Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Bill Redding manages America's most unusual post office.
00:08Since 1895, its carriers have delivered untold thousands of envelopes and packages,
00:15but never to a house or building.
00:18There are no street numbers on the route.
00:21In fact, there are no streets.
00:27The mail goes aboard the U.S. mail boat, J.W. Westcott II,
00:32for the quick trip to its destination.
00:36A steaming ship.
00:40The Westcott skipper eases her tightly against the bobbing hull.
00:44The ship barely slows down.
00:47A deckhand simply lowers a pail.
01:05The vessels part company and the delivery is complete.
01:21The only marine post office in the United States serves vessels far from any ocean.
01:29Deep in the heart of North America, these giant ships ply the world's great chain of freshwater seas.
01:42If water is wealth, this place is rich beyond imagination.
01:52The region, covering less than one-tenth of one percent of Earth's surface,
01:57holds nearly 20 percent of the planet's supply of surface freshwater.
02:04Most of that water flows through five giant inland seas known as the Great Lakes.
02:31Herman Melville wrote about these sweetwater behemoths in his quintessential tale of the sea, Moby Dick.
02:39Those grand freshwater seas of ours, Erie and Ontario and Huron and Superior and Michigan,
02:47possess an ocean-like expansiveness with many of the ocean's noblest traits.
02:53They are swept by borian and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave.
03:00They know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland,
03:06they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.
03:19The Great Lakes region is a freshwater ecosystem of staggering proportions.
03:26Lake Superior alone has a surface area larger than the states of Connecticut, Delaware,
03:32Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New Jersey combined.
03:38Most newcomers are amazed by the immensity of the Great Lakes.
03:42At most places along their shores, it's impossible to see across to land.
03:50But freshwater isn't the only natural resource in extraordinary abundance here.
04:02The history of the Great Lakes region is the story of the birth of our modern technological society.
04:10It's about people drawn here by natural resources
04:14and economic opportunities that prove greater than their wildest dreams.
04:19It's where men named Astor, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford made their fortunes.
04:28Millions more simply came in search of a better life,
04:32transforming the natural landscape in the name of progress and prosperity.
04:38Progress had its price.
04:42By the mid-20th century, lakes, rivers and streams,
04:46choked with industrial and municipal waste, symbolized the Great Lakes.
04:54Lakes and rivers, once teeming with life, were considered dead.
05:02The water pollution is very tragic.
05:04Lake Ontario and the Humber River are cesspools of garbage.
05:08Lake now, you can see dead fish on the ground and on the shores.
05:12Nobody can go in there swimming.
05:14It's like talking about living in a giant garbage can that,
05:17after a while, you begin to feel like a piece of garbage yourself.
05:21Across the political spectrum, people demanded action
05:25on the daunting challenge of cleaning up and restoring the lakes.
05:30The Great Lakes region became the cradle of the environmental revolution,
05:35and the lakes were brought back from the brink.
05:42The lakes are thriving again in once-contaminated water.
05:48People swim at beaches once covered with dead fish.
05:55Today, nearly 40 million people live in the Great Lakes region
05:59and depend upon its fresh water for drinking, washing, commerce and recreation.
06:07But the freshwater seas still confront enormous challenges
06:11that call into question long-held assumptions about nature's role in our lives.
06:19The social, economic and political stakes are high for the people in the region,
06:24the two nations they call home, and the entire world.
06:32From space, it's easy to see that Earth is mostly covered with water.
06:37Just three percent is freshwater,
06:40the essential resource for the nearly seven billion people living on our planet.
06:45Most of Earth's freshwater is locked up in polar ice caps
06:49or is buried in underground aquifers.
06:53Less than one percent is accessible in lakes, rivers and streams,
06:57and in more and more places, it's becoming increasingly scarce and valuable.
07:04The Great Lakes region is the ultimate exception,
07:07a freak of nature with a seemingly inexhaustible and invulnerable freshwater supply.
07:13Why is so much freshwater here?
07:19The story begins in outer space.
07:22The gravitational pulls of Jupiter and Venus distorted Earth's orbit around the sun,
07:27launching an extended period of colder winters
07:30as more snow fell than melted in summer, creating an ice age.
07:39Over the past half million years, six ice ages occurred.
07:44The most recent began 70,000 years ago.
07:48A vast ice sheet expanded to the south, scraping away soft rock and sediment
07:54and depositing enormous amounts of excavated material along the edges of the ice.
08:00Only hard rock substrate withstood the assault.
08:09The process reversed when the ice sheet began to melt,
08:13uncovering terrain that had been scraped clean and buried under tons of ice.
08:19The spores of lichens and moss took hold on the barren landscape,
08:23creating topsoil where plants and trees grew that eventually drew insects, birds, and animals.
08:31It took 5,500 years for the ice to melt to where Chicago is now.
08:36As it did, cascades of meltwater flowed to the sea,
08:40helping to carve the Mississippi River Valley.
08:44As the ice melted further, enormous basins excavated by the ice sheet were revealed.
08:51Over time, meltwater filled these excavations,
08:54forming glacial lakes covering thousands of square miles.
08:59The size and shape of these giant lakes changed as the ice sheet melted.
09:06Another factor also played a role.
