Lake Erie Stories

by Chad Fraser

  It wasn’t long before Grashaw’s confidence was put to the test. About a third of the way to his destination, with the Colgate nearing Long Point, the wind picked up, pushing the waves into a steady chop, considerably slowing the freighter’s progress. Still, Grashaw remained unperturbed. Unbelievably, only one day after he was rescued by the rail car ferry Marquette & Bessemer No. 2 (which had been replaced by a nearly identical boat of the same name after the original was lost in the same 1909 storm that claimed the Clarion), the captain was able to pen his own account of Black Friday, which was published in the October 23, 1916, edition of The Cleveland Leader. In it, he justifies his decision to press on:

  The steamer ran into rough weather last Friday afternoon. We couldn’t make much headway in the face of the storm and about 6 o’clock it became apparent that we were in for a severe fight with the weather. Blackness set in and the wind blew a seventy-five-mile [121-kilometre] gale. We tossed about like a cork. The crew gathered aft, every one confident we would weather the storm.

  By eight o’clock, the unrelenting winds were still lashing the Colgate and the waves towered over ten metres high. Ceaselessly, they rolled over the whaleback’s low deck, which, with the boat fully loaded, swayed perilously close to water level. Over the next several hours, Lake Erie tested the Colgate’s hatches, sloshing tonnes of water over them and washing away anything that wasn’t tied down. The crew, knowing full well that any attempt to work on the viciously swaying deck would be suicide, could only stand by helplessly and watch. Grashaw paints the grim picture:

  We headed her into the sea, but it soon became apparent that it was only a question of a few hours before she went under. Then some of the men dropped on their knees and prayed. Others talked of the folks at home. They all held together to the last. There was no panic.

  But Alexander McDougall’s whaleback design didn’t go down without a fight, holding up to Black Friday’s vicious onslaught for nearly eleven exhausting hours in total. But by late evening the water had fully penetrated the deck hatches, first in dribbles, then in torrents. Finally, many of the hatches simply crumpled and gave way.

  Grashaw was up in the wheelhouse, flashing the Colgate’s powerful spotlight over the lake in a desperate bid for help when he began to feel the boat settle deeper into the water. He provides a vivid written account of the Colgate’s last moments in the Leader:

  . . . I turned the light on the steamer itself. My fears were confirmed. The boat was awash nearly to her hatches. Then I knew everything was gone. I made ready for the jump and as she seemed about to plunge beneath the waves, I dived from the bridge far out into the sea.

  Here, fate intervened; when Grashaw poked his head above the surface of the roaring, frothing water, he immediately bumped into the side of one of the Colgate’s small life rafts, something that is nothing short of miraculous considering that the Colgate, after taking such a long beating from the storm, had left no significant wreckage behind for the men in the water to cling to. Hurriedly, Grashaw clambered aboard, along with two other crewmen. In his own words: “It was every man for himself. I climbed aboard the raft but it went over. When it finally righted and I pulled myself aboard again, I found that there were two others on with me, a coal passer whose name I do not know, and Harvey Ossman [the Colgate’s second engineer].”

  Throughout the terrible night, the frozen, terrified men clung helplessly to the tiny raft, doing their best to stay on top of it and out of the freezing water, capsizing many times in the effort. During one of these terrifying incidents, three hours after the sinking, the coal passer, exhausted, slipped from Grashaw’s grasp and was never seen again. The next morning the lake claimed Ossman, leaving only Grashaw, alone, exposed, and at the full mercy of the elements. But even though the storm had largely blown itself out by this point, his ordeal was far from over; he would remain adrift for another twenty-four hours, and be passed by at least one steamer that failed to see him, before the sweet sound of his ultimate salvation — the whistle of the car ferry Marquette & Bessemer No. 2 — finally rang in his ears.

