The Last Voyageurs

by Lorraine Boissoneault

  As the crew pulled up to shore at St. Ignace, the snow-bearing clouds were blown away and the sun shone down brightly once more. Fall hadn’t quite given into winter yet. Maybe they’d have a few more warm days before they were stuck wearing wool long underwear and multiple layers of shirts.

  Now that the flurries had abated, Fialko could see the people on shore. To his complete surprise, his fiancée, Linda, was standing among them, distinct with her long brown hair. As soon as his canoe touched ground, he hurtled over the three men in front of him like a kid playing leapfrog and ran to her. The homesickness that had come on for the first time in Georgian Bay evaporated. Stress from the disagreements within the expedition vanished. With her, he didn’t have to be Pierre Prudhomme, 17th-century armorer and wilderness survival expert. He could just be John.

  Chapter Seven

  TRAPPED AT DEATH’S DOOR

  Michilimackinac, Lake Michigan

  Late October 1681

  La Salle wasn’t the first European to reach the Mississippi, nor was he the first Frenchman to have contact with tribes along the Great Lakes region. There had been a European presence in North America for close to two hundred years by the time La Salle arrived. Yet all the discoveries of his predecessors had done little to fill in blank spaces on the map. There were plenty of unsolved mysteries and misconceptions about North America, caused in part by misfortunes such as the disastrous culmination of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette’s voyage. The two Frenchmen traveled together to discover a route from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River in 1673 and continued on to Arkansas before turning back due to fears of meeting with Spanish colonists farther south. Jolliet, trained in cartography and geography, almost certainly made a map of their route. But when he returned to Quebec after parting ways with Marquette, his canoe capsized in the Sault Saint-Louis rapids just outside of Montreal. Three of the men traveling with him perished, and although Jolliet survived by clinging to some rocks until he was rescued, all of his notes were lost. He was forced to make his report on the journey down the Mississippi solely by memory.

  Such gaps in the voyageurs’ knowledge of North American geography—and with it, Native culture—were common. Though it was given the name “America” decades before La Salle’s birth, the continent was still the “fourth part of the world,” an unknown element.1 In the 16th century, Europeans were at least somewhat familiar with Asia, Europe, and Africa, but the world beyond the Atlantic Ocean was a land populated by monsters and men with no heads. There was little reliable cartographical information for anything beyond the East Coast, and one misstep could mean death. Considering the thundering waters of Niagara Falls, who could predict that early explorers wouldn’t encounter such fierce rapids as they paddled farther into the interior? None of them knew what they might encounter.

  By the time La Salle arrived in what would later be known as the Midwest, he had to rely mainly on his own previous experiences and the information he was given by Native American guides. The latter could be a gamble, because La Salle and the other Frenchmen were hardly the most powerful players in the game of exploration. Native American tribes could and did exploit the voyageurs to their advantage, whether it meant trading for European weapons in wars against other tribes or directly involving the Europeans in Native disputes. Every bit of advice had to be placed in its proper context: La Salle was a foreigner traveling through occupied territory rife with political alliances and enmities about which he had little knowledge, and there was always the possibility that he was being manipulated.

  Fortunately, the next section of La Salle’s journey involved navigating a well-known strait in Lake Michigan. Less fortunate was the passage’s notorious reputation for leading to the deaths of even the most experienced voyageurs. The passageway linking Lake Michigan with Green Bay was known as La Porte des Morts (Death’s Door). All mariners treated it with caution. According to the legends of the local Potawatomi tribe, the name was derived from a battle between their warriors and the warriors of the invading Winnebago tribe. As the Potawatomi paddled along the strait, they were attacked from the cliffs of a nearby island, and many died in the rough waters.

  Whether or not the legend held any truth,2 La Salle was already intimately familiar with the dangers of Death’s Door Passageway. During an earlier attempt at reaching the mouth of the Mississippi, La Salle’s fleet of canoes was almost dashed against the rocky shore when a storm blew up while they were crossing the strait. And there was the matter of his ship, the Griffon, the first sailboat to ever travel across the Great Lakes. The ten-ton, forty-foot vessel was built to easily transport furs and carry supplies for La Salle and his men down the Mississippi River, but the boat had disappeared years prior, after its maiden voyage in 1679. He may well have wondered if the ship was wrecked in the shallows of Death’s Door, but there was no way of knowing.

  This time around, in October 1681, luck was with La Salle and his men. After a brief stop at the mission at Michilimackinac, the northern tip of modern-day Michigan, the men quickly made the crossing from Lake Michigan to Green Bay. By the beginning of November they were already approaching the Illinois River, moving faster than the cold weather could freeze up the waterways.

  Washington Island, Wisconsin

  November 4, 1976

  For two days the team had been confined to dry land by the howling wind that stirred the lake into a mass of hard-edged chop. They’d risen before dawn to prepare for the normal paddling routine. They’d organized their gear, broken down the camp, and packed the canoes. But instead of heading onto the lake to do battle with the foaming waves, they’d been told to rebuild the shelters. The water was too rough to paddle across.

