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Editorial: SHIPS, PORTS, 4.ND PEOPLE OF THE GREAT LIKES Our cover this month carries a blank map of the Great Lakes. This shows the region as the white man found it. No towns, no roads, no railroads, no farms, no industrial plants. Just land and water, and endless forests, with here and there a few open spaces. For countless years it had been like this, except for the changes wrought by long slow processes of nature. It had not always been like that, but what went on before is a story for the geologist, not the historian or the gather of legends. There had been vast upheavals, and many<f the minerals that were later to serve mankind had been tossed about and left in prodigious deposits, here and there, often barely covered by the soil that nourished the trees that came later. Through the forests, and over these vast deposits, a primitive race of men wandered for perhaps thousands of years. Theirs was a simple life that made so slight a drain upon the natural resources that nature healed the wounds they made, leaving no scars. The bark and boughs they took for the lodges and boats were replaced faster than they were taken. Save for a few minute dents made by some unknown race, the copper deposits remained untouched. To these people iron ore was but another kind of dirt, not even good for growing corn. The supply of furs was never depleted, and the forests never diminished in area. Game for food was limited only by the food supply for the animals, and fish multiplied in the waters until there was no room for more. Then came the white man into the Great Lakes Basin. Singly, and in pairs, then by tens, and later by hundreds and thousands. For more than a hundred years, like the Indians, the white man left little or no trace of his having passed. It was during this period that he saw the region as our map shows it. To him the Lakes were a highway into a wilderness. His remote trading posts begot towns, and towns required farms to feed them after the white man*s custom. Towns and farms required better transportation than was afforded by the canoes and so came the ships. With better transportation the towns grew in size and number and the farms encroached upon the forests. Fur gave way to agriculture, and the demand for lumber for homes, and barns and bridges, and wharves, further reduced the forests. Lumbering became the principal industry, then waned, when the forests were no more. Then came the era of copper mining, with the development of the iron ore deposits following close on its heels. Until the coming of roads the ships were the only means of transportation. Railroads came so soon after the few, poor roads, that the latter hardly affected the business of shipping, but it was the railroads which first gave shipping a set back. Passenger traffic between the larger centers of population went first, then the local passengers took to the branch lines. The smaller ships held on to the small-town business for a while, but finally gave up. Then came the through highways, and the automobiles and trucks* • Many of the branch lines quit. Shipping moved into a new field,--that of bulk cargoes of iron ore and grain, where they hold the field today. So varied, and numerous, have become the details of a modern map of the Lakes region, that it is a relief to look upon one which shows the land, and the Lakes, as the white found them, and it is very restful.