"The Lotus beds of the Monroe marshes[Lake Erie] were for a great many years an advertising feature of Monroe to attract tourists and visitors to that city. These have practically disappeared since Michigan put the muskrat under game protection. The rats devoured the rhizomes for food and thus destroyed one of Monroe's flourishing activities. The plants flowered by the
thousands every year and visitors were taken out to the beds and allowed to cut the flowers at will and carry them away. I am putting it rather mildly when I say that in the forty years I was at Detroit I probably saw a million such flowers."