Former industry worker explores history and impacts of Great Lakes shipping

The Great Lakes run through Cleveland-area author Eric Hirsimaki’s blood. He spent 40 years working in the Great Lakes shipping industry — on a cargo railroad, aboard boats, at the ports they visited and beyond.

“The work was hard, but the pay was good,” the author said, recalling summers sailing the lakes, delivering freight and commodities.

Staring with his great-grandfather, a Finnish immigrant, Hirsimaki’s family worked in the shipping industry for nearly 130 years, finding employment on docks, sailing and shoveling coal on cargo ships of all sizes.

His great-grandfather died in a dock accident, and his burial place is unknown.

“We were an average working immigrant family and all prospered,” Hirsimaki said.

In 2011, Hirsimaki retired from the shipping industry and began writing about it instead. He has authored 10 books on the subject. His most recent release, “Sail, Steam, and Diesel: Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes,” published by Michigan State University Press, is a monster at nearly 700 pages.

In nine chapters and four appendixes, the book provides a comprehensive history of shipping on the Great Lakes, beginning with the fur trade and later timber and valuable minerals, all of which made some entrepreneurs fabulously wealthy.

Through this history, Hirsimaki’s book also provides a look at the settlement of the northwest United States and how the cargo the boats carried contributed to the country’s industrial might during two world wars.

The book is filled with stories and information you’ve likely seen nowhere else. Much of it is focused on the evolution of boats on the Great Lakes, including the age of sail, the advent of steam power and, finally, the implementation of diesel engines.

When you think of the earliest freight haulers — canoes — you may picture small two-person vessels navigating the Great Lakes. However, we learn from the book that the Montreal canoe was nearly 40 feet long and 6 feet wide, requiring eight men to paddle it.

Then there were boats propelled with literal horsepower, like the canal boat, which was pulled by horses walking along the shore. This method was used on the Erie Canal, which opened the Great Lakes to the East Coast in 1825. There were also the less common methods of having horses onboard walk in circles or on treadmills to drive a paddle wheel.

Hirsimaki also writes about the inherent danger of sailing the Great Lakes and discusses the wrecks at the bottom of the vast waters. He explores some of the advancements in safety, such as lighthouses, lightboats and the United States Life-Saving Service, which kept watch over some of the more dangerous passages.

The author said he has been collecting stories about Great Lakes shipping for decades and has even taken around 10 vacations on Great Lakes freighters. He has three more books in the works, including one on the Soo Locks.

Today, shipping on the Great Lakes looks much different than it did at its peak, when boats would pass through Detroit, for example, every 15 minutes, and would be backed up at the Soo Locks awaiting passage. According to “Sail, Steam, and Diesel,” the industry at the turn of the 20th century employed more than 20,000 workers. Today, there are 1,200 workers at most, and you’re lucky to see one boat a day, Hirsimaki said.

“When I sailed in the ‘60s, it wasn’t unusual to see boats on the horizon. You knew a boat from the stacks and the flags they flew. Those days are gone,” he said.