Every so often I find a headline that makes me really wonder whether it’s true or not. Today was one of those headlines.

"The number of the five Great Lakes may be increased to six," the Milwaukee Leader announced, in its Saturday magazine section, one hundred years ago today. Not a renaming of an already established lake to be a “Great” lake. Not a redrawing of a map. An actual new lake, built by dams, north of Lake Superior, more than twice the size of Lake Ontario.

My first instinct was that this had to be filler. The kind of speculative engineering fantasy a newspaper syndicate ran on a slow week to fill column inches next to a stomach-medicine ad. Then I went looking for who was actually behind it, and the story turned out to be a lot more real, a lot longer, and a lot stranger than the headline let on.

Two years before the Milwaukee Leader ran its breezy little feature, a man named Ralph Keemle was already deep into this idea. Keemle was a railway engineer, not a hydrologist, who'd spent years working for the Canadian Northern Railway and later became general manager of a smaller Ontario line. By his own account, he'd first recognized the possibility back in 1923, while crisscrossing the empty country between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay for railway work.

His pitch, as reported in June 1924, was concrete and specific: build three dams across the Albany, Ogoki, and Kenogami rivers, all of which currently drained north into Hudson Bay, and redirect that water south into Lake Superior instead. Estimated cost: five million dollars. The basin it would flood was roughly the size of Lake Erie.

The motivation wasn't vanity or whimsy. It was Chicago. The city's drainage canal was pulling enormous volumes of water out of the Great Lakes system for sewage disposal, and Keemle had a number for it: "Chicago is drawing off 10,000 cubic feet of water every second," he told reporters. "This diversion has lowered the lakes' level about five and a half inches." Every inch the lakes dropped cost shipping companies real money in dredging and lost cargo capacity. Keemle's fix was simple in concept: take water that was, in his words, otherwise going to waste, and put it where it would actually help.

He wasn't some lone crank shouting into the void, either. Sir Adam Beck, chairman of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission, was reportedly considering the project seriously enough that the commission sent one of its own engineers, C.C. McLennan, on an expedition to survey the proposed dam sites. McLennan came back and reported favorably. And Keemle, when asked about his own stake in all this, said something I didn't expect from a man pitching a multimillion-dollar megaproject: "I am not looking for any profit from the venture myself. My interests are solely from the standpoint of the public."

Buried inside that same article is the detail that actually answers the Milwaukee Leader's headline. The full "sixth Great Lake" idea, the one that eventually got the dramatic write-up in 1926, wasn't Keemle's main proposal at all. It was a side note, something he mentioned almost in passing as a bigger, vaguer possibility he hadn't worked out yet. His real plan was the more modest one: raise the existing lakes by diverting water into them, not build a brand new inland sea from scratch. The newspapers that ran with "sixth Great Lake" as the headline, mine included, were technically covering Keemle's footnote, not his actual pitch.

Two weeks after that first detailed write-up, a rival engineer named Mark J. Paterson stepped in to say, bluntly, that the whole thing was nonsense. Paterson had real standing to make that claim. He'd spent ten years prospecting that exact stretch of Ontario and had personally led a canoe-and-foot expedition in 1900 that crossed nearly the entire route Keemle was now proposing to dam, from Lake Superior all the way to James Bay and back.

His verdict: "All the money in Ontario would not effect such an absurd proposition." He argued the land elevations made it physically impossible, and that even if it somehow worked, it would drain fish-filled lakes, destroy valuable timber, and ruin good farmland for nothing. "The whole plan seems more like a hideous nightmare to me than anything else," he said.

Keemle didn't back down. He maintained he'd surveyed the land carefully and that Paterson simply had the elevation figures wrong. When the paper told him about the criticism, his response was almost weary: "The alternative proposition looks good on paper, but when one knows the land levels, it is quite hopeless." Two confident engineers, two competing surveys, and as far as the record shows, neither side ever fully conceded the point.