09:09The enormous weight of the ice had compressed the ground beneath it.
09:16Once the ice melted, the terrain began rising, changing how water flowed in the region.
09:23The ice sheet melted from the Great Lakes region about 10,000 years ago,
09:27but climate change and the rebounding terrain continued to transform the lakes.
09:33Finally, 2,500 years ago, the Great Lakes became the natural wonders we know today,
09:40the foundations of a unique ecosystem where plants, animals, aquatic organisms,
09:47and people interact in an environment exceptionally rich in natural resources.
09:57Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world
10:00and the first in a series of enormous steps leading water down to the sea.
10:06It flows from the southeast corner of Lake Superior down the St. Mary's River
10:10into Lake Huron, 23 feet below.
10:15Lake Huron connects to Lake Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac,
10:19which separate the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan.
10:23These two Great Lakes have the same surface elevation
10:27and are considered by many to be a single lake.
10:32From there, water flows down the St. Clair River to Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River,
10:38which feeds Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes.
10:44Water flows north from Lake Erie into the Niagara River,
10:48where it cascades over the 200-foot cliffs of the American and Horseshoe Falls,
10:53known collectively as Niagara Falls.
10:57It then enters the fifth and final Great Lake, Ontario.
11:02From Lake Ontario, water flows into the St. Lawrence River
11:06for the final drop to the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the Atlantic Ocean.
11:16People first came to the Great Lakes region more than 10,000 years ago.
11:21Shallow pits dotting the southern shore of Lake Superior
11:24tell of ancient miners who found copper,
11:27which they shaped into tools and ornaments that have been found as far away as Mexico.
11:33No one is sure what became of these prehistoric craftsmen, but one thing is certain.
11:38They were the first in a long line of people
11:41whose use of the Great Lakes region's natural resources
11:45had impacts far beyond its boundaries.
11:59On a June morning in 1854, 47-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
12:06began composing what became an iconic American poem.
12:10Should you ask me whence these stories,
12:13whence these legends and traditions with the odors of the forest?
12:17The Song of Hiawatha is one of America's best-known poems,
12:21an epic based on one of the predominant Native North American tribes.
12:26From the great lakes of the Northland, from the land of the Ojibwes...
12:31The poem's main character is a leader of the Anishinaabeg people.
12:36Europeans called them Ojibwe, a name that morphed through mispronunciation into Chippewa.
12:42They lived near Lake Superior.
12:45By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining big-seed water
12:50stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the moon.
12:54By the beginning of the 17th century, many Aboriginal nations peopled the Great Lakes,
12:59their names populating the history and lore of North America.
13:04Their cultures and mythologies are based upon intimate relationships with natural spirits.
13:10People of the southern Great Lakes region grew crops and built permanent settlements.
13:16But in the north, people hunted and gathered and looked to the lakes for food.
13:22Forth upon the Gitche Gumee, with his fishing line of cedar, of the twisted bark of cedar,
13:29forth to catch the sturgeon nama, all alone went Hiawatha.
13:36Fish migrated into the Great Lakes region during the 7,500 years it took the last ice sheet to melt.
13:44The various glacial lake phases connected the basin to the Mississippi River,
13:49the Atlantic Ocean, and even the Arctic Sea at different times.
13:55Once the lake stabilized, a food web emerged.
13:58Eventually, enormous schools of fish congregated at nearshore reefs and in streams
14:04at specific times to reproduce.
14:07Indigenous people invented ways to catch them.
14:10Take my bait, cried Hiawatha, down into the depths beneath him.
14:15Take my bait, oh sturgeon nama.
14:18The knowledge that native people acquired about animals, fish, and plants
14:23proved to be extremely valuable to others who came here to live.
14:31The Song of Hiawatha ends with a tale of the most significant occurrence
14:35in the human history of the Great Lakes region.
14:38And the noble Hiawatha, with his hands aloft extended,
14:43held aloft in sign of welcome, waited, full of exultation,
14:49till the birch canoe with paddles grated on the shining pebbles,
14:53stranded on the sandy margin, till the black-robed chief, the pale face,
14:59with the cross upon his bosom, landed on the sandy margin.
15:06In the 1500s, French fishermen began trading metal tools and ornaments
15:11with native people in the St. Lawrence River Valley.
15:14Europeans were even more impressed with the furs that natives offered in trade.
15:23In 1608, a seafarer and cartographer named Samuel de Champlain
15:28broke ground at a strategic narrows of the St. Lawrence
15:31and built a trading outpost that he called Quebec.
15:38Champlain traded with Algonquin people,
15:41who told him the skins came from a place where rivers flowed into the sea
15:45and fur animals were easy to come by.
15:50In the fall of 1610, Champlain decided to see for himself.
15:56With ten native guides, he traveled north,
16:01up one large river to a second, and headed west.
16:04After a journey lasting weeks, they paddled through an archipelago of rock islands
16:09that opened onto a vast sea.
16:15It is very large, nearly 400 leagues long from east to west, and 50 leagues broad.
16:24He named it the Sweetwater Sea.
16:28Champlain built relationships with the people of Quebec
16:32Champlain built relationships with Great Lakes natives
16:35that gave him exclusive access to what became
16:38the most profitable natural resource in colonial North America.
16:43Beaver was the prized fur in Europe and abundant in the Great Lakes.
16:51Over the next 150 years, Great Lakes fur financed the expansion of New France
16:56until it covered a large portion of North America.
17:02The French monopoly lasted until Britain conquered New France in 1759.
17:10Fifteen years later, the American colonies rebelled against England.
17:16The Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution,
17:19established the Great Lakes as the northern boundary of a new nation,
17:23the United States of America.
17:26The portion of the Great Lakes region within the new country
17:29was part of the Northwest Territory.
17:36The new government had neither the manpower nor the financial resources
17:40to control the largely wild and unsettled region.
17:44That began to change when a resourceful young German
17:47with a relentless drive to make money
17:50stepped off a sailing ship after crossing the Atlantic.
18:00John Jacob Astor was the son of a butcher,
18:03an apprentice in the musical instrument trade.
18:07Arriving in New York in 1784,
18:10he decided his greatest opportunity was in the fur business.
18:15He sold musical instruments and started buying pelts.
18:19Astor soon learned that to get rich,
18:22he had to make a living by selling fur.
18:26Astor soon learned that to get rich,
18:29he had to break into the beaver trade.
18:31But there were problems.
18:33Although the United States owned half of the Great Lakes region,
18:36Canadian fur companies controlled the business on both sides of the border.
18:41Bad feelings lingering from the War of Independence
18:44made cross-border trade illegal.
18:48Astor's Canadian-bought furs had to travel through London,
18:51but the price the Great Lakes beaver brought in New York
18:54made it worthwhile,
18:56and he became the biggest fur dealer in New York.
19:02In 1800, the new administration of President Thomas Jefferson
19:06began asserting control over the Northwest Territory.
19:10The British and their Canadian colonists
19:12stubbornly refused to leave U.S. soil.
19:16The bad blood boiled over into what became the War of 1812.
19:21After three years of fighting,
19:23Canadian companies were forced to leave U.S. territory.
19:29Astor's American fur company was finally free to do business
19:32in the Great Lakes region on its own terms.
19:37Astor opened trading posts and ruthlessly crushed competitors
19:41while pushing native trappers to harvest all the animals they could.
19:47John Jacob Astor was the first person
19:50to industrialize a Great Lakes natural resource.
19:53By 1825, he achieved a near monopoly of the region's fur trade
19:58and expanded the market for Great Lakes furs to Asia.
20:04But by 1820, the most profitable animal, the beaver,
20:08was almost completely gone.
20:11The Great Lakes fur trade was coming to an end
20:14and Astor knew it.
20:16He looked west, expanding his domination of the fur trade
20:19all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
20:23John Jacob Astor sold his interest in the American fur company in 1834
20:28after becoming the richest man in America.
20:32As fur animals dwindled and the industry focused on new territories,
20:36the company tried to diversify, but in 1842 it went bankrupt.
20:41A new generation of American businessmen,
20:43with even bigger plans for the Great Lakes region,
20:46was already taking over.
20:56It began as a trickle after the War of 1812
20:59when an economic recession brought hard times
21:02to the 13 New England states.
21:05Reports of cheap land in Ohio
21:07and beyond inspired young people and out-of-work laborers
21:11to pack their belongings onto barges
21:14and float the Ohio River toward the Northwest Territory.
21:19For many settlers, prosperity was elusive.
21:22A big problem was transportation.
21:26A scarcity of roads meant that settlers farther away from main rivers
21:30had no access to markets for crops they grew.
21:33Those with farms close to rivers had it a bit better.
21:37But most rivers flowed west, away from major markets.
21:43To reach cities in the east,
21:45crops traveled down the Ohio River to the Mississippi,
21:49then to New Orleans,
21:51where they were put on ships bound for New York.
21:58Then, every year, the Mississippi River was pumped
22:02Then, everything changed.
22:05In 1825, the 363-mile-long Erie Canal,
22:10linking Lake Erie to the Hudson River, opened.
22:13The cost of shipping goods from Buffalo to New York
22:16dropped by two-thirds,
22:18and a transportation revolution began.
22:24A canal-building boom spread from Pennsylvania to Illinois,
22:28linking farmers to new ports on the Great Lakes.
22:32The Erie Canal opened up the Great Lakes to commercial shipping,
22:36creating an inland route stretching from Chicago to New York City
22:41and setting in motion forces that, over time,
22:44would dramatically transform the Great Lakes' ecosystem.
22:48The Erie Canal also provoked concerns across the northern border.
22:53Canada lies just across the Niagara River from Buffalo.
22:58When people there learned about plans to build the Erie Canal,
23:02some were deeply concerned.
23:05Although the Erie Canal linked the upper Great Lakes
23:07to the eastern cities of the United States,
23:10Canadian cities like Toronto on Lake Ontario
23:13and Canada's principal seaport, Montreal, remained disconnected.
23:19The War of 1812 was still a fresh memory,
23:22and some Canadians were concerned that every ship that called it Buffalo
23:26would increase U.S. dominance of the Great Lakes.
23:34Solving the problem meant accomplishing the Herculean task
23:37of bypassing Niagara Falls to connect Lakes Erie and Ontario.
23:43A group of Canadian businessmen devised a plan to lift not just barges,
23:48but entire ships up and down the Niagara Escarpment,
23:52the rocky cliff over which water cascades at Niagara Falls.
23:59It took more than 10,000 men, 5,000 people,
24:03and a total of 1,000 ships to complete the task.
24:08It took more than 10,000 men, 5 years, to build the Welland Canal.
24:16In 1829, the first ship made its way from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.
24:22For the first time, the Great Lakes were navigable
24:25from Lake Ontario all the way to Chicago.
24:29Canals transformed the Great Lakes
24:31into one of the most important shipping routes in the world,
24:35creating economic opportunities
24:37that drew more and more immigrants and settlers.
24:41The exploding population created an insatiable market for lumber.
24:46Conditions were ripe for the birth of a new industry.
24:49All that was needed was a rich source of trees.
24:55When Michigan became a state in 1838,
24:58land speculators sent surveyors into the wilderness.
25:01They found a seemingly infinite number of giant white pine trees.
25:07First-growth white pine trees often had trunks more than 10 feet across
25:11and stood more than 150 feet.
25:14Just one tree could produce an enormous amount of lumber,
25:18but trees were just part of Michigan's appeal.
25:22So was its bounty of rivers.
25:25Lumber camps sprang up across Michigan's Lower Peninsula
25:28that filled with men in wintertime.
25:33They cut trees by the thousands.
25:37The logs were hauled from the forest over frozen ground to riverbanks.
25:44When spring runoff swelled the rivers,
25:46the logs were floated to sawmills near the lakes.
25:50Lumber drove an explosion of shipping on the Great Lakes.
25:54Crews were pushed to haul as much as their ships could hold
25:57from the first open water in springtime until the lakes froze in December.
26:05Sudden storms packing gale-force winds lapped the Great Lakes
26:09and forced the Great Lakes to freeze.
26:13The Great Lakes were frozen in December,
26:16Sudden storms packing gale-force winds lashed the Great Lakes in autumn.
26:21Many swallowed ships, sending all hands to an icy grave.
26:30Thousands of shipwrecks rest on the bottom.
26:33At some places, they're especially numerous.
26:37Because of the lakes' cold, fresh water,
26:39wrecks don't deteriorate here like they do in saltwater.
26:43So these provide a unique window into history.
26:48Wrecks from the early lumbering era
26:50are often the oldest and most numerous to be found.
26:54The first lumber ship crews paid a heavy price
26:57to learn lessons that helped sailors in their wakes
27:00navigate the lakes more safely.
27:05By 1860, sawmills sat at the mouths of the Lower Peninsula's largest rivers.
27:11Immigrants from Europe and Eastern states poured into Michigan to cut timber.
27:16Farther north, a different sort of boom was underway.
27:24In 1840, Douglas Houghton, Michigan's state geologist,
27:28studied a vein of copper near some prehistoric mines on the Keweenaw Peninsula.
27:34After blasting a ton of the raw metal out of the side of a hill,
27:38Houghton concluded that Michigan's copper deposits
27:41were much more extensive than was originally supposed.
27:46His report unleashed a copper rush.
27:49Rich and poor flocked to the area to try their luck.
27:54Within two years, a mine opened that employed 120 men, and others followed.
27:59In 1844, a survey team working the Upper Peninsula
28:03stumbled upon a different treasure, raw iron ore.
28:10Mines opened and went bust.
28:15Then railroads began threading their way through the eastern United States,
28:19exploding the demand for iron rails.
28:22By 1850, the iron railways were the largest in the world.
28:27By 1850, U.S. iron foundries were struggling to keep up.
28:33Two basic raw materials go into the production of iron,
28:36raw ore and a fuel to heat it to molten form.
28:43Ohio and Pennsylvania had natural deposits of both iron and coal,
28:47but there wasn't sufficient iron ore for American companies
28:50to compete against imported metal from England.
28:56The Lake Superior Iron Range brought new hope,
28:59but a big obstacle stood in the way.
29:03Although ships sailed freely through four of the Great Lakes,
29:06Lake Superior was still blocked by the rapids on the St. Mary's River.
29:14The U.S. Congress came to the rescue,
29:16underwriting construction of a canal and two locks
29:19that let deep draft ships sail between Lake Superior
29:22and the rest of the Great Lakes.
29:26The two locks made it possible to move iron and copper ore in bulk.
29:31Investors poured money into the region as never before,
29:34and they weren't disappointed.
29:42During the Civil War, trains played a strategic role moving troops and weapons.
29:48Heavy wartime loads caused iron rails to simply fall apart.
29:52A young Scottish immigrant working his way up the management ladder
29:56of a Pennsylvania railroad company took a keen interest in the problem.
30:01By his mid-twenties, Andrew Carnegie had accumulated a tidy bankroll
30:05through wise investments.
30:07He saw another opportunity in a new metal alloy called steel.
30:12He quit the railroad and began selling rails to his former employer.
30:18Carnegie built the first steel plant in Pittsburgh,
30:22using Bessemer furnaces to produce steel much lighter and stronger
30:26than anything before.
30:28It paid off handsomely.
30:31Carnegie Steel revolutionized the railroad industry.
30:34It also transformed building construction
30:37by making possible the erection of buildings that scraped the sky.
30:41And it launched the era of steel-hulled commercial and military vessels.
30:46The Lake Superior Iron Range was behind it all.
30:50As demand grew, new mines opened in Michigan and Wisconsin.
30:55Then, the largest iron ore deposit in North America
30:59was discovered in northeast Minnesota.
31:02Mines were dug and a railroad built to move ore to Lake Superior for shipment.
31:09The 1893 recession dried up the mining company's capital.
31:14It looked for help from a man who had made his fortune
31:17on another Great Lakes resource.
31:20John D. Rockefeller had made good money supplying the Union Army
31:24with vegetables during the war.
31:26Then, 50 years before oil was discovered in Texas,
31:30the first oil wells in North America were drilled in the Great Lakes region.
31:35Kerosene lights had made oil a hot commodity,
31:38and Rockefeller got oil fever.
31:41He invested in Pennsylvania oil wells,
31:44then launched the Standard Oil Company
31:47and used it to monopolize the Great Lakes oil business.
31:52By the time the Minnesota mine owners came calling,
31:55Rockefeller controlled more than 90% of the oil refineries in the United States
32:00and had amassed a considerable fortune.
32:04Rockefeller agreed to help the Minnesotans,
32:07but he demanded a controlling stake in their company.
32:10A year later, Rockefeller owned most of the largest iron range in North America.
32:16Andrew Carnegie was the biggest user of iron ore in America.
32:20Carnegie started buying Minnesota iron mines himself,
32:23but soon realized that Rockefeller was unstoppable.
32:29The oil baron had commissioned 56 lake steamers
32:32designed to carry the largest loads possible
32:35and still pass through the newly expanded locks at Sault Ste. Marie.
32:40Rockefeller's fleet slashed the cost of shipping ore,
32:43making his operation the most cost competitive in the industry.
32:47In the end, Carnegie made a deal to manage all of Rockefeller's iron mine operations,
32:53including his fleet of ships,
32:55and pay Rockefeller a handsome royalty.
32:58Rockefeller went back to the oil business,
33:00and Carnegie sold a lot more steel.
33:04While the Great Lakes steel business was booming,
33:07Michigan lumber was a different story.
33:10Less than 20 years after it all started,
33:13there was practically nothing left to cut
33:15that could be floated down the state's rivers.
33:18Even though the vast majority of the Lower Peninsula's forests
33:21still stood untouched,
33:23there was simply no way to move logs out of the forest.
33:26Many timber companies moved to the Upper Peninsula,
33:30Many timber companies moved to the Upper Peninsula,
33:33and west to Wisconsin and Minnesota.
33:36Then, wood met iron.
33:39Steel rails began snaking their way into the trees
33:42as light-gauge railroads brought the entire Michigan pinery
33:46under the axe and saw.
33:48Gone were the days when loggers had to wait
33:51for rivers to swell to send logs to mills.
33:54The cutting went on year-round.
34:00In 1902, a young mother living in the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois,
34:04In 1902, a young mother living in the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois,
34:07wrote in her scrapbook about her young son.
34:10At two years, eleven months, went fishing with two men,
34:14his father and Mr. Glotfelty.
34:17He caught the biggest fish of the crowd.
34:20He knows when he gets a bite, and he lands them all himself.
34:25Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois,
34:30a prosperous Chicago suburb ten miles from the Lake Michigan shore.
34:35His father was a doctor and an avid outdoorsman.
34:38How this boy who grew up in Chicago in the middle of the country
34:42could become one of our greatest authors of literature of the sea.
34:46It really tells me why he would want to live in Key West or Cuba
34:51and go fishing on the Gulf Stream,
34:54that his relationship to massive bodies of water
34:57and all the different kinds of cultural interest they can provide
35:01and to wild lands was really bred there.
35:04The year Hemingway was born, more lumber changed hands in Chicago
35:08than anywhere else in the United States.
35:11Chicago was the commercial center
35:14linking the Great Plains to cities of the East.
35:18Like other Great Lakes towns,
35:21Chicago's boom began with the opening of a canal.
35:24The Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848,
35:28connecting Lake Michigan to the Mississippi.
35:31At the dawn of the 20th century, grain from prairie farms
35:35arrived by canal barges and trains,
35:38and lumber from Great Lakes forests arrived by ship
35:41to be traded in commodity markets,
35:44and Chicago grew to become the most important west of New York.
35:50Chicago was a great vortex
35:53that was there to suck in all the natural resources of the West.
35:58That's really why the city was founded.
36:01It's in the center of the country.
36:04If you looked at a railroad map at that time,
36:07it would look like a spider's web with Chicago in the middle as the spider.
36:13But the commerce propelling Chicago's meteoric growth had a dark side.
36:20The air pollution in Chicago
36:23was something that was almost unimaginable today.
36:27There was a black pall of soot that hung over the city
36:31that you could see for miles as you were approaching
36:34across the Great Plains.
36:37Vaccinations for epidemic diseases like polio and diphtheria
36:41did not exist, measles, whooping cough,
36:44so there were vast epidemics, especially during the summer months.
36:49A cholera outbreak in the 1850s
36:52killed nearly 1,500 of the city's 29,000 residents.
36:56The tragedy spurred the city to build a system
36:59that collected raw sewage and underground pipes
37:02and discharged it directly into the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.
37:07In 1830, the Chicago River had been described
37:10as a clear stream with a gravelly bottom and abounded in fish.
37:16Thirty years later, the river ran black.
37:19A report claimed that while the sewers were responsible to some extent,
37:23the pollution was chargeable chiefly to the discharge of blood
37:27and other refuse from the slaughter and packing houses,
37:30besides that from distilleries, glue factories,
37:33establishments for rendering offal, etc.
37:37But Chicago draws its drinking water from Lake Michigan,
37:41and the threat to public health grew to the point
37:44that it couldn't be ignored.
37:47Rather than disturb the meatpacking plants
37:50or redirect the flow of sewage and industrial waste
37:53away from the Chicago River,
37:55the city fathers took nature into their own hands.
38:00The Illinois and Michigan Canal was widened and deepened,
38:04creating a flow gradient that reversed the flow of the Chicago River.
38:08For the first time in more than 2,500 years,
38:11Lake Michigan water flowed into the river
38:14and flushed the city's sewage, packing plant offal,
38:17and industrial waste away from the lake
38:20and into the Des Plaines River.
38:23That stream, once a pristine source of water,
38:26became Chicago's sewer.
38:30The Chicago Drainage Canal saved the city's water supply,
38:34but did nothing to slow dumping into the Chicago River.
38:38This was a really unpleasant,
38:41very, very unhealthy place for a child to be.
38:45Parents, like Hemingway's parents, middle-class parents,
38:48wanted to get their children out of the city in the summertime.
38:52Hemingway's parents actually took him to Michigan
38:55when he was just 7 weeks old.
38:58They took a steamer up Lake Michigan,
39:01and then they took a little train to Petoskey
39:04to get to a site where they hadn't yet built a cottage,
39:07just to get their baby out of the city in the month of July.
39:11Hemingway's parents eventually built a cabin there
39:14where Ernest spent every summer of his childhood.
39:17When we think about Hemingway's relationship to nature,
39:20we really have to look at that contrast
39:23between Chicago and Michigan at this time.
39:26There was a contrast between, how can I say this,
39:30William Blake's dark, satanic mills,
39:32and really something that seemed to Hemingway as a child
39:35like the Garden of Eden.
39:38When Hemingway was a child,
39:40the Michigan lumber boom was still underway.
39:43The year that Hemingway was born and a little bit before that,
39:47timber was coming out of Michigan
39:49at the rate of 10,000 million board feet per year.
39:53And so Michigan became a vast clear-cut
39:57where virgin woods were just falling rapidly to industry.
40:02And because forestry practices then
40:05had very little to do with conservation,
40:08people left slash on the ground,
40:10so there were devastating forest fires.
40:13That was something that Hemingway saw over and over again.
40:17Michigan's forests were being exhausted.
40:20The railroad and independent shipping companies
40:23that have moved timber were trying to stay afloat.
40:27Wealthy city dwellers yearning to reconnect with nature
40:31were a source of hope,
40:33but outdoor recreation was beyond the means of most.
40:37That began to change when a former
40:40electrical power plant maintenance man
40:42began building automobiles in a converted wagon shop in Detroit.
40:51In the first decade of the 1900s,
40:54more than 500 automobile manufacturing companies
40:57were launched in the United States.
41:00Most built machines for the rich, but not Henry Ford.
41:04I will build a motor car for the multitude.
41:07It will be large enough for the family,
41:10but small enough for the individual to run and care for.
41:14It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary
41:18will be unable to own one,
41:21and enjoy with his family the blessings of hours of pleasure
41:25in God's great open spaces.
41:28His first production car was called the Model A,
41:32and it sold for $850.
41:34It did well, and the company moved into a new factory
41:38where Ford launched a revolution in manufacturing.
41:41Originally, each car was built by the same team of craftsmen
41:46from start to finish.
41:48But Ford revamped his operation
41:50based on a system called rolling assembly.
41:53Instead of the workers coming to the car,
41:56the car rolled from station to station
41:59where standardized parts were added by each worker.
42:03Production improved dramatically,
42:05but the system's true potential was realized
42:08with the production of Ford's next car, the Model T,
42:12and the new factory he built to produce it.
42:16The new factory used rolling assembly
42:18to assemble not just the car, but its parts and components.
42:23The year it opened, more than 20,000 Model Ts rolled out the door.
42:28Over the next 3 years, production more than quadrupled.
42:32Thanks to enhanced efficiency,
42:34Ford dropped the price from $850 to $500,
42:38putting the Model T within reach of even more people.
42:42When you get to making cars in quantity,
42:45you can make them cheaper.
42:46And when you make them cheaper,
42:48you can get more people with enough money to buy them.
42:51The market will take care of itself.
42:55In 1913, Ford's Highland Park factory
42:58produced more than half of the cars made in the United States.
43:02The Model T launched a social revolution
43:05and made Henry Ford America's first celebrity businessman.
43:10He preached a new philosophy, American consumer capitalism,
43:14and set out to change how people think about leisure time.
43:19People who have more leisure time must have more clothes.
43:23They must have a greater variety of food.
43:26They must have more transportation facilities.
43:30In January 1914, Ford shocked the business world
43:34when he started paying each of his 26,000 workers
43:38$5 for a day's work, doubling their previous wage.
43:42Ford also limited work shifts at his factory to 8 hours,
43:46ensuring that workers had sufficient leisure time
43:49to enjoy their earnings.
43:51Wall Street bankers branded him a socialist.
43:54Other carmakers were incredulous.
43:56But by raising his workers' wage,
43:59Ford instantly expanded the consumer base
44:02for manufactured products, including his cars.
44:05The people who consume the bulk of the goods
44:08are the ones who make them.
44:11With one bold stroke, Henry Ford launched the expansion
44:15of the most affluent and mobile working class
44:18in the history of the world.
44:20Middle-class families took to the countryside in their automobiles
44:24to enjoy their leisure time
44:26with the economic means to do so as never before.
44:30When Hemingway was a boy,
44:32America was in the midst of a new and burgeoning
44:36back-to-nature movement.
44:38They also were beginning to see for the first time
44:41evidence that nature was not infinite and could be destroyed.
44:45When he was a young child,
44:47along came an American president who had the interest
44:51and who had a voting populace with the will
44:54to try to do something about this,
44:56and that president was Teddy Roosevelt.
44:58Roosevelt was a great hunter and fisherman,
45:01so he might not seem to us today
45:03like the kind of environmentalist we know,
45:06a 21st century environmentalist
45:08who maybe isn't interested in hunting and fishing.
45:11But this was the impetus that got people thinking about nature
45:15and preserving it.
45:17Like most sport anglers,
45:19Hemingway mostly fished the inland lakes and streams.
45:23Few ventured onto the big lakes.
45:25They were the domain of commercial fishermen.
45:30Fish have been an important source of food in the region
45:33for its entire history.
45:35Native people taught Europeans to fish.
45:38French explorers kept journals,
45:40the earliest written descriptions of the Great Lakes' ecosystem.
45:44It is a daily manner which never fails.
45:47There is no family which does not catch sufficient fish
45:50in the course of the year for its subsistence.
45:53Moreover, better fish cannot be eaten,
45:56and they are based and nourished in the purest water,
45:59the clearest and most polluted you could see anywhere.
46:06As cities and towns in Canada and the United States filled up,
46:11commercial fishing became big business.
46:14The development of refrigeration and railroads
46:17spread the market to major cities in the east
46:20where lake trout and whitefish became culinary favorites.
46:25In 1879, the earliest year that records were kept,
46:29more than 26 million pounds of whitefish
46:32were taken from the Great Lakes,
46:34and fishery biologists felt that whitefish were already being overharvested.
46:39Within 20 years, the whitefish catch had dropped by two-thirds
46:43and continued to decline.
46:45But whitefish were just a symptom.
46:48At the end of the 19th century,
46:50the Great Lakes' ecosystem had been transformed.
46:54Cities replaced forests.
46:58Clear rivers, once teeming with fish,
47:01were replaced with industrial and human sewage.
47:05The native people who taught the first Europeans how to survive
47:09were largely gone, succumbing to diseases like smallpox and syphilis
47:14or pushed onto reservations to the west.
47:18Like Niagara Falls and the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie,
47:22native people were obstacles to an emerging juggernaut
47:25founded on what the journalist John L. O'Sullivan
47:29described as America's manifest destiny to overspread the continent
47:34allotted by Providence for the free development
47:37of our yearly multiplying millions.
47:41In the early 1900s, those multiplying millions
47:44were transforming the Great Lakes region as never before.
47:49Poles, Hungarians, and other Eastern Europeans
47:52swelled the payrolls of factories,
47:55increasing the ranks of America's new consumer class.
47:58More and more companies converted to mass production,
48:01producing cars, motorcycles, furniture, appliances,
48:05anything that could be made and sold to working class consumers.
48:10So did factories that produced the tools, machines, chemicals,
48:14and parts used by these manufacturers.
48:18The natural resources of the Great Lakes region
48:20were the foundation of a growing industrial giant.
48:24Iron and copper mining expanded exponentially.
48:27So did steel production,
48:29making Andrew Carnegie a fabulously wealthy man.
48:34The world's largest nickel deposit was discovered near Lake Huron.
48:38Sizable limestone and salt deposits were discovered in the region too.
48:43The locks and canals that connected the lakes
48:45were expanded to let more and bigger ships
48:48move ever-increasing quantities of raw materials.
48:52And lakeshores and riverbanks near factories
48:55were transformed into docks and piers with machinery to unload them.
49:01Competitors large and small in Detroit and elsewhere in the Great Lakes region
49:06battled Ford for a share of the burgeoning car market.
49:10Even so, Ford Motor Company production
49:12grew from around 5,000 cars a year in 1908
49:16to more than 500,000 cars eight years later and kept growing.
49:21But Ford wasn't satisfied.
49:24My ambition is to employ still more men,
49:27to spread the benefits of the industrial system
49:29to the greatest possible number,
49:31to help them build up their lives and homes.
49:35In 1917, he broke ground on a new factory,
49:38the likes of which had never been seen anywhere in the world.
