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TELESCOPE Page 35 The Life and Times of The BESSEMER FLEET CPantel iota twoupant series, toube concluded in the May/June issue. ) BY PRITCHARD BUGBEE GORDON The decade of the nineties is one of the most interesting periods in the history of lake shipping. It was then that the Great Lakes ore car- rier became the archetypal lake ship in place of the decked package cargo "propeller." Shipowners typically having but a freighter or schooner or two were displaced by the large fleets of ore carriers owned by the big mining and steel companies. The steel hulls became economical and then commonplace, so that by 1900 only James Davidson of Bay City was still building large wooden hulls. Throughout the nineties and during another half dozen years the length of the largest lake freighters near- ly doubled and the carrying capacity more than tripled. We have not seen comparable advances until the advent of thousand-footers in the present decade. Beyond the lakehead, the last of the great northern iron ore ranges, the Mesabi, was brought into production. The new steel hulls were much more expensive than wooden ones, and the new ore pits promised only distant future rewards. But a severe finan- cial depression troubled the middle years of the nineties, and there was little new capital available. The only likely investor who seemed immune to the business panic was John D. Rockefeller. Now that the oilman was no longer plowing profits back into his Standard Oil empire, Rockefeller's yearly income fattened his personal fortune almost unman- ageably, and he needed places to put his money to work. And so Rockefel- ler became a sort of absentee land- lord to the largest of the new lake fleets and mining ventures. For a time it appeared that Rockefeller would consolidate an ore mining and shipping monopoly much like his oil trust. But so impersonal and indir= ect was his involvement, and for such a brief time span, that today his own contribution in bringing ore shipping to maturity is largely for- gotten. Rockefeller was a young Cleveland produce merchant when he took up oil refining with several associates in 1862. Not long before, oil had been only a vile-tasting patent medicine. But the Pennsylvania oil discoveries of 1859 created a booming new indus- try. In ten years, Rockefeller gath- ered Cleveland's oil refineries into his Standard Oil Company. In another ten, Standard Oil controlled ninety per cent of American oil refineries. Standard also dominated oil Trans- portation, buying up all the pipe- lines and clubbing special low rates from the railroads. But at least in the early years Rockefeller avoided buying oil wells, themselves. He knew that oil producers were too numerous to combine for protection