Of late engineers have, in effect, been undoing with levels and scoops and
dredges what nature did in a mighty upheaval. They are practically tipping
the bowls back the other way and so making currents to run down the old
channel toward the gulf through the valleys of the Des Plaines and the
Illinois to the Mississippi.
And so that dream which the dying _Griffin_ spoke to the lake, and the
lake to the rivers in the time of flood--when intercommunication was
possible--is to be realized, except that steam or electricity will take
the place of winds, and screws of sails. [Footnote: Herbert Quick,
"American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.]
Meanwhile a great battle of the lakes is waging--a battle of levels, it
might better be called, between those, on the one side, who wish to
maintain the grandeur of Niagara much as it was when Hennepin first
pictured it, and with them those who for utilitarian reasons do not wish
its thunderous volume diminished, except, perhaps, for their local uses,
and those also who fear disaster to their harbors and canals all around
the lakes, deepened at great expense, if water is led away toward the
Mississippi; and, on the other side, the public health of millions at the
western end of the lakes and the commercial hopes of other millions in the
Mississippi Valley waiting for the _Griffins_ of the lakes to come with
more generous prices for their produce and bring to their doors what the
rest of the world has now to send to them by the more expensive railroad.
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