Keemle kept pushing it. By February 1925, he was describing a "second phase" of his plan to the Chatham Rotary Club, and reporters noted the scheme had, by then, been officially endorsed by the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission. The following October, a Buffalo newspaper covered what reads as essentially the same proposal, attributed instead to a "C. Lorne Campbell of Toronto, railway builder," under the grand title "The Campbell Plan for the Restoration of the Great Lakes Levels." Whether that was a second engineer independently chasing the same basin, or some confusion in the reporting, isn't something I can untangle from what I've got. What I can tell you is that years later, when the project actually got built, the newspapers covering its construction credited it back to Keemle by name, not Campbell. So that's the version of the story I'm sticking with.

A decade after Keemle's first pitch, the idea was still alive enough to make front pages, though the tone had shifted toward skepticism. By 1935, the price tag being floated had ballooned to $155,000,000, and a Toronto Telegram headline asked whether the whole thing amounted to pouring that fortune "down Chicago's sewers." The basic shape of Keemle's plan, the dams on the Ogoki and its neighboring rivers, was still the one everyone kept coming back to, even as estimates of its cost and value swung wildly depending on who was doing the math.

Here's the part of this story that surprised me most. Despite the rebuttals, the inflated cost estimates, and a full decade of newspapers treating it as a curiosity, a real and substantially smaller version of Keemle's plan did get built, and it happened because of a war, not a wheat empire.

Construction on the first piece, a dam diverting the Kenogami river through Long Lac, began in the late 1930s. A 1938 photo of that dam, mid-construction, ran under the headline "Reversing a River," with a caption noting that fourteen miles of river that had flowed north toward Hudson Bay for all of recorded history would now flow south instead.

Then came the war. In 1940, with Britain and Canada needing every watt of hydroelectric power they could generate for the war effort, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario greenlit the larger project: the Ogoki diversion, damming the Ogoki river and sending its flow south into Lake Nipigon and on into Lake Superior, instead of north into James Bay. A 1942 feature on the construction effort described it as nothing less than "the crystallization of a dream of Ralph Keemle," and noted plainly that he'd first recognized the possibility back in 1923, a full eighteen years earlier. Eight hundred lumberjacks cleared bush, work crews poured concrete in temperatures that dropped to fifty below zero, and bush pilots flew more than a million pounds of freight into a construction camp that didn't exist a year before.

The Ogoki diversion was officially opened on a cold day in 1943, with a Hydro engineer smashing a bottle of Niagara River water against a log instead of champagne against a ship's hull. Combined with the smaller Long Lac diversion, the two projects raised the level of every Great Lake below Superior by about two and three-quarter inches. Not the fifty-to-one-hundred-year restoration Keemle once promised. Not a sixth Great Lake, not even close. But real, measurable, and still running today, eighty years later.

Here's where I have to slow down, because the completion ceremony wasn't the end of the story for everyone involved.

The land that got flooded when Lake Nipigon's water levels rose wasn't empty. The Whitesand First Nation had lived along the northwest shore of that lake for generations. As the water rose through the 1940s, it eroded their shoreline, flooded their homes, and washed away their burial grounds. They lost their entire reserve and didn't have a permanent home again until a new allotment of land was finally agreed upon in 1977, thirty-four years after the diversion opened. Ontario Power Generation, the utility's modern successor, didn't agree to compensation for the displacement until 2009: $12.5 million, more than eighty years after Keemle first sketched his plan on a map.

Keemle, describing the water he wanted to redirect back in 1924, called it water that was "going to waste, directly north of Lake Superior." It wasn't going to waste. People were living on it.

No sixth Great Lake exists today, and probably never will. What exists instead is a quiet, mostly forgotten series of dams that a lot of people living around Lake Superior have never heard of, built for a war, credited to a railway engineer's stubborn hunch, opposed at the time by another engineer who turned out to be right about more than he knew, and paid for, in the end, by a community that nobody asked.

I went looking for a quirky "almost happened" headline. I came out the other side with a story about how often the smaller, quieter version of someone's big idea actually gets built, and how the cost of that smaller version still lands on somebody.

See you tomorrow.

– Chris