there down the
thundering St. Lawrence River on their rush to the ocean.
Like the plugs of land that once isolated the basins that are now
the Mediterranean and Black Seas, erosion has been having its way
with Niagara Falls. It is expected the falls will disappear in about
50,000 years—which is to say, geologically speaking, pretty soon.
When that happens, the cliffs that have for millennia separated the
upper Great Lakes from the Eastern Seaboard will be gone. All that
will remain is a fast-flowing, ever-eroding riverbed that will draw the
lakes, every day, one step closer to sea level. How this all precisely
plays out in terms of perhaps opening a nature-carved sailing route
between the middle of the continent and the ocean is a matter of
geological conjecture that won’t be answered for eons—an
unbearably long period for the 19th- and 20th-century Great Lakes
politicians and businessmen who were not content to leave the lakes
as they had found them, as isolated inland seas upon which giant
cargo boats could float from one Midwestern city to another, but
never out to the ocean.
Their idea was to finish the job nature started when the last
glaciers carved out the Great Lakes basins 10,000 years ago. Their
dream was to create, by the hand of man, a North American “Fourth
Seacoast,” thus flexing the Midwest’s burgeoning manufacturing
might across the globe, prying open new markets in far-away cities
and squeezing from them all manner of exotic bounty. They lusted
for their own Mediterranean, for their own Strait of Gibraltar or
Bosporus to emerge, but they were not willing to wait for such a
natural disaster to unfold.
So they hatched an unnatural one.

THE MAP PRACTICALLY TAUNTED THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA to

build the St. Lawrence Seaway. The tendril of blue reaching out to
the Atlantic Ocean from Lake Ontario—the Gulf of St. Lawrence and
the St. Lawrence River that feeds it—stretches some 1200 miles
inland. And, on a map, that flat ribbon of blue continues on from
Lake Ontario, through Lake Erie, into Lakes Michigan and Huron and
all the way across Lake Superior to Duluth, Minnesota, on its
western shore. If you were to plot a voyage based on this map, you
might assume you could paddle or sail your way from the Atlantic
Coast almost to the dead-center of North America—a distance of
about 2,300 miles. And, in a boat, you would indeed find waters as
flat as those on a map for almost half the trip. But everything
changes about 1,000 miles inland.
Jacques Cartier, the first European known to reach the area by
boat, learned this firsthand when the yawning river up which he
sailed so effortlessly in 1535 turned narrow and vicious in an instant.
The 44-year-old lifelong explorer, descended from a long line of
mariners, had been handpicked by France’s King Francis I to find a
nautical shortcut across North America to tap the riches of Asia and,
of course, to pick up any gold and silver nuggets he found along the
way.
The summer before, Cartier led a two-boat expedition across the
Atlantic Ocean that probed as far west as the Gulf of St. Lawrence
but stopped short of sailing up the St. Lawrence River that feeds it.
He returned to France that fall, his cargo hold empty of precious
metals but his head filled with Native American tales that a vast sea
did indeed lie at the head of the St. Lawrence River. The next year
the king gave Cartier 110 men and three boats, including one
specially modified to sail up rivers.
The boat wasn’t special enough for the St. Lawrence job. No boat
would be for hundreds of years.
Just upstream from the island that is now downtown Montreal,
Cartier encountered a set of oversized rapids, a word that doesn’t
adequately capture how angry and impenetrable to upstream
navigation this river was. There were waves approaching six feet in
height, like those you’d expect to see on an ocean beach when the
red no-swim flags are snapping. But these waves didn’t crash. They
forever arced, never tumbling into a froth that might be breached by
some well-timed paddling. It was a standing, ever-rolling wall of
water created by the plunging St. Lawrence riverbed. Cartier
remained convinced there were loads of gold beyond the waves and,
perhaps, the fabled shortcut to Asia, but the water was so violent it
stopped him mid-voyage. He turned around and sailed back down
the river. The French explorers who came after remained convinced
that somewhere beyond this violent water lay the riches of China,
and the rapids today remain named Lachine, which is French for that
promised land.
