Lake Erie Stories

by Chad Fraser

  For Abigail, the adulation quickly poured in. The March 7, 1855, edition of the Toronto Globe raved: “Such noble conduct deserves more than a passing notice. She is a woman of the most humble position in life, but showed herself, on this occasion, a true heroine, and possessed of the noblest qualities of heart and soul.”

  When it was learned that two of the Conductor’s crew had been Americans, the Lifesaving Benevolent Association of New York, an organization dedicated to helping shipwreck victims and their families, sent Abigail a gold medal. The May 26, 1857, Buffalo Daily Courier describes it:

  The medal, which we have had an opportunity of examining, is a very fine one; on one side is an inscription stating the object for which the medal was given, and on the reverse is the device of the association — a ship in a gale driving on a lee shore, on which is seen a small building in which the life-saving apparatus is kept; and close to it a mortar ready for use, a shot from which carries a line to the vessel, followed by a hawser, upon which the life car is slung.

  A letter from Queen Victoria soon followed and, in 1860, Abigail was thrilled to get a visit from the Prince of Wales while he was hunting at Long Point.

  But by far the most valuable gift was a sum of money donated by Buffalo’s merchant and sailor communities. Totalling $550, an impressive sum for the time, the money was placed in the care of the customs officer at Port Rowan. With this, Abigail bought a fifty-acre farm north of town (though the customs officer, when she came to get the money, would only release $535).

  The farm was not a great success in the early going. Two cows soon died (one when a tree fell on it), and Jeremiah quickly lost interest in the operation and returned to Long Point to hunt and trap. Then came the most debilitating blow. Wheeler recalls:

  He [Jeremiah] went over there [to Long Point] and was only there a few days when a heavy storm came up. He was obliged to leave his shanty. He seems to have hoisted his trunk upon the roof, where it was found, and part of his clothing frozen to it, as if he had been sitting upon it. Afterwards he had apparently tried to make his way to another shanty some three miles distant. He had gone about two miles when he seems to have sat down on a log and frozen to death. His body was not found for nearly three months.

  In the wake of such a loss, and considering the few opportunities available to single women on the frontiers of nineteenth-century Canada, one could be forgiven for thinking that this would certainly mean a sad end to Abigail’s story. But as she had shown many times before, Abigail Becker was at her best when times were hard. She also had a number of young, strong sons among her brood of thirteen to draw upon. By pulling together, the family managed to make the farm modestly profitable, though it was far from easy, particularly for Abigail, who sustained a number of injuries during her farming career, including four broken arms and a number of broken toes that she suffered when her horses bolted as she was unloading hay.

  By the time she married again, a few years after Jeremiah’s death — to Henry Rohrer, who brought with him even more children — Abigail was a seasoned survivor. She lived out the rest of her days quietly and with little notoriety on her small farm, passing away there in 1905 at the age of seventy-four.

  Today, there are few permanent memorials to Abigail Becker in the Long Point area, save for a plaque erected by the Ontario government in a park in Port Rowan. But Abigail’s is a story that almost transcends monuments or plaques. Simply mention her name to anyone who has spent any time in the area, particularly anyone connected with the marine community, and the recognition is instant. Long Point, it seems, needs no reminder of the heroic deeds of its favourite daughter.

  “A Seething Furnace”: The sinking of the Clarion

  “Fire!” cried one of the crewmen as the freighter Clarion fought her way through Lake Erie’s treacherous Pelee Passage.

  Up on the bridge, Captain Thomas Bell felt an immediate sense of dread. Fire aboard a lake freighter is one of the most terrifying situations any sailor can encounter. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time, for Bell and his crew were already dealing with one of the most vicious Great Lakes storms in recent memory.

