Canals

A Dan, a clan, a canal, Canada! (That is a palindrome in the style of an already well-known palindrome. But this story doesn’t really involve anyone named Dan, nor any clans. But it does include canals and Canada. So well worth the reversibility.)

Thinking about some of the places we have visited—Chicago, Illinois; Midland, Michigan; Kingston, Ontario—as well as many other cities we didn’t get to, I realized that many of them wouldn’t exist or would be much smaller if it weren’t for canals.

Water is essential for a big city. Certainly we need it to drink and wash. But just as important in the development of trade, we need water for shipping. Big cities are generally cities where lots of trade can occur. There are inland big cities, like Atlanta, which was a major trading location due to the railroads that crossed there, and later the interstates. But most big cities are on major waterways or on the coast.

The Great Lakes are massive. But for realistic shipping, you need to be able to go from one lake to another. And more importantly, you need to be able to connect to the ocean. That’s not the case with the Great Lakes as nature left them.

You might be saying, “What about the St. Lawrence River?” Great question. The St. Lawrence River does run from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean. The trouble is that the river isn’t navigable the whole way.

Prior to canals, if you entered the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, you could go upstream a long way. But then you hit a set of rapids. Where? Right at Montreal. That’s why Montreal is where it is. It was the furthest into the interior you could get by river. But this meant you had to transport goods over land from Montreal further west or from the west to Montreal. That’s heavy work.

The rapids were originally called Sault Saint-Louis (sault is the French word for rapids.) They were named for a teenage sailor, Louis, who drowned in these rapids during an early expedition up the river. But they were later renamed the Lachine Rapids. That’s a funny name. They were named for a city called Lachine, just southwest of Montreal and very close to the rapids. But Lachine is the French term for China. It’s kind of a joke name, because the original nobleman who was granted the land, René Robert Cavelier de La Salle, thought he could use the St. Lawrence River to find the Northwest Passage, a way across North America to the Pacific and eventually to China. That didn’t work out, but ironically they named this piece of his land Lachine, so he could say he had reached China.

Narrow boats with little draft can actually go down the rapids. In fact, there are whitewater excursions that run them. But it wasn’t possible to go upriver over the Lachine Rapids. So ships from the Atlantic couldn’t reach Lake Ontario. Montreal was as good as it got.

Then someone had an idea! Let’s build a canal that goes around these rapids. And they did. The earliest canal was called the Lachine Canal. These days that has been replaced by the bigger South Shore Canal which is part of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The St. Lawrence Seaway project was a joint venture between Canada and the United States to make it possible for ships to go from the Atlantic all the way through any of the Great Lakes to reach as far as Duluth, Minnesota or Chicago, Illinois.

But passing the Lachine Rapids was only one necessary step. It isn’t generally possible to get from one Great Lake to another. There are two exceptions. The first is Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. They are connected by a channel called the Straits of Mackinac which is deep and navigable. In fact, the water levels of Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and the Straits of Mackinac are all the same elevation. Hydrologically this means it is really all one big lake. But historically we think of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron as being separate lakes.

The other exception is between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. You get from one to the other through rivers and another lake. Lake Huron drains into the St. Clair River which runs to Lake St. Clair. Ironically, this lake is in the middle of the great ones, but it’s not big enough to be great itself. Maybe it is great adjacent. From Lake St. Clair, you go downstream through the Detroit River and reach Lake Erie. These rivers are navigable upstream as well.

Lake Superior is the highest of the lakes in elevation. It connects to Lake Huron through a river, St. Mary’s River. But that river also has a set of rapids: Saint Mary’s Rapids. Or, in French, Sault Ste. Marie. On each side of the rapids is a city called Sault Ste. Marie, one in Ontario, Canada, and the other in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, United States. How does one get past these rapids? With a canal, of course!

But the biggest, scariest barrier to navigation is between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. These are also connected by a river, but the barrier here is no set of rapids. That river is the Niagara River and that barrier is Niagara Falls. No ship is going upstream or downstream across that massive obstacle.

Ships passing between these two lakes avoid the Niagara River entirely. They use the Welland Canal, a north-south cut through the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario. It is an impressive feat of engineering, such a long canal.

But the Welland Canal isn’t the longest canal connecting the Great Lakes to the ocean. That honor goes to the Erie Canal, 351 miles long, which cuts across upstate New York to connect the Seneca River which empties in Lake Erie to the Hudson River which empties in the Atlantic Ocean. The Erie Canal is the longest canal in North America. But it is only the fourth longest canal in the world.

The longest canal in the world is also the longest duration for any canal to have ever been built. It’s called the Grand Canal and it is in China. It connects the Yangtze River and the Yellow River and it runs 1,104 miles. But what’s crazy about this canal is that work began on it in the 5th Century BCE and it was completed in the 17th Century CE. It took over 2000 years to build this monster and it was completed before any of the canals of the Great Lakes was even begun.

Well, I had plenty to say about canals and certainly Canada was mentioned. If anyone has any ideas as to how to work a Dan or a clan into the story, let me know. I hate to waste a good palindrome.