  Grashaw was in no position to witness the ultimate demise of the rest of his crew, which, for him, was perhaps the only fortunate thing about that terrible night on Lake Erie. The October 23, 1916, Cleveland Leader speculates that, “Nineteen of them were sucked down to death the instant the big steel boat foundered in the storm.” While we will never know for sure, it would have been a horrifying scene; those poor souls who didn’t drown in the immediate aftermath of the sinking would not have lasted long in the freezing, towering waves.

  Sadly, the lost crew of the James B. Colgate would make up less than half of the death toll from a storm that claimed a total of four vessels on Lake Erie that night — and cut short the lives of fifty young sailors.

  Some of McDougall’s whaleback fleet would remain in service for another forty years after the loss of the James B. Colgate, but they were already beginning to fade into the annals of history by the time Black Friday howled over Lake Erie. As industrialization quickened in the run-up to the First World War, newer, larger bulk carriers were built to carry ever-increasing cargo volumes, and the whalebacks simply weren’t big enough. Apart from this, their cylindrical hulls made them difficult to load, meaning that any spillage from their hatches inevitably went over the side and into the lake. Still, the old boats hung on for a time, with some being converted into oil tankers and one, the City of Everett, even seeing ocean service, but by the 1920s the writing was clearly on the wall for the pigboats. And just as his ships were beginning to disappear, the father of the whaleback himself, Alexander McDougall, died in 1923.

  Today only one whaleback, the S.S. Meteor, survives. After serving as an oil tanker, it was converted into a permanent museum dedicated entirely to these unique and intriguing Great Lakes workhorses. Even though the old freighter is no longer in top shape, it remains at Superior (though no longer in the water), and is open to the public during the summer months. The longevity of the Meteor, truly the last of her kind, is a testament to the skill and determination of its inventor, and to the many hardworking young men who served on these unique vessels.

  Chapter 6

  Shelters from the Storm: Lake Erie Lighthouses

  The lightkeeper’s job bears two unique but opposite distinctions: it is both the most tedious job on the Great Lakes and the most terrifying. Lake Erie, with its treacherous mix of shallow water and ferocious storms, poses risks even for today’s technologically advanced vessels. But during the Age of Sail, many sailors who plied these waters in their wooden ships never returned home.

  Expected to keep the lights burning and to save crews’ lives when their vessels were in peril, lightkeepers on both the Canadian and American sides faced huge obstacles. In both countries, lighthouse services were drastically underfunded, leaving keepers ill-equipped and often lacking basic shelter near their places of work. At Pelee Island, Ontario, for example, keepers often had to hike several kilometres from their homes — or sleep on the beach. But by far the most difficult aspect of the job was the nearly endless boredom. Keepers worked late at night, often alone. While these long hours were occasionally punctuated by the excitement of setting forth to rescue sailors or by the sheer terror of witnessing horrific disasters, the vast majority of their time was spent doing tedious maintenance work.

  Although there are dozens of lighthouses on Lake Erie, all with intriguing personalities and stories of their own, the four covered in the following pages are typical of the types of challenges Lake Erie lightkeepers faced. At the Pelee Island lighthouse, privation was the major problem, with keepers often running out of oil during the navigation season while, at the same time, they tried to build homes and farms on the untamed, isolated island. On nearby Green Island, in American waters, a terrible midwinter fire nearly cost keeper Charles F. Drake and his family their lives. At the Marblehead lighthouse, Benajah Wolcott, the first keeper and one of the area’s earliest settlers, survived one war, and was di
splaced by another. His successors would see even more armed conflict in the area. And at Point Abino, Ontario, the crew of Lightship No. 82 went head-to-head with the Great Storm of November 1913 — the worst ever to hit the Great Lakes — and lost.

  With over 200 years of history on the Great Lakes, lighthouses are among the last remaining monuments to a time long past — when lake vessels formed the backbone of the economies of two nations, bringing raw materials to settlers who would go on to build the lakeside towns and cities that many of us call home. The continued presence of historic lighthouses on Lake Erie is the result of the hard work and resourcefulness of scores of dedicated volunteers. Behind nearly all of the lighthouses studied for this book, there was a group of citizens striving to keep their community’s lighthouse preserved for future generations. The work of these groups is vital to maintaining the nautical heritage of both Canada and the United States, and their efforts should be given our greatest support.