  The residents of Washington Island had been more than hospitable during the voyageurs’ extended stay. The young men were welcomed into homes to watch the news and listen to radio reports of the presidential election. Everyone had submitted their absentee ballot for either Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford weeks earlier. The team consensus seemed to be that Ford, the incumbent, would be re-elected. To their surprise, he was overthrown. Another new start for the United States.

  One Washington Islander in particular had done everything he could to accommodate the crew. Thor Williamson, the community action program director, was a tough old marine who acted as the group’s host while they were on the island and was determined to make their stay as enjoyable as possible. He drove down to the expedition’s campsite each morning with a breakfast of steak, eggs, and donuts to get them started on the right foot. The hardy breakfasts were some consolation for not keeping to the schedule. At least Thor would be back the next day with more of his excellent food. He also gave them use of his Travelall utility truck to check out water conditions on the eastern shore of the island and he spread the word around the small Washington Island winter community that the northern side of the island was being visited by a crew of voyageurs. Meeting with townspeople was a kind of palliative. It helped prevent a lethal level of boredom while the crew waited to depart.

  Originally, Lewis had planned for his team to stop at Washington Island for a night or two, perform their regular routine for the five hundred year-round inhabitants, then depart. The island was the perfect resting spot before making the treacherous journey across Death’s Door Passage. The strait, which runs between the tip of Wisconsin and the Potawatomi Islands, had long held a degree of notoriety among locals. But Lewis was confident in everyone’s ability to handle rough waters. At this point they’d canoed over nearly one thousand miles of lakes and rivers, surviving passage through locks, unpredictable weather on the Great Lakes, and the thousands of islands of Georgian Bay. Lewis was impatient to be on the way again. As much as flexibility was a necessity in this undertaking, he knew they’d likely encounter more bad weather and delays now that winter was approaching, and he hated to miss any of the performances he’d scheduled months earlier. But there were no scheduling solutions to bad weather.

  Despite their relatively diminut
ive size compared to the oceans, the Great Lakes are among the most treacherous bodies of water on earth. Squalls blow up without warning, dark waters hide reefs, foggy nights send ships unfamiliar with the shoreline straight onto the rocks. Historian and mariner Mark Thompson estimated that as many as twenty-five thousand people have died in shipwrecks on the Great Lakes; between 1878 and 1897 alone, 5,999 shipwrecks were reported.3 The Death’s Door area is a particularly dangerous part of Lake Michigan. In one seven-day period in 1872, the insidious shoals sent eight schooners to the lake bottom. And if history had taught Great Lakes navigators anything, it was that November was the most wily and unpredictable of months.

  Following on the heels of Halloween, strong winds nicknamed the Witch of November blow across the Great Lakes each year. The winds are caused primarily by low-pressure systems that sit implacably above the Great Lakes for weeks, pulling in cold Arctic air from the north and warmer air from the Gulf in the south. When the two fronts meet over the lakes, they can create horrific storms capable of producing hurricane-force winds. In 1913, a November squall-blizzard dubbed the “Freshwater Fury” killed more than 250 people, caused around $5 million in damage ($116 million in today’s currency), and stranded or destroyed thirty-eight ships. Winds reached ninety miles per hour and produced waves more than thirty-five feet high.4 The storm’s intensity was unusual, but plenty of large storms battered the shores of the Great Lakes every year, especially in November. The Canadian vessel Bannockbarn was sunk in November 1902, the Rouse Simmons disappeared in 1912, and the Daniel J. Morrell was broken by a storm in 1966.

  The years that followed the Freshwater Fury were spent developing better weather forecasting tools and more advanced preparedness systems. But that didn’t stop another intense storm from killing twenty-nine men in November 1975, just one year before the La Salle reenactment expedition. The 729-foot ore ship Edmund Fitzgerald had been on a course for Cleveland when a powerful storm engulfed it on Lake Superior, leaving no trace of ship or crew. Despite an exhaustive investigation of the incident by the U.S. Coast Guard National Transportation Safety Board, no definitive reason was ever provided for the shipwreck. The twenty-nine men aboard the ship joined thousands of other mariners who have died on the Great Lakes. The incident was even marked by pop culture: Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot released a song commemorating the tragedy in June 1976, just two months before the La Salle reenactors set off from the banks of Montreal. In the first verse of “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” Lightfoot introduced his listeners to the legendary ore ship and the storm that brought her down. “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead / When the skies of November turn gloomy,” went the lyrics.

  On the morning of November 4, the third day of camping on Washington Island, Lewis, Hobart, and Fialko drove along the shore to scope out the wind and water conditions. If they left that day and paddled from the northern part of Washington Island down to a new campsite just six miles away on the southern shore of the island they’d be better positioned to cross Death’s Door Passage the following day. It would mean another night on Washington Island but would still cut some of the distance off for the following day’s paddle. From their perspective on shore, the lake looked as if it might be rough for a mile or so, but after that the water would be calm enough. Certainly nothing worse than what they’d experienced in the past. They decided to go for it. Having been trapped on shore for three days, it felt good to have a plan of action, to be doing something. The crew was cheered by the news as well. They’d been getting antsy to leave.

