Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas

© 1997 David Minor / Eagles Byte

It’s as far west as the salties can go. For those of you unfamiliar with Great Lakes lingo, a salty is a saltwater ship, and you won’t find one west of Duluth-Superior. To those of us who live at the eastern end of the Great Lakes, the western end may be relatively unknown. Every so often we’ll explore the shores of these five glacial souvenirs, and get acquainted.

Most lakes have fairly rounded contours. Lake Superior comes to a sharp point at its western end, where Wisconsin snuggles cozily into the lower curve of eastern Minnesota. That geography has shaped the history of two towns; made them first rivals, and then partners.

Superior, Wisconsin, was the first. England’s Hudson’s Bay Company had an outpost there as early as 1820, although an even earlier trading post at nearby Fond du Lac, Minnesota, 67 years earlier, would one day become a depot of the rival American Fur Company. Superior, formally settled in 1853, under the tutelage of a bevy of eastern capitalists and politicians, a consortium including Washington banker William Wilson Corcoran, Senator Stephen A. Douglas and Congressman John C. Breckinridge, stepped out ahead. Momentum increased when a military road to St. Paul, Minnesota, was constructed in 1856. Meanwhile, a rival had sprung up across the bay. Duluth, near Fond du Lac, was also settled in 1853 but, with no friends in high places, had only a population of eighty, seven years later. That changed when Philadelphia financier Jay Cooke became interested in Duluth as a lake port for the shipment of grain from nearby midwestern wheatfields to eastern markets. He was one of the sponsors of a bill in Congress to make harbor improvements at Duluth.

And improvements were necessary. Minnesota Point, an eight-mile long spit of sand, fifty feet in height, not only protected Duluth’s harbor, but made Superior closer to open water and therefore to shipping. When, in 1870, the bill failed in Congress, Cooke founded the Minnesota Canal and Harbor Improvement Company and began construction of a channel to sever Minnesota Point, opening the Port of Duluth directly to Lake Superior. The town of Superior, learning of the threat from their rival, sent representatives to Leavenworth, Kansas, the nearest Federal presence, to obtain an injunction against the project. The emissaries were successful and set off for home, galloping across the landscape, injunction in hand. But they underestimated the citizens of Duluth. Word of the legal prohibition raced ahead of them. Every able-bodied man in Duluth grabbed a shovel or a pick, rushed out onto the point, and completed the construction of the channel, hours before the injunction was scheduled to take effect.