Seeing America First, with the Berry Brothers — Key Ideas to Explore

People had told us that Lake Superior is twenty feet higher than Lake Huron, and we boys were dreading the plunge which our steamer would have to make, but it was as quiet as a mill-pond, for our boat merely sailed into a sort of box or "lock" and the water was slowly lowered till we sailed out on Lake Huron without even a jolt. There are locks between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, too, for Niagara Falls would not be very easy for a steamer to climb or descend.

It is wonderful to watch the loading and unloading of the huge freight barges. There are great derricks which reach out giant arms and pick up monstrous loads and carry them up or down to deck or dock.

Before the Erie Canal was built, the steamers could only go as far as Buffalo and there the freight had to be taken from the boats and loaded on trains in order to be sent farther east. The Erie Canal crosses New York state like a great water boulevard and connects with the Hudson at Albany and a boat sailing from Chicago can go clear to New York City and get a glimpse of the ocean before starting back to the inland seas.

We Berry Wagon Boys thought we had seen big machinery before, but when we went to the huge steel mills at Gary, Indiana, we felt about as small and unimportant as a couple of undersized ants standing before the Pyramids of Egypt!

Gary is called "the steel capital of the world," yet only a few years ago the spot where the city stands was just miles of dreary sandy beach on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. Columbus discovered America all ready-made, but Judge Gary and the other men who were in the big steel company did not discover Gary, they actually made it! Way up in the Lake Superior country were enormous stores of ore, but there was no coal and no limestone, so the ore had to be taken far away to be made into steel, and the freight made the steel very expensive. These men decided to find a place where the materials could be brought together more cheaply. It had to be on the lake, so that steamers could haul the ore. It had to be near several railroads, so that they could bring the coal and limestone. It had to be near a big city so that there would be a near-by market for the steel. Besides, they needed a lot of space to grow in. They bought 9000 acres and seven miles of that barren shore 25 miles from Chicago and they set their designers to work. The whole thing was built on paper before they began to build it out of concrete and cement. If anything was in their way, they just moved it. They had to move a river and a hundred miles of railroad track. Even then they had to build four of their big blast furnaces right out in the lake. It cost over two million dollars just to get things ready for the buildings.

If you were to go to Gary today and see the fine city they have built for their workers to live in, the paved and electric-lighted streets, the pretty homes, the parks, the wonderful steel plants, the fine harbor and the docks where great steamers are always loading and unloading, you would find it hard to believe that all of these had grown up out of that sand in ten years.

Until today all that we Berry Wagon Boys knew about meat was that we liked our steak rare and our pork well done, and we never thought where all the meat comes from or how it is prepared for the market. Here at the Union Stock Yards of Chicago we have learned many interesting things. Almost every farm in the United States has some cattle, hogs, and sheep, and out in the far west there are huge ranches where thousands of cow-boys are employed to care for the great herds of cattle. In Texas there is a ranch larger than the whole state of Connecticut.

Farmers used to kill their own stock and sell the meat in the nearest town, but now there are great meat-packing centers to which they ship the live stock and where it is turned into canned meat or sent in refrigerator trains or ships to all parts of the world, and because of the intense cold in which it is kept, the meat will remain fresh for months. The packing industry amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars a year.