The voyageurs who eventually pressed further inland by
portaging their birch bark canoes around the rapids quickly learned
that far upstream lay something almost as miraculous: a set of
connected fish-filled freshwater seas larger than any explorer had
ever encountered, surrounded by forests of pine and hardwoods that
teemed with game—and pelts—on a scale incomprehensible in
Europe. But the Lachine Rapids were just the first line of defense for
what would one day be called the Great Lakes. In the thousand
miles or so it took to sail from the Atlantic to Montreal, the St.
Lawrence River rose all of 18 feet. In the 189 miles upstream from
Montreal to Lake Ontario the river climbed some 245 feet in a series
of impassable torrents.
Then the real whitewater started. On the far side of Lake Ontario
lay another frothing river that gained about 160 feet in just 35 miles.
Anyone who tried to paddle or portage up that gorge hit a wall.
Literally.
Niagara Falls are what made the Great Lakes unique in the
natural world. The falls are the most famous 1,100 yards of a 650-
mile-long ridge of sedimentary rock arcing from western New York,
into the province of Ontario, and down into Wisconsin. This
escarpment is the rim of a 400-million-year-old seabed that cradled
a shallow, tropical ocean that once sloshed across what is today the
middle of North America. At about 170 feet high, the falls that
tumble over the Niagara escarpment near present-day Buffalo, New
York, are nowhere near the world’s tallest or even largest by volume.
But they were among the most ecologically important because they
created an impassable barrier for fish and other aquatic life trying to
migrate upstream from Lake Ontario into the other four Great Lakes.
Other giant freshwater bodies that have evolved over tens of
thousands or even millions of years have been subjected to epic
changes in temperature, salinity, water levels as well as wave upon
wave of invading and evolving organisms, all in a manner that leaves
those water bodies inhabited by a cast of species steeled by the
crucible of evolution. This gives them something of an “immune
system” when it comes to maintaining ecological stability in the face
of disruptions from the outside world. The Great Lakes of Cartier’s
time, on the other hand, were what biologists today call “ecologically
naïve.” This means the lakes were inhabited by fish and other
aquatic species whose isolation left them uniquely exposed to
foreign perturbances. None of this, of course, was pondered by the
early explorers desperate to exploit their ecological bounty.
The ditch-digging to open a commercial passage into the Great
Lakes by first building a canal around Lachine Rapids started in 1689
but was scuttled soon after when French crews equipped with only
the crudest of tools ran into more stubborn rock than expected—and
attacks from Native Americans. Work on that tiny section of river
alone would sputter all the way into the 1800s, even as progress
was made in taming other St. Lawrence rapids farther upstream
toward Lake Ontario, particularly after the English captured Canada
from the French in 1763.
In the next two decades the English military, eager to maintain
control of the region in the face of rebellion from the 13 U.S.
colonies, began chewing its way upriver to supply troop outposts.
The first big bite through the St. Lawrence barrier came in 1781,
during the height of the Revolutionary War, with the opening of a
canal running parallel to the northern bank of the St. Lawrence
River, about 25 miles upstream from Montreal. It stretched scarcely
the length of a football field and was less than six feet wide and
three feet deep. But it was not the size of this little detour around
the rapids that made the canal so significant. It was the technology
built into it. It had three navigation locks that may well have been
the first constructed on this continent.
In a navigation lock, an upriver-bound boat enters a watertight
chamber that has a downstream front door and an upstream back
door. At the time an upriver boat noses through the open
downstream door and into the chamber, the upstream door is
already closed. Once the boat is fully within the chamber the
downstream door is closed as well. Then a gate is opened to a sluice
fed by river water on the upstream side and the chamber is filled
until it matches the water level on the upper side. The upstream
doors swing open so the boat can smoothly progress upriver.
Downstream boats go through the process in reverse. The only
engine a system like this needed was gravity to send the water into
and out of the chambers, and human muscle to crank the lock doors
open and shut.
