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TELESCOPE June 133 THE OCEAN LINERS OF THE LAKES Ocean styling flourished on the lakes briefly in the eighties and nineties while lake carriers were searching for their moderr1 forms. Package freighters of the Lehigh Valley and Erie Railroad fleets were the best examples of this trend. Bulk carriers like Maryland and Centurion also had their machinery placed nearly amidships. Largest and fastest on the lakes then were Erie Rail road's 350-foot package freighters Owego and Chemung of 1887~88 (see illustration). They were modelled closely after Atlantic coastal freighters of the Mallory Line. Their powerful engines and fine hull lines gave them laurels in impromptu races with other package cargo liners of the Chicago and Buffalo trade. Lake Superior then had less glamorous American-flag freighters than those on the Chicago run. They were principally wooden Ward Line propellers, or older tonnage pooled by various rail- road fleets to make up the Lake Superior Transit Company. But three Canadian ships of 1884 were the finest passenger-cargo steamships of the lakesâ€"«Alberta, Athabaska and the unfortunate Algoma. These actually came from shipyards overseas in Scot- land. And they introduced many modern ocean innovations to the lakes--such as the "Plimsoll line," which other lake ships needed a decade or more to begin adopting grudgingly. But in appearance the Canadian Pacific ships and Algoma's replacement, Manitoba of 1889, were less transplanted ocean liners than greatly modernized engines-aft traditional propellers. The Canadian Pacific was part of the great spectacle of westerrm railroads pushing toward the Pacific between the sixties and the nineties. Another of these railroads began in the Lake Superior region as the St. Paul and Pacific Railway. But it made very little progress westward before financial grief overtook it in the troubles of 1873. By 1878 it had been reorganized by a Red River steamboat operator named James Jerome Hill. Now it was less pompously rechristened the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manit<3ba Railway. Hill encouraged Canadian friends to finance it, as the railroad now hoped merely to reach the Canadian border and meet feeders of the growing Canadian Pacific system. But in a few years the Canadian Pacific began pushing vigorously eastward around Lake Superior. Soon it would be much less dependent on its Minnesota railroad connections. And Hill's railroad had turned westward again, reaching Montana by 1887 and the state of Washirlg- ton by 1893. Alone among the American transcontinental railroads, Hill's company survived succeeding financial depressions with an unbroken dividend record, thanks to sound planning and managemerlt. We mention this only to counter the notion that Jim Hill was a reckless spendthrift; the following pages will have little more such evidence! Manitoba wheat and flour were still Hill's best cargoes in the late eighties. To carry these cargoes eastward, he circumvented the Lake Superior Transit pool of eastern railroad ships and biiilt his own vessels. Cleveland's Globe Iron Works had grown into the