by Chad Fraser
But these expectations were quickly dashed. A thorough search of the vessel revealed no trace of the crew, and of the six, only one was ever found; later that fall, the body of Chief Engineer Charles Butler was pulled from the Niagara River near Buffalo. His widow identified him by his coat, a gold cuff button, and a missing finger on one of his hands.
The wreck, however, revealed much about the ferocity of the “Big Blow.” The vessel’s steel hull and whaleback-shaped foredeck had indeed done their jobs, but the storm had created waves so high that they carried right over the hull and bashed into the vessel’s aft wooden superstructure. Once they tore off the mast and lanterns, the waves crashed into the interior, filling the hull from the inside, violently swamping the ship — and likely killing her trapped crew instantly — before tearing her completely off her moorings and dragging her to her final resting place. It also appeared that Mary Williams had been right: Captain Williams had decided to stay on his station, but in such conditions there was nowhere for the tiny vessel to go, even if it had tried.
And perhaps, even more surprisingly, this was not the end of Lightship No. 82’s story. Once refloated at Buffalo, the ship was towed to Detroit, rebuilt, and used as a relief lightship. No. 82 held stations on Lake Michigan and Lake Huron before being retired at the end of the 1935 navigation season. From there it went to Boston, where it was permanently docked and used as a summer retreat for retired Navy men. But ironically, Lightship No. 82’s ultimate demise would come not from a storm at sea, or even from old age: in 1945, vandals boarded her and sank her at her dock. By now, Lightship No. 82 had run out of lives — after being refloated a second time, she was finally sent to the scrapyard.
Today, the lighthouse stands abandoned at the tip of Point Abino, roughly midway between the towns of Fort Erie and Port Colborne. After the loss of Lightship No. 82, two other lightships temporarily held the position before the Canadian government finally got around to building the ornate lighthouse, complete with an attached keeper’s dwelling, in time for the 1918 navigation season. With this, and a lighted buoy marking the nearby shoal, lightships were no longer necessary.
With its twenty-eight-metre white concrete tower, the Point Abino lighthouse is a rarity among Lake Erie lighthouses. Constructed in Greek Revival style, it spurns the utilitarian look of most Great Lakes lights, instead projecting an almost regal appearance that nearly masks its once-vital role of guiding vessels safely into Buffalo. It was manned for far longer than most other lights on the lakes, with the last keeper, Lewis Anderson, finally turning off the lantern in January 1989, when the lighthouse was fully automated. Quoted in a January 3, 1989, Toronto Star article, Anderson was blunt about his feelings: “Lighthouse keepers have been around since the time of the ancient Egyptians. Now we’re going the way of the dodo bird.”
Photo by author
The Point Abino lighthouse, an architectural rarity on the Great Lakes, faces an uncertain future.
But Anderson’s thirty-year term can hardly be described as boring. In December 1985, the keeper found himself in the middle of yet another fierce Lake Erie gale, with waves blowing so high they completely entombed the lighthouse in ice, blowing out the windows and completely destroying Anderson’s office at the base of the tower. When Anderson and his crew arrived the next morning, they had to use fire axes to get in. “There was five feet of ice,” he said in the same Toronto Star article. “It took three months before it thawed, and we had to dry everything with industrial-sized heaters.” On other occasions, Anderson was forced to ride out storms for days in the lighthouse.
After Anderson left, automation would only extend the old light’s life for another seven years. With the advent of the Global Positioning System and other tools of modern navigation, the Point Abino lighthouse, like the lightships that had preceded it, was no longer needed. At the close of the 1996 navigation season, the Point Abino lighthouse fell dark — for good. But as with Lightship No. 82, this is a story with many endings.
Almost from the moment the Point Abino lighthouse was deactivated, local citizens began to put together a concerted effort to preserve it. The building was almost immediately designated a National Historic Site by the federal government in 1998, which was something of a pyrrhic victory, since no money was allocated for its maintenance. Further, the land behind the lighