On average, over 163 million net tons of cargo are moved each year on the Great Lakes in the holds of a vast fleet of steel ships. From the western end of Lake Superior, to the shallow, emerald-colored waters of Lake Erie, ships arrive and depart at all hours amid a landscape of dirt-laden mill buildings, smoke streaked skies, and vast fields of coal and iron ore pellets. The photographs in this book will show you a slice of industrial America rarely seen by the general public. These images, contemporary and historic, will take you to all of the primary loading and unloading ports from Lake Superior to Lake Erie. View first-hand how cargoes are loaded at the grain terminals of Thunder Bay, the ore docks of Minnesota’s north shore, or the sprawling Midwest Energy coal dock in Superior. See where these giant ships and cargoes go “down below” on the infamous Cuyahoga River, the Ford Plant on Detroit’s Rouge River, or inside the heart of the famous U.S. Steel Works in Gary, Indiana.

Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakestraces the evolution of the Great Lakes shipping industry over the last three centuries. The Great Lakes shipping industry can trace its lineage to 1679 with the launching on Lake Erie of the Griffon, a sixty-foot galley weighing nearly fifty tons. Built by LaSalle, a French explorer who had been commissioned to search for a passage through North America to China, it was the first sailing ship to operate on the upper lakes, signaling the dawn of the Great Lakes shipping industry as we know it today. Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakes is the most thorough and factual study of the Great Lakes shipping industry written this century. Author Mark L. Thompson tells the fascinating story of the world's most efficient bulk transportation system, describing the Great Lakes freighters, the cargoes of the great ships ,and the men and women who have served as crew. He documents the dramatic changes that have taken places in the industry and looks at the critical role that Great Lakes shipping plays in the economic well-being of the U.S. and Canada, despite the fact tat the size of the fleet and the amount of cargo carried have declined dramatically in recent years. Spanning more than three centuries, from LaSalle's voyage in 1679, through 1975 with the mysterious sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, to life aboard today's thousand-foot behemoths, this important volume documents the evolution of the industry through its "Golden Age" at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, with a downsized U.S. fleet that numbers fewer than seventy vessels.