  His many years of experience told Bell, a veteran Great Lakes skipper from Ogdensburg, New York, that he had a desperate situation on his hands. As he slowly turned toward the ship’s stern, he caught sight of what was causing the commotion: a red glow flickering out of one of the hatches just before the aft deckhouse. Just as he was beginning to take this in, a crewman barged onto the bridge behind him and announced that the Clarion’s hold had become “a seething furnace.”

  It was the evening of December 8, 1909. And the Clarion was about to sail into Lake Erie folklore.

  The iron-hulled propeller steamer Clarion had begun life some twenty-eight years earlier, sliding into the Detroit River from her dry dock at Wyandotte, Michigan, at three o’clock on the afternoon of July 27, 1881. The July 28 Cleveland Herald reported the event matter-of-factly:

  The propeller Clarion was built at the Detroit Dry Dock Company’s iron shipbuilding yard at Wyandotte, under the supervision of F. Albert Kirby, the drawings, etc., being furnished by Frank E. Kirby, of the Dry Dock company. She is, in appearance, the exact sister to the propeller Lehigh, launched at the same yard last fall, the only difference between the ships being in the boiler and the machinery.

  Iron-hulled vessels were still a relatively new innovation on the Great Lakes at this point, and the Clarion was impressive ship, though not overly large. Operated by the Anchor Line of Buffalo (the lake division of the Erie and Western Transportation Company), the Clarion was 78 metres long and 11 at the beam. She had only a single deck covering her hold, and often carried a crew of twenty-one. Because she operated in conjunction with the railway system, the Clarion also carried the odd passenger, especially in her early days.

  But the Clarion’s career on the Great Lakes did not get off to the most promising start. While her home port was listed as Erie, Pennsylvania, she ranged far and wide, calling at big-city and small-town ports alike and hauling essentially anything that could be carried in a railroad boxcar. During one of these runs, while passing through the St. Clair River, the Clarion was involved in a collision with the wooden schooner Hercules. The Clarion’s iron hull made short work of the old sailing vessel, as the June 16, 1883 Marine Record, quoting the Detroit Free Press, notes:

  At about six o’clock on Wednesday evening the propeller Clarion, bound up, collided with the schooner Hercules, which was sailing up, and damaged her to such an extent that she filled and went to the bottom at once, giving the crew barely time to save themselves. It was broad daylight at the time, and great indignation is manifested by those who saw the accident against the officer in charge of the propeller . . . The Hercules lies on her starboard side a short distance above the Club House, on the Canada side of the St. Clair River. The hull is completely under water, and the topmasts broken. Her sails are set.

  But despite this regrettable incident, the Clarion’s long years of service on the Great Lakes were largely uneventful. She was a sturdy ship, and even though newer, faster, and larger vessels were constantly coming on stream, she remained in steady service without any further reported problems. Until the night of December 8, 1909, that is.

  The men who toiled aboard the Great Lakes freighter fleet in the early twentieth century always dreaded the “last trip down.” December is usually when the weather is at its nastiest. On top of that, there was always a frantic race for cargo as captains crammed their ships into port in an attempt to get loaded, on their way, unloaded, and into winter lay-up before their insurance ran out for the season.

  The Clarion’s chief engineer, A.E. Welch, was no different. Welch had split his time between the Clarion and another Anchor Line boat, the Conestoga, for more than twelve years. His career had kept him away from home for many long weeks at a time, and no doubt Welch was looking forward to putting the Clarion to bed at Erie just as soon as she was finished unloading her cargo at Buffalo.r />
  The Clarion had left Chicago early on the morning of December 7, loaded mainly with flour and corn feed. The trip had gone well; she steamed southbound on the Detroit River the following afternoon alongside the freighter Denmark, past Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, headed for the open waters of Lake Erie. But here things took on an ominous feel: the skies had started to darken and the wind had picked up from the west-southwest. And the forecast offered no good news for the men on Lake Erie that night — nothing less than fierce winter gales and towering waves awaited them. As the Clarion emerged onto the lake and Captain Bell swung his vessel around to the east for the entrance to the Pelee Passage, he knew his crew was in for a long night.