  Pelee Island Lighthouse: The Limestone Fortress

  Of all the lightkeepers on Lake Erie, those who kept their vigil on the lake’s remote islands faced perhaps the toughest challenge. Today, the islands are mostly well-developed vacation spots, but this is a fairly recent development. Not so long ago, they were untracked forest. Separated from the mainland by the lake’s often-dangerous waters, these stalwart keepers regularly endured long, lonely stretches of time totally cut off from the outside world and, when disasters or critical shortages struck, they were often left to face the peril on their own. This was the case for the men who tended the lighthouse built at the northeast corner of Pelee Island in 1832.

  In 1819, Canadian explorer and cartographer David Thompson passed through the area while on a border survey as part of the Treaty of Ghent, which formally ended the War of 1812. The venerable Thompson was winding down his illustrious career by this point, but in the course of the previous thirty-five years he had managed to explore and map much of western Canada. During his survey, he crossed the volatile Pelee Passage, the stretch of open water between Pelee Island and the Ontario mainland, in an open boat. He wrote of the hostile environment he found on the island in his journal entry of August 31:

  . . . the country is nothing but a pestilential marsh on the level of the lake surrounded by a ridge of sand made burning hot by the sun and the marsh full of rattle and black snakes, the latter very large and bold. We have twice seen them coming some distance from out in the lake with fish 6 in. long in their mouths. The rattle snakes are also large and fat.

  As the crew of the Clarion would learn the hard way nearly a century later (see Chapter 5), the Pelee Passage is, quite simply, a graveyard for ships. In 1821, a trip through the Passage during a fierce storm nearly cost American surveyor Joseph Delafield his chartered schooner, the Sylph, and the lives of her entire crew. He describes the event in harrowing detail in his official record of his journeys, entitled The Unfortified Boundary:

  During the night they [the Sylph’s crew] had been endeavouring to beat off the coast and attempted to weather Point aux Playes [Pelee Island] on one tack, or Stockwell’s Point [the Ontario mainland] on the other; that they soon carried away so much of their rigging as to be without the use of the main sail and, finding that they were losing ground, the Capt. had resolved to beach his boat, but the gleam of day inspired them with hope; they kept under way until, finding all exertions vain, they tried to hold by their anchor, and fortunately rode out the gale.

  Ironically, the Sylph would be wrecked among the Lake Erie islands only a few years later, one of the many vessels that met their end on the archipelago’s constantly shifting shoals, which consist mainly of sandbars formed by storms and currents.

  At the same time, the lands surrounding the western basin of Lake Erie were booming. In the peace following the War of 1812, settlers began moving in, building small farms and homesteads and, in turn, boosting passenger and freight traffic on the lake. In 1818, Lake Erie saw its first steamship, the Walk-in-the-Water, which, while crude compared to the regal steamers that would follow, did a brisk business ferrying both cargo and passengers. But, like the Sylph, the Walk-in-the-Water would soon be lost on Lake Erie, running aground near Buffalo in 1821.

  The influx of settlers also meant an increase in demand for wood and stone for construction. Pelee Island and the neighbouring Lake Erie islands had both in spades — sturdy limestone that formed the bedrock of the islands and abundant forests. An ever-growing number of ships were now routinely calling among the islands.

  All of this activity made the task of alerting captains to the dangerous, shifting shoal at the southern extreme of the Pelee Passage all the more critical. As the number of lost vessels mounted, the Upper Canadian administration finally responded. On February 13, 1833, it passed legislation ordering the construction of a lighthouse on Pelee Island. Eight months later, the lighthouse was finished.