49:43It was known simply as the Rouge,
49:45covering more than a square mile
49:47at the place where the Rouge River met the Detroit River,
49:50the Rouge was a fully integrated industrial complex.
49:56Ford's own lake carriers brought iron ore from his iron mines
50:00to blast furnaces at the Rouge.
50:02Others brought sand from Great Lakes beaches
50:05to the Rouge's glass ovens.
50:08Facilities to cast, stamp, and press metal
50:11and transform it into automobile parts were on site
50:14to supply the state-of-the-art mass production assembly plant
50:18that produced cars at a rate of one every 40 seconds.
50:23The automobile industry was becoming the engine
50:26of the American economy and was transforming the region
50:29into the American industrial heartland,
50:32but there were clouds on the horizon.
50:36The 1929 crash and the Great Depression
50:39brought a century of American expansion to a halt.
50:43The economic collapse made a bad situation in Europe worse.
50:49The First World War had devastated much of the continent,
50:53breeding discontent and fascism.
50:56By the 1930s, war clouds gathered anew.
51:02A staunch opponent of Franklin Roosevelt,
51:05Henry Ford opposed any American engagement
51:08in the war against fascism brewing in Europe.
51:11For Ford, Nazi aggression was Europe's affair.
51:16Then, the attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything.
51:20We are in it now,
51:22and the important thing is to finish it quickly
51:25so that we can return to more useful, more serious matters.
51:30Ford abandoned his neutrality
51:32and put his full industrial might behind the war effort.
51:37The Great Lakes went to war.
51:39From B-24 liberator bombers to eagle boats
51:42to tanks and trucks and jeeps to artillery and ammunition,
51:46the Great Lakes industrial heartland
51:48became the arsenal of democracy.
51:51Practically overnight, the region turned
51:53from the depths of the Great Depression
51:55to building everything its factories could produce,
51:58and then some.
52:00California was the center of airplane manufacturing,
52:03but the plant building B-24 bombers there
52:06could produce only one per day.
52:08Henry Ford built a factory near Detroit
52:11that eventually built one per hour.
52:16With America at war,
52:18the Depression-era problems of unemployment
52:21were replaced by a shortage of workers.
52:24Ford recruited unemployed workers from the South.
52:27All in all, more than 350,000 workers
52:30migrated to Detroit alone to work in defense plants.
52:33All of the steel used in U.S. and Canadian war production
52:37came from Lake Superior iron ore.
52:40The entire Allied Forces war effort
52:42depended upon the ships and sailors of the Great Lakes fleet
52:46who hauled ore from Lake Superior mines
52:49to steel plants in Detroit, Gary, Indiana,
52:52Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Hamilton, Ontario.
52:57The war effort dramatically increased
52:59the manufacturing capacity of the Great Lakes,
53:02and the manufacturing capacity of the United States.
53:05When it was all over,
53:07a large portion of that capacity
53:09was redirected to producing goods for the civilian economy.
53:13Returning soldiers went to work rebuilding a devastated world
53:17and supplying a growing middle class.
53:22The World War II generation
53:24launched the greatest economic expansion
53:26in the history of the United States.
53:28The middle class had the means to buy cars
53:31and the leisure time to travel.
53:34People bought property on the lakeshores
53:36and built second homes.
53:38Others visited parks to camp.
53:42Recreational boating became popular
53:44as average citizens ventured out on the lakes
53:47to sightsee and fish.
53:53For the first time, the Great Lakes
53:55were no longer the exclusive domain of businessmen
53:58harvesting the region's natural resources for monetary gain.
54:02The new middle class created by those businesses
54:05was turning to the lakes
54:07as a place not to expand their prosperity,
54:10but to enjoy it.
54:29The Great Lakes
54:31The Great Lakes
54:33The Great Lakes
54:34The Great Lakes
54:35The Great Lakes
54:36The Great Lakes
54:37The Great Lakes
54:38The Great Lakes
54:39The Great Lakes
54:40The Great Lakes
54:41The Great Lakes
54:42The Great Lakes
54:43The Great Lakes
54:44The Great Lakes
54:45The Great Lakes
54:46The Great Lakes
54:47The Great Lakes
54:48The Great Lakes
54:49The Great Lakes
54:50The Great Lakes
54:51The Great Lakes
54:52The Great Lakes
54:53The Great Lakes
54:54The Great Lakes
54:55The Great Lakes
54:56The Great Lakes
54:57The Great Lakes
54:58The Great Lakes
54:59The Great Lakes
55:00The Great Lakes
55:01The Great Lakes
55:02The Great Lakes
55:03The Great Lakes
55:04The Great Lakes
55:05The Great Lakes
55:06The Great Lakes
55:07The Great Lakes
55:08The Great Lakes
55:09The Great Lakes
55:10The Great Lakes
55:11The Great Lakes
55:12The Great Lakes
55:13The Great Lakes
55:14The Great Lakes
55:15The Great Lakes
55:16The Great Lakes
55:17The Great Lakes
55:18The Great Lakes
55:19The Great Lakes
55:20The Great Lakes
55:21The Great Lakes
55:22The Great Lakes
55:23The Great Lakes
55:24The Great Lakes
55:25The Great Lakes