  Out on deck, the temperature had dropped to a bone-chilling -12°C degrees Celsius, and Lake Erie, true to form, was throwing a late-season tantrum. Thomas J. Thomas provides a dramatic description in an article he wrote about that fateful night in the April 1911 Wide World Magazine:

  The waves were running mountain high, lashed by the cold December wind. To make matters worse, a heavy vapor, rising from the foaming water, was instantly converted into a dense fog, which, being quickly frozen was driven with stinging force against the faces of the men on the bridge.

  The Pelee Passage was and still is one of the most dangerous places on the Great Lakes. It covers the stretch of water between Pelee Island to the north and the tip of Point Pelee, on the Canadian mainland, to the south. The water is about twelve metres deep in the Passage itself, but there are three major shoals here: the Middle Ground Shoal, which extends northeast from Pelee Island, the Southeast Shoal, extending out from the Point, and Grubb Reef, near the entrance to the Passage. The shallow water and unpredictable conditions here have made many a captain anxious. And this is just one of many such places on the lakes, and just one kind of condition, that sets the captains of the big lakers apart from their ocean counterparts, as the January 10, 1910, Marine Review bluntly points out:

  It is no disparagement to say that even the most skillful average coast master would absolutely refuse to undertake some of the things which are matters of every day to the lake skipper. It is merely to say that he has not grown up amidst the conditions peculiar to the lakes where maneuvering big ships in narrow channels and crowded harbors loaded and light, with many times but a few inches of water between him and a big job for the dry dock or the wreckers, is an every day occurrence, and has resulted in a skill which is unequalled in the world.

  Today, the Southeast Shoal, at the eastern entrance to the Pelee Passage, is marked by an unmanned light station, but in 1909 only the tiny lightship Kewaunee marked the spot where vessels cleared the Passage and headed out into the open lake. And it was here, just as the Clarion’s exhausted men were searching through the dense fog and blinding snow for the comforting glow of the Kewaunee’s light, that one of them noticed the fire bursting through the cargo hatch in front of the boat’s aft deckhouse.

  Immediately, the chain of command began to break down as the men struggled with the Clarion’s steam-powered fire extinguisher. Very early on, the fire disabled the boat’s steering, leaving the freighter at the mercy of the lake and drifting beam-on to the raging water. More frighteningly, she was now headed in the general direction of the Kewaunee — and the shallow waters of the Southeast Shoal.

  In the midst of the bedlam, James Thompson, the boat’s mate, performed the first of a long list of valiant acts that night, grabbing a hand-held fire extinguisher and dashing down into the hold to search for the fire’s origin. His crewmates never saw him again. Welch had a theory about what happened to his unfortunate crewmate: “He must have been overcome by the smoke, which soon began to roll out of the hatchways in dense volumes,” he later told a reporter. Nearly a century after the event, author James Donahue made sure the engineer’s perspective wasn’t lost by including Welch’s retelling in his book, Terrifying Steamboat Stories.

  Meanwhile up on deck, the fire quickly spread, fanned by the whistling gale. By the time the men actually got the boat’s fire extinguisher working and water began to spit from the end of the hose, it was far too little, too late. The fire was totally out of control. The Clarion was entering the final hours of her life.

  As the men did their best to prolong the inevitable, a haunting wail, which Thomas J. Thomas fancifully describes in Wide World Magazine as “like the shriek of an animal in agony or terror,” bellowed out from the stricken ship. It was the Clarion’s whistle at full cry — Captain Bell had returned to the bridge and was pulling the Clarion’s whistle rope desperately, hoping against hope that another vessel might respond.

  Miraculously, far off in the distance, one did.

