SAULT STE. MARIE, MICHIGAN

Region: Sault Ste. Marie

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Located on the south shore of the St. Marys River, across from its much larger Canadian sister-city of the same name, the Sault overlooks one of the most strategic links in Great Lakes shipping, the Soo Locks that make it possible for giant freighters to pass between Lake Huron and Lake Superior despite the rapids and 21-foot change in elevation here. ("Sault" means falls in French.) Sault Ste. Marie is Michigan's oldest continually occupied settlement and one of the oldest in the U.S., thanks to the ancient portage around the falls of the St. Marys River.

Mimi Bruder

An Upper Peninsula architectural landmark, the 1896 Edison Sault Power Plant draws water from a 2-mile-long canal from Lake Superior that drops 20 feet, turning the longest hydroelectric shaft in the world. The 1400-foot-long building uses native sandstone. Despite its awesome size, the power plant never attracted as much industry as its backers had hoped.

The attractive Soo Locks Park and viewing stand are magnets for boat-watchers and tourists of all stripes. The 600' Valley Camp bulk carrier has now become the Museum Ship Valley Camp. Its many Great Lakes displays include two torn lifeboats from the Edmund Fitzgerald.

For centuries the whitefish-filled rapids at the Sault were an important Indian fishing spot in the region. The area was first visited by a European in 1618, when Etienne Brulé, Champlain's scout, was on his search for the fabled Northwest Passage to the Orient. A French trading post developed here in the 1650s. Father Jacques Marquette established one of his Jesuit missions here in 1668. By the 1730s Sault Ste. Marie's importance in the fur trade had been eclipsed by Fort Michilimackinac at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula.

Photography Plus

Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan is to the left, next to the four American locks. The smaller Canadia locks are on the right. In summer Lock Tours Canada gives visitors a boat tour.

Even though the city is located at such a strategic spot and over 100 million tons of cargo passes right by its downtown every year, Sault Ste. Marie has remained economically rather static over the decades. It reached a low point in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the state's economy was floundering and the Air Force closed its Kincheloe air base south of town. (Built during the Cold War to defend the strategic locks, it's pronounced "KIN-shul-OH.") A radar base closed as well.

But the economy has picked up since the late 1980s, due to the giant Kewadin casino outside Sault Ste. Marie, two smaller casinos in nearby Bay Mills, and the big new Kinross and Chippewa prisons at Kincheloe. Gambling is the linchpin for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians' multifaceted, long-range plan under longtime tribal chairman Bernard Bouschor to build a self-sufficient employment base, educational and social services, and health insurance for all tribal members.

The opening in 1855 of these locks at Sault Ste. Marie was a huge development, allowing Lake Superior ports to ship large quantities of iron ore and grain to the rest of the country.

Before gambling, many houses on the reservation had no indoor plumbing. Now the tribe has become a benefactor for the whole area. The tribe has developed its flagship Kewadin Casino in Sault Ste. Marie into a spectacular entertainment/lodging/cultural complex, complete with an art gallery and hotel. It sets a high standard for Midwestern casinos. Years ago the tribe, ever aware that the gaming industry is fast-changing and increasingly competitive, started to diversify with its gambling earnings. It now owns two construction companies, a charter air service, a manufacturer of driveshafts for the automotive aftermarket, several motels in and beyond Sault Ste. Marie, and a cleaning company.

The Kewadin Casino finished building the biggest convention center in the Upper Peninsula in 1997 with an eye to making the city a broad-based destination. It added a 16,000-square-foot bingo hall, three restaurants, a nightclub, a convention room seating 530, the 1,300-seat Dreammaker Theater, and an extra four stories on its Clarion Hotel, enlarging it to 300 rooms. The Bawating Gallery displays a large collection of contemporary Woodland native art, some of it for sale. Demonstrations of beadwork, basketmaking, and painting are usually on Saturdays. The casino is southeast of town on Shunk Road north of Three Mile Road. (See map.) For information, call (800) KEWADIN, (906) 635-4917, look in at www.kewadin.com , or contact Tickets Plus (800-585-3737) for headline entertainment that has included Kenny Rogers, Culture Club, Gordon Lightfoot, and Loretta Lynn.

Gambling earnings have provided the wherewithal to develop educational and social service programs that emphasize traditional Ojibwa spirituality, traditional culture, and youth sports as effective tools in fighting substance abuse. The tribe's well-written and substantive newspaper, The Sault Tribe News, and its web site, www.saulttribe.com , are worth seeking out. They give revealing glimpses of community life, including activities at the charter elementary school and the Big Bear Arena, which brought ice hockey facilities in the American Soo up to Canadian standards, with year-round ice and more.

Prisons, viewed in toto, are perhaps the largest industry of all in this region. The Kinross and Chippewa correctional facilities which house some 3,000 prisoners and pump $80 million a year into the local economy. The huge Kincheloe prison complex to the south handles another 4,000 prisoners and employs over 1,000.

The Canadian dollar is worth about the same as an
American dollar. Even though Canadian currency has appreciated against the American dollar, Canadians still boost the Michigan Soo's economy somewhat by crossing over the International Bridge to buy much cheaper gasoline and dairy products on the Michigan side. The bridge, over two miles long, once averaged 10,000 vehicle crossings a day because it is the only U.S.-Canadian bridge between Port Huron, 345 miles to the south, and the Ontario-Minnesota border, almost 600 miles to the northwest.

A conspicuous sight crossing the border into the U.S. are big logging trucks bringing cheaper timber from Canadian forests, where environmental restrictions are less stringent than in the U.S. Another common sight are trucks with big loads of steel from the giant Algoma plant, a looming sight across the river.

In the late 19th century, there were plans for Michigan's Sault Ste. Marie to become a major northern metropolis by using the St. Mary's River as a power source. Francis Clergue from Maine pursued this dream but went bankrupt in developing the impressive sandstone hydroelectric power plant, a quarter mile long, where the waterpower canal meets the river. Today it's known as the Edison Sault Power Plant. It's on East Portage two-thirds of a mile east of Ashmun.

The three-mile long power canal effectively created an island of downtown Sault Ste. Marie, which is connected to the rest of the city by five bridges. It's all too easy for visitors to miss seeing downtown's grand churches and public buildings from this exuberant turn-of-the-century era. Bingham Avenue historic buildings are on the street which parallels Ashmun two blocks to the east.

The new industries so eagerly anticipated by Clergue never came to the Michigan. Clergue went bust, and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, is today not another Minneapolis but a town of well under 20,000. Despite Clergue's ultimate financial failure, deals and alliances he had made earlier with Canadian investors did transform Sault Ste. Marie, Canada into the industrial center it is today. Clergue helped create the Algoma Central Railroad (the famous Agawa Canyon Tour Train and Snow Train), St. Mary's Paper, and Algoma Steel.

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PLACES AROUND SAULT STE. MARIE, MICHIGAN TO

Eat Sleep Camp