This first short canal allowed a boat to ascend, or descend, a
mere six feet before it returned to the main river channel. It was a
modest breach in the defense of the Great Lakes, but the canal
building inexorably progressed upriver and soon stretches that had
been accessible only by birch bark canoes that could be portaged
around rapids were being plied by flat-bottomed rowboats 40 feet
long. These “bateaux” had a draft of less than three feet but each
could carry more than three tons of cargo—furs and timber
downstream and food, tools and people upstream. By 1800, the river
beyond Montreal had become accessible to larger Durham boats (the
kind George Washington used in 1776 to cross the Delaware River in
his Christmas night raid) that could be equipped with a sail and haul
more than double the cargo of a bateau. Yet at the beginning of the
19th century the Lachine Rapids at Montreal had yet to be breached
with an adequate canal, and in other particularly rough stretches
along the St. Lawrence River cargoes had to be unloaded as the
boats were tugged through the whitewater. It took about 12 days to
make the 180-mile trip that started just above Lachine to Lake
Ontario.
Moving cargo and people along the river got much easier in
1825, when the Lachine Rapids were finally bypassed with their own
lock and canal system. The manmade waterway was more than 8
miles long and included seven lock chambers that collectively raised
boats about 45 feet. Completion of the canal finally provided boats a
reliable float from the Atlantic Ocean into Lake Ontario, and the
impact this had on goods flowing into North America’s interior was
almost immediate. By the early 1830s about 2,000 trips on the river
between Montreal and Lake Ontario occurred annually and 24,000
tons of cargo was hauled—four times the volume of traffic in the
year before the Lachine canal opened. It took a century and a half of
chipping rock and plowing earth to put this crack in the geographic
barrier protecting the Great Lakes from the outside world below, but
it was about to turn into a chasm.

THEY MIGHT BE CALLED THE GREAT LAKES, BUT THE FIVE INLAND seas
are essentially one giant, slow-motion river flowing west-to-east,
with each lake dumping like a bucket into the next until all the water
is gathered in the St. Lawrence River and tumbles seaward.
 The surface elevation (in relation to sea level) of the Great Lakes, and the
natural barrier at Niagara Falls.

Lake Superior sits at the system’s headwaters. It is about 350

miles long and 160 miles wide, and it holds enough water to
submerge a landmass about the size of North and South America
under a foot of water. The lake basin might have been carved by the
glaciers, but the 1,300-foot-deep sea is not simply an oversized
puddle of ancient ice melt. Lake Superior is a dynamic system, ever
filling up with precipitation and stream inflows, and ever flowing out
toward the Atlantic.
Lake Superior inflows are balanced by its outflows down the St.
Marys River. Along its 60-mile course the river drops about 22 feet in
elevation until it spills into Lake Huron, which is, really, the same
body of water as Lake Michigan. They are two lobes of the same big
lake connected at the five-mile-wide Straits of Mackinac. Both
Michigan and Huron flow into the St. Clair River, which flows toward
Lake Erie, whose elevation is only about 9 feet lower than that of
Michigan and Huron. All of Erie’s waters move eastward toward its
outlet—the Niagara River that plunges 325 feet into Lake Ontario.
Most of that drop happens midway down the river at Niagara Falls.
For thousands of years there was no way anything in or on the
water below the falls could breach this barrier between Lake Ontario
and the upper Great Lakes, but its collapse came swiftly, and it came
on the United States’ side of the border.
 President George Washington was among the first to grasp the
danger of allowing settlement of American territories west of the
Appalachian Mountains to take its own course. Washington believed
there was no reason the inland immigrants on that isolated frontier,
severed from the 13 seaboard states by the mountain crests of the
Appalachians, would maintain allegiance to their new country
instead of the settlers allied with Great Britain to the north, or with
the Spanish to the south. He wanted a canal extending west from
the Mid-Atlantic’s Potomac River, but he recognized that a connection
to the West had to be made, one way or the other—and in one place
or another.
“I need not remark to you Sir, that the flanks and rear of the
United States are possessed by other powers, and formidable ones
too; nor how necessary it is to apply the cement of interest, to bind
all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds, especially that
part of it, which lies immediately west of us . . .” Washington wrote
to Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison in the fall of 1784. “The
Western settlers, (I speak now from my own observation) stand as it
were upon a pivot; the touch of a feather, would turn them any
way.”
Black powder and pickaxes affixed these western settlements to
the United States. It took 40 years and it did not follow the route
Washington championed, but his dream of an umbilical cord
stretching westward from the colonies to the interior was realized
with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Much of the New York
state route between Lake Erie and the Atlantic Coast had already
been carved by nature. Like the lower St. Lawrence River, the
Hudson River rolls ever so gently into the sea, its tilt so tame that
ocean tides push upriver as far as Albany. That made for 145 miles
of smooth sailing into what was then the deep American interior.