  Faintly, a steamer whistle could be heard wafting through the din of the roaring fire and crashing waves. Bell yanked the rope again, and again came the response. Louder and louder the other boat’s whistle grew, until finally the men could see her lights emerging out of the darkness, and then her hull, which passed so close astern they could actually see the faces of the men on the other steamer by the light of the flames. But then, to their horror, just as quickly as she had appeared, the mystery ship was gone, her hull and then, finally, her running lights winking out in the fog and the mist.

  The steamer was the freighter E.C. Pope, under the command of Captain Balfour. Probably afraid of grounding his own ship on the treacherous shoals, Balfour proceeded on without attempting a rescue. But he did send out the first wireless message indicating that the Clarion was in trouble. The Pope was one of at least three ships who passed by that night, saw the stricken Clarion, and carried on.

  Aboard the lightship Kewaunee, which was now barely three kilometres away, the three-man crew could also see the Clarion drifting by, and the smoke and fire billowing from her deck. But there was nothing they could do, either: they had their hands full managing the tiny lightship, which was encrusted with ice and, anchored to the bottom, was being whipped by the fierce gale. Even if they were to attempt a rescue, launching their small yawl in such seas would have been suicide. Instead, they repeatedly blared the boat’s horn and rang her bell, so that if the men of the Clarion did decide to take to the lifeboats, they would at least know where to steer.

  Aboard the burning freighter, this is exactly what was being contemplated. Their abandonment by the Pope made it clear to the crew that rescue was simply not in the cards. Worse, the fire had divided the men into two groups, with twelve at the bow with Captain Bell and seven at the stern with Welch, who recounts what happened next:

  We saw Captain Bell and the forward crew launching the big metallic lifeboat and we turned to the light wooden boat on the davit’s aft. Her lines were covered with ice, and long before we got them clear, Captain Bell and the other members of the crew succeeded in getting away.

  To all appearances, Captain Bell and his companions had managed a narrow escape, while the half-dozen men left aboard were condemned to a bitter fate. But events were to take a strange turn that night.

  While one lifeboat pulled away, circumstances were pointing to a grim conclusion at the stern of the Clarion. The last lifeboat, an old wooden craft, was the only hope for those remaining aboard. But even this was quickly dashed — as the men were lowering it, a large wave suddenly grabbed the tiny launch and smacked it high against the Clarion’s hull, tearing it from its ropes and capsizing it.

  Just as the group was absorbing this shocking development from the deck, one of their number, an oiler named Joseph McCauley, made a snap decision. Grasping the deck railing, McCauley vaulted over the side and into the freezing water. With his stunned mates looking on, McCauley struggled toward the overturned lifeboat in a vain attempt to bring it under control. But just as the plucky oiler reached out his hand, another wave suddenly swept him up and carried him away into the darkness. Helpless, he likely took a few futile strokes toward the distant lightship before going down for good.

  This grisly scene utterly destroyed the morale of the remaining six men, who could now feel th
e heat of the fire bearing down on them as they huddled at the stern.

  Their choice was becoming clearer and clearer: they could either burn to death on the Clarion or follow McCauley into Erie’s dark waters.

  Little did they know that help was indeed on the way. Two other freighters, the L.C. Hanna and the Josiah G. Munro, under the command of Captain Matthew B. Anderson and Captain C.B. Sayre, respectively, had heard the Pope’s wireless message. Both were steaming toward the Clarion’s position. The Munro was the first to get there, but because of her size (at 162 metres, she was more than double the length of the Clarion), she ran hard aground on the Southeast Shoal before she could get close enough. Stranded but otherwise safe, Sayre was forced to leave the job, and the lives of the six men on the Clarion, in the hands of Captain Anderson.

  Born in Norway in 1864, Matthew Anderson had been through too many things in his seagoing career to give up on the rescue effort easily. He had been sailing from the time he was a boy, and had served on ocean freighters before coming to the Great Lakes. Those who served under him recall a man with a great sense of humour and a deep compassion for his crew. On this dark night on Lake Erie, he was steaming for Cleveland with a load of iron ore. But fate had more immediate plans for Anderson and his men.