  The lighthouse, described in the late 1800s by journalist and historian Lydia Ryall, who lived on nearby South Bass Island, as “a stately structure, romantic as to environment,” was built from limestone supplied by Pelee Island’s first non-Native owner, William McCormick. Its fixed white light was nearly fourteen metres above the water, and was visible fifteen kilometres offshore, covering almost all of the Pelee Passage. McCormick would prosper from the lighthouse’s presence on his island — not only did the lighthouse help speed Pelee’s development, but he was also hired as the first keeper. The post almost naturally fell to him because, beyond his own family, there were few other settlers on the largely marsh-covered island.

  From the beginning, difficulties plagued the new lighthouse and its keeper. The government did not supply McCormick with enough oil, forcing him to leave the light dark for many nights during its first season. Interestingly, one of the only mentions of the lighthouse in McCormick’s private papers is a September 1834 protest to William Hands, an official in Sandwich (present-day Windsor), about this very problem:

  The lighthouse has been out of oil for several weeks past. I think you had better authorize me to buy oil from Buffalo, where I think it might be got of better quality than has been furnished. I have ascertained that it was not of that quality used in lighthouses and will never make a good light.

  Compounding the oil supply problem was the fact McCormick was at the time mainly concerned with relocating his large family from the Canadian mainland to the new settlement they were constructing on the island. The move, and the backbreaking work of building his home, often kept McCormick away from his lightkeeping duties. This was no small problem, and did nothing to improve the safety of shipping in the Passage.

  The lighthouse also fell victim to a number of acts of vandalism in its early years. In 1835, it was paid a visit by a young Robert E. Lee, later the most storied of Confederate commanders in the Civil War, then surveying the Ohio-Michigan boundary as an officer of the Army Corps of Engineers. While there, Lee found the lighthouse in a state of “considerable disrepair” and, after killing a snake that was laying at the door, forced his way inside, climbed to the top of the tower, and proceeded to use it to take a position reading. On the way out, for good measure, he stole some lampshades. His later report on the raid to his superiors was the source of confusion for years afterward. Portraying the snake he had killed as the “lightkeeper,” Lee wrote that the keeper was “irascible and full of venom” at the presence of the Americans, and “an altercation ensued which resulted in his death.” He later refers to the keeper as a “Canadian Snake.” Had Lee really killed the keeper? As McCormick lived another five years and the murder of a lightkeeper on Canadian soil by an American surveying crew would most certainly have sparked an international incident, it appears that Lee, perhaps bored by his surveying duties, was having a little fun with his superiors.

  Only three years later, the Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837 (see Chapter 3) wreaked yet more havoc on the lighthouse. It was looted again, this time by members of a 450-strong raiding party that seized Pelee Island in
late February 1838. These self-styled “Patriots” meant to use the island as a springboard to invade Upper Canada, overthrow its government, and turn the colony into an American-style republic. They stole furniture and fixtures from the lighthouse before being driven back to American territory by a force of British regulars and Canadian militiamen dispatched from Fort Malden, in nearby Amherstburg, Ontario.

  Little changed for the lighthouse after William McCormick’s death in 1840. His son Alexander took over, but the supply problems continued. It would appear that Alexander, like his father, was too busy with his duties as the island’s landlord, and the light often went unlit, prompting more than a few complaints from passing mariners.

  Finally, in 1850, James Cummins took over the tending of the lighthouse, and maintained the position, with the exception of four years, until 1889. The diligent Cummins introduced a more professional approach to lightkeeping on Pelee Island. When he complained that the lack of a keeper’s house often forced him to sleep on the lighthouse steps, the government ordered a small dwelling built next to the light.

  The lightkeeper was also expected to act as a rescuer for sailors in distress, and even though he was provided with little equipment for this, Cummins saw a number of vessels get chewed up on the shoal, and even managed to save some lives. On July 3, 1869, the robust Irishman pulled Andrew Poustie, the master of the schooner George Warren, from the raging surf after the ship had capsized in a fierce storm. A little more than a year later, on December 5, 1870, Cummins was credited with saving the captain and crew of the schooner Tartar, which was smashed to pieces on the shoals of the Pelee Passage. For his bravery, Cummins was awarded a gold watch by the Canadian government.