Due west and through some 300 miles of thick forest and stubborn
Allegheny Mountains, lay the outpost of Buffalo on the shore of Lake
Erie. The overland trip by stage coach between Albany and Buffalo
took about two weeks in the early 1820s, most of it over roads so
rough that passengers often had to get out and push the carriage up
a bumpy slope, through mud and over ruts. There had to be a better
way.
New York governor and one-time mayor of New York City DeWitt
Clinton gets much of the credit for spearheading construction of the
state-funded Erie Canal across this rough route, and he was the
politician who sold the concept to the public. But the engineering
idea that made it possible was hatched from a prison cell. Jesse
Hawley, a flour merchant in western New York, had gone broke
trying to move his product down the mess of roads and trails that
wended their way out of the wilderness of western New York.
Hawley spent 20 months in debtors’ prison beginning in 1807, and
while there he scratched out more than a dozen letters to the
Genesee Messenger arguing for construction of a canal linking the
Hudson River to the Great Lakes. He wrote that he was motivated by
wanting to atone for having led a life of “little purpose” up to that
point. The letters laid out the general route that the Erie Canal
would eventually take. Hawley knew he was thinking big,
acknowledging later in life that his argument was initially received as
“the effusions of a maniac.” But there was a genius in it. The way he
saw it, God put the Great Lakes so high above sea level for one
reason—to provide the energy to fill the locks to lift the boats. Had
Lake Erie been at an equal level in elevation to the Hudson River but
still separated by a mountain range, such a canal would not have
been possible. But once men who knew how to build navigation
locks went to work, the upper lakes’ greatest line of defense to the
outside aquatic world proved to be their greatest weakness.
“It appears the Author of nature, in forming Lake Erie with its
large head of waters into a reservoir,” Hawley wrote, “. . . had in
prospect a large and valuable canal, connecting the Atlantic and the
continental seas, to be completed at some period in the history of
man, by his ingenuity and industry!”
The idea was derided across the nation as impractical, if not
technologically impossible. But it stirred the passions of the only
man who mattered—Clinton. As mayor of New York in the early
1800s, the young lawyer initially saw the canal as a means for his
city to keep pace with Boston and Philadelphia. But by 1816 he had
sold the canal as essential to the economic future of the nation and
had won financial backing for it from Congress, though that support
was snuffed by a veto from President James Madison.
Clinton, who became New York governor in 1817, pushed forward
with the canal as a state project that began that year on July 4.
Public support for an enterprise the press mocked as “Clinton’s Folly”
would wane in the following years to the point that Clinton lost his
office. But as his vision took shape in the form of a 40-foot-wide
ditch wending hundreds of miles through the western New York
wilderness, enthusiasm for the canal—and its deposed champion—
soared. Clinton won reelection as New York governor in 1825—eight
years after canal construction started and just in time for its opening
ceremonies in Buffalo. On October 26, 1825, at precisely 10 a.m.,
the first gates on the 83-lock system swung open and Lake Erie
water entered the canal. Clinton and his entourage climbed aboard
the Seneca Chief, a barge tugged by four gray horses, and headed
for Albany at a speed of about four miles per hour.
Their departure was marked by a cannon blast, followed by
another farther downstream once that first boom was heard, and so
on, all the way down the canal’s path to Albany, and then down the
Hudson River to New York Harbor. It took about 90 minutes for the
chain of cannon reports to hit New York City, which responded with
its own blast that started a reverse, upstream-bound string of
booms. Buffalo and New York City—the East Coast and the Western
frontier—were now linked by a water road smooth as any modern
interstate.
When the party got to New York City 10 days later, Clinton
hoisted a green cask containing water drawn from Lake Erie. He
tipped it into the sea. “This solemnity, at this place, on the first
arrival of vessels from Lake Erie,” he proclaimed as he splashed the
Great Lakes water into the harbor, “is intended to indicate and
commemorate the navigable communication which has been
accomplished between our Mediterranean seas and the Atlantic
Ocean.”
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