If we examine the western ends of the Great Lakes route, we see that cities have grown up wherever the lakes reach into the good country. What is the population of each of eight American cities on these lakes? The lake steamer carries freight more cheaply than a train. Explain how that fact has caused the lake cities to be larger than the inland cities.
Chicago is the second city of America in size because, like New York, it is a center for many trade routes. Chicago is larger than Toledo or Duluth chiefly because it is the trade center for more good farmland than either of the other cities. It has been made not only by the lake, but also by the land. (Figs. 264, 308, 494.) Chicago is on the edge of the Lake Region, yet the lakes make it the greatest center of trade with the rich region of the Prairie Corn and Small Grain Belt. This region sends to Chicago many thousands of meat _animals for the packing plants, and many millions of bushels of grain to be forwarded over the lakes. In return, Chicago sends machinery and all kinds of sup plies back to the farming country. Chicago and, to a lesser extent, all the other lake cities are really gateways through which streams of goods are flowing in both directions. Raw materials are going east and finished products are going west.
Being centrally located in the United States, Chicago is a good place for mail-order houses. (Figs. 308, 494.) All the people of the country can be more quickly reached by mail from this point than from any other.
In the summer season some of the produce that comes down the lakes from Chicago and other American cities is forwarded to Europe from the ports of Montreal and Quebec. It is a great hindrance to trade that the produce of the Lake District and of the St. Lawrence Valley must go overland to the Atlantic ports for nearly five months when the river is icebound.
322. Population.—The lake region' is the most northerly part of eastern North America where many people are living, and it has many kinds of people in it. Quebec was once a French colony. The people still speak French, and many refuse to learn English, or to speak it when they know it. Ontario was settled by British people, and they retain English ideas and ways of living. Michigan was settled by Yankees from New York and New England. The same kind of people also settled in Wisconsin. Later many Germans, Danes, and Poles settled there. A great many people have recently come from many countries in Europe to work in the mining towns near the west end of Lake Superior, and to live in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and other big cities.
323. Transportation helps make manufac lake cities are busy with fac tories as well as with trade. The lake steamer that carries ore, grain, lumber, meat, and copper eastward, often brings on its return journey cargoes of Pennsylvania coal from Buffalo, Cleveland, Erie, or Ashtabula.
The lake shores produce the materials for making machinery, and Chicago, the trade center of the greatest agricultural district in the world, is also the greatest center in the world for the manufacture of agricultural machinery. Such products are so bulky that they need to be made as near as possible to the place where they are to be used. This gives Chicago an advantage over distant places.
To supply Chicago with steel, a new city was started near by at Gary, Indiana. Here, on a waste of sand, the largest steel plant in the world was built. A harbor was dug out of the sand. Here steamers loaded with iron ore from Lake Superior can run into docks directly beside the iron furnaces. At this big plant the newly-melted iron runs into little cars, and is carried, still molten, to the steel furnaces. There it is changed to steel, and sent on as .a. great white-hot chunk to the rolling mill, to be rolled out into steel rails for railroad and trolley tracks, or girders for bridges and skyscrapers, or billets (chunks) for the wire mill or the nail mill. A thousand different factories use the product of this one great plant.
Since Chicago is so near to the stock farms of the corn-growing prairies, it slaughters more meat animals than any other city in the world. An English traveler said: "To watch an animal from the pen to the tin (can) is an extraordinary experience. You see it killed; it falls; a conveyor carries it away; it is flayed (skinned) while you wait; it disappears. Then, suddenly, it is an open ' carcass; it passes the veterinary; in a few seconds it is cut up, and hurriedly you follow the dwindling carcass that is no longer an ox, but fragments of meat; you see the meat shredded; in another room the manicured girls are filling the shreds into tins, and the tin is closed and labeled. A superior force, which is called organized industry, has cut up the cattle on a traveling belt and carried them away." Milwaukee, like Chicago, is a machinery and trade center; it has also large factories manufacturing leather and many other things.