220 
Modern Business Geography 
Maumee River, which has been made into a good harbor. Here again, 
as in the case of almost every city, many factors besides transportation 
cooperate. 
Buffalo as a station on the route to Europe. The extraordinary 
importance of the ends of the Great Lakes is evident from the location 
not only of Chicago, Detroit, and Toledo, but of Duluth and Toronto. 
and especially Buffalo. 
Buffalo has the great advantages of (1) cheap iron ore from the Lake 
Superior region, (2) cheap grain from the same region, (3) cheap water 
power from Niagara, and (4) water transportation to New York through 
the Erie Barge Canal. In spite of the canal, however, the grain from 
the western lake ports is usually lifted out of the boats into elevators 
at Buffalo, and then transported to cars that carry it to the Jersey 
City water front of New York harbor (Fig. 145). There it is lightered 
to tramp steamers bound for Liverpool and Europe. 
Strange as it may seem, the cost of unloading a bushel of wheat at 
Buffalo, plus the cost of the railway haul to Jersey City, plus the cost 
of reloading on the ocean-going steamer, is fully half the entire cost 
of transportation from Duluth to Liverpool. In normal times, for 
every bushel of wheat bound for Liverpool from six to eight cents is 
spent on costly railroad transportation. Yet when the wheat reaches 
Jersey City, it is farther from Liverpool than when it was on the dock 
at Buffalo. If Buffalo were a station on the route of ocean steamers 
instead of a terminal for lake steamers, the journey from the Middle 
West to Europe would be shortened almost a thousand miles, and five 
cents or more would be saved on every bushel of wheat bound for Europe 
from Manitoba, the Dakotas, and the neighboring wheat regions. 
The waterways between the Great Lakes have been so much improved 
that all but the largest freight-carrying steamers could proceed from 
the Atlantic Ocean to Duluth or Chicago were it not for fifty miles of 
rapids in the upper St. Lawrence River above Montreal. It seems 
probable that if dams and large locks were built here, the cost of con- 
struction would be met by the water power that would be made avail- 
able. It would then be possible to lift ocean steamers the entire 600 
feet to the level of Lake Superior. Thus Buffalo and the other lake 
ports would, to all intents and purposes, become seaports. 
The transportation conditions that favor Cleveland and Milwaukee. 
Cleveland and Milwaukee, unlike the other great cities on the lakes, 
are located at neither the head nor the foot of a body of water. Port 
Arthur, the wheat port of Manitoba, and Rochester, on a river a 
few miles from Lake Ontario, occupy similar positions. Cleveland