OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: The Great Lake Erie [3] *********************************************************************** OHGENWEB NOTICE: All distribution rights to this electronic data are reserved by the submitter. Reproduction or re-presentation of copyrighted material will require the permission of the copyright owner. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. *********************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 October 1, 2000 *********************************************************************** Historical Collections of Ohio Diaries of S. J. Kelly Plains Dealer Know Your Ohio by Darlene E. Kelley *********************************************************************** The Great Lake Erie -- part 3. Lake Erie has always had more personal relationship with land than all the other Lakes, simply because more people have come to dwell around her shores and more boats have trafficked her waters. Lake Erie sailors are no more colorful than the sailors on the other Lakes. but there have been more of them, and they have oftener appeared upon the stage of dramatic events. Erie is the Lake of short hauls, quick trips, stops and starts, hello-goodbys. If a nineteenth century steamboat captain didn't pause along the way for a bite between meals at Toledo or Sandusky or Lorain or Ashtabula or Conneaut, Ohio, or Erie, Pennsylvania, or Dunkirk, New York, he could enjoy an early breakfast in Detroit, a late lunch in Cleveland, and a midnight supper in Buffalo, where he could take a cat nap while freight and passengers came aboard, and then resume his Lake Erie menu in reverse. Steamboats on Erie were as familiar a sight in each port, and as welcome, and almost as regular, as today's mailman. They carried the mail, of course; they brought the latest news. They served the purpose of today's interstate and commuter trains; they were the Greyhound buses running on fresh water. Better known in their day then celebrities, the Captains of crack steamboats strutted in port, promenading the water front while admiring eyes took in their blue coats, brass buttons, nankeen trousers, white vests, low shoes, white silk stockings, ruffled shirts, high hats, jingling gold watch chains and seals. In the era of the Civil War they sported Prince Alberts and stovepipe lids and General Grant beards that gave them the appearance of Barnum's trained walruses. They called anything that floated a boat, and on occasion they even used the word ship, but the term had no relation to size on the Great Lakes. A boat was a boat, from a lumber hooker to a battlewagon. The day would come when fresh water boats grew large enough to serve as aircraft carriers, but boats they remained to the Lake people who in general steered clear of salt water parlance to measure speed in miles rather than knots and to keep time by the Big Ben alarm clock rather than ship's bells. A Captain had a whole list of pet names for his boat; she was his darling, his sweet business, his plaything, his huckleberry. There were staemboat engineers who petted and stroked their machinery and talked baby talk to the various parts in an effort to coax more speed out of them; " It's a sweet little engine; it's the prettiest little piston; it's a cute little valve; it's the nicest little bearing--- etc." The Captains were always roaring for more speed so the engineers had plenty of practice on baby talk. Coming out of Cleveland in a heavy fog, Captain Wight of the William Penn once observed what he figured to be a smokestack of another streamer between his boat and the shore. He ordered full speed ahead, opining that he would never allow anything on Lake Erie to pass him, not if he knew it! The race went on, sparks flying and paddles churning, until the fog cleared to reveal that the supposed rival smokestack was nothing but a fire-blasted tree along the shore. This same Captain Wight was coming out of Buffalo harbor one day when the steamer Illinois hove in sight abaft the William Penn and gained rapidly on her. Whereas an anxious passenger said : " Capatin, she is after us, isn't she?" To which the Captain relied, shaking his fist, " Never mind, we'll be after her directly!" Spokesman for all steamboat Captains on Lake Erie, it was Wight who bragged that the William Penn could " run anywhere where ground was moist." By Lake Erie custom when a Captain made a record run, he hoisted a broom atop the smokestack or foremast and kept it there until beaten. he shipping news of 1839 made this note: During the season there was considerable rivalry in regard to speed, and not infrequently in company a high pressure of steam was carried. The steamer Cleveland claimed to be the fastest boat, without the necessity of racing, which was inserted in her bills. She claimed to make a run between Cleveland and Buffalo in fourteen hours, and from Detroit to Buffalo on one occasion, with fair freight and one hundred passegers, in twenty one hours and thirty eight minutes, the dist- ance being three hundred miles. Not long after this, however, the steamer Buffalo, Capt Levi Allen, made the distance between Detroit and Buffalo in nineteen hours, and carried the broom for the remainder of the season. The year 1853 marked another famous racing season on Lake Erie. Capt McBride's Queen of The West challenged Capt Hazzard's Mississippi on the run to Buffalo to Cleveland, and lived up to her name. Among other contests that same year, the steamboat Queen City raced the Alabama over the identcal course, a distance of 173 miles, and had a winning time of twelve hours and ten minutes, giving her an average speed of almost 15 miles an hour. These contests continued across the years on Lake Erie with the most famous of al reserved for the year 1901 when Detroit's crack excursion boat Tashmoo raced Cleveland's City of Erie on June 4 over a course laid out from Cleveland's breakwater to the lighthouse off Erie, Pennsylvania, almost a hundred miles. A historic event never to be repeated because of the disaster inherent in such trials of speed, the two floating palaces of the Lake approached the starting point at about 9:30 in the morning. For more than a hundred miles the south shore of Lake Erie was lined with holiday crowds. Business shut down; school was closed; passenger steamers were charted from Detroit and other ports to bring spectators to the scene; thousands of dollars had been wagered on the outcome of the race. A cannon boomed and the race was on with the Tashmoo and the City of Erie almost abreast, their paddle wheels kicking up huge swells and clouds of spray flying back from their sharp bows. At Fairport, Ohio, the Tashmoo forged ahead; at Ashtabula Harbor, the City of Erie pulled abreast again; at Conneaut she was two lengths ahead; twenty miles from the finish line she had increased her lead to three lengths. On the last stretch the Tashmoo desperately tried to close the gap, and the wake she and her riva kicked up almost swamped the timekeepers and the judges in their boats, but the watches showed the Tashmoo had come in a heartbreaking forty-five seconds behind the City of Erie, both steamboats averaged just a fraction less than twenty-two miles an hour for ninety-four miles, a record still to be envied by most modern steamers and respected by all. Although the Tashmoo lost her race against the City of Erie in June of 1901, she went on to win the greatest victory any steamboat could boast, on another June day thirty five years later, when, mortally wounded herself,she carried 1,500 passengers to safety, and then died alongside the dock. From the year 1818 when the Walk-in-the-Water started posting records for other steamboats on Lake Erie to shoot at, until 1901 when Tashmoo and the City of Erie ended such debates, rival captains on the short hauls across the shallow inland sea took desperate chances to beat one another into Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and all points. These Captains also took big chances to extend the season of navigation. One winter Capt. Whitaker of the steamer United States took his boat out of Buffalo and plowed through drift ice until he came to a large field of ice that barred passage into the open lake. Instead of returning to port, he herded all the passegers on the upper deck and told them to run from one side of the steamer to the other, all together. This gave the boat a rolling motion that helped break down the ice while Capt Whitaker backed up and drove ahead until he rammed his way through into navigable water. There were hundreds of such couragious Captains on Lake Erie. They went out in weather that literally scared fish in frightened schools from one depth or another. They made gallant rescues under impossible conditions, and now and then a wild spark of humor would show in their eyes. Their golden era is gone in smoke, but the memory of the old Lake Captains may be seen in the long sunset ladders of pure molten gold that climb the high wall of Lake Erie from the Canadian shore. Each flowing step in the ladder, every rising wave, is a tribute to each and every one of them. ****************************************************** to be continued in part 4--