  It was a later start than usual. The sun had been up for an hour when the canoes launched from Jackson Harbor at 7:45. Even with the warm daylight there was ice to chop away along the shoreline before they could get the boats in the water. Ice, at the beginning of November. Less than a week ago they’d celebrated Halloween on Big Summer Island; the name had seemed less than suitable considering the weather. They’d finally made the turn south around the west side of Michigan after spending a third of their journey traveling west, but several months of Midwestern winter lay ahead of them before they would reach the milder climate of the south. Already the water was a frigid thirty-nine degrees and ice formed rapidly on the canoes. Everyone was dressed in wool hats and mittens, but there was little they could do to protect their faces from the stinging spray. Luckily the wind was blowing from the northwest, so the paddlers would be sheltered by Washington Island as they made their way down its east side.

  The boats glided onto the lake in splendid unison, as if they’d rehearsed the launch hundreds of times. And of course, they had—every day of paddling for the past three months had been a lesson. They were practically experts at this point. The cold wind nipped at any exposed patches of skin, and the choppy surf slapped the canoes as they slipped along. The day was overcast and the air cool, but nothing out of the ordinary. There was no reason to think the six-mile journey down the coast of Washington Island would take much longer than an hour.

  But after less than a mile of paddling around the northern tip of the island and turning south to travel along the east coast, the wind shifted. It started to blow out of the northeast, forcing the rough waves straight into the canoes. In seemingly the blink of an eye, the waves had grown to five or six feet and were tossing the canoes around as if they were toys. The six teams were pushed apart by the waves, one taking off in the lead, the others scrambling around to move away from the breaking waves on a narrow strip of shoals to the east. The water was icy cold as it sloshed around their feet at the bottom of the canoes. Men in the middle of the canoes abandoned their paddles to start bailing.

  Suddenly Ken shouted out to the others, “We need help! We’re sinking!”

  A first wave had hit his boat broadside, sending water swirling around the ankles of Ken, LeSieutre, Hess, and Fredenburg. Before they’d had the chance to react, a second breaker followed the watery trail laid by the first, effectively swamping the canoe. The edge of the boat was nearly level with the lake’s surface, and some of their gear was now bobbing freely in the water. Only the tapered points on the bow and the stern poked out above the surface of the lake. Everyone sat in three feet of icy water with their feet hooked under the gunwales to keep themselves from floating away. For each scoop of icy water the men were able to bail out, another wave pushed it all back in. To make matters worse, Hess was wearing a heavy plaster cast on one leg to protect his foot, which he’d broken only a week earlier when he slipped on some rocks. He’d continued in the canoes because there hadn’t been any upcoming portages planned, and paddling didn’t require much lower body movement. But now the cast had suddenly become a liability. Leaning back as far as possible to hold his leg above the water, Hess considered what would happen if their canoe sank beneath him or if they capsized. The cast was already starting to feel heavy as water soaked into it. If he fell in, there was no way he’d be able to swim back up to the surface. The cast would sponge up the water and he’d plummet like a rock to the bottom.

  For the most part, Hess hadn’t doubted his decision to come on the journey. He loved being outside with a group of friends, camping and canoeing every day. But until this point, his life had never been on the line. He’d had blisters and aches like everyone else, and there had been that minor eye injury after a piece of tinder flew into his face, and the stress fracture in his foot was a bit of a nuisance—not to mention it cemented his reputation for being accident prone—but nothing serious had happened. Nothing that might prevent him from returning home to a normal 20th-century life at the end of the expedition. Now he was contemplating his imminent mortality, in the form of drowning or hypothermia. Neither was very appealing.

  “Hey! We’re sinking!” Ken bellowed into the wind again, trying to get the attention of the other paddlers. Reid, redirecting his canoe to their assistance, instructed Kulick to start unlashing equipment from their boat in case they needed to jettison things to make room for more men if Ken’s boat capsized. As Kulick was untying g
ear, DiFulvio in the rear maneuvered the canoe around to the left side of Ken’s boat while Hobart’s canoe pulled up on the right. Fialko’s took the rear position while Stillwagon’s raced ahead to shore to get a fire started.

  “Yellow pants keeping you dry?” Cox joked as the four canoes inched toward shore, referring to the foul-weather gear some of the men wore under their outfits on rough weather days.

  The four men in the submerged boat could hardly spare the energy to laugh. They continued bailing and paddling with grim determination. Hess lay almost flat on his back with his cast straight up in the air like a flag. It would’ve been comedic if the situation weren’t so grave. The cold water soaked into their wool clothes and froze their limbs. If the men weren’t warmed quickly, the first symptoms of hypothermia would set in. Once that happened, it would be much harder to get everyone safely to shore.