Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 February 1896 — ITS PERILS ARE MANY. [ARTICLE]

ITS PERILS ARE MANY.

Lake Superior la an Exceedingly Treacherous Body of Water. The recent accident to the •learner Missoula tends to show more clearly than anything that occurred the vast area of Lake Superior, and the possibility of a vessel’s crow reaching land after shipwreck and yet being unheard of for a couple of weeks after starting on a voyage. The shores of Michigan* Wisconsin and Minnesota on the big lake are traversed by railways and telegraph lines, and the towns and small settlements on the American side of the lake, even to the islands, furnish ready means of communication with the larger cities; hut not so on that part of the Canadian shore north of the lakes, where a wilderness inhabited by a few fishermen and Indians exists. This is especially true of the Canadian shore just above Sault Ste. Marie, and for a long stretch of country to the north and east of the point where the Canadian Pacific railway turns in to the shore of the lake and traverses it on toward Port Arthur and Fort William. M hen the Missoula broke her shaft and was rendered helpless she was less than twenty-five miles from dCaribou Island on the course down toward Sault Ste. Marie. She was somewhat off the regular course of vessels bound down from the head of Lake Superior, but if she had been able to make any headway toward the Sault, or care for herself at all on the course she was following, she would have been picked up very soon after tlJb accident by some passing vessel. But a southerly wind drifted her out of the course of even the few vessels trading to Canadian ports at the head of the lakes, and she was working over toward the wildest part of the Canadian north shore territory when her crew was compelled to abandon her. A glance at the chart will show that Brule point, where the crew of the Missoula first made land, is scarcely more than seventy-five miles from Sault Ste. Marie, where 15,000,000 tons of freight passes through a canal in a single season, and yet the men in one of the Missdula’syawl boats spent nearly two days working along the shore of the lake before they found any more sign of life than a deserted fisherman’s shanty, in which they built a fire and dried their wet clothing. The fishing season has closed, but even fishermen are scarce in this territory during the most active periods. It is not strange, therefore, that the men from the Mis. soula were nearly a full week in finding means of communicating with the ownera of the vessel after they had landed on the dreary north shore of Lake Superior.—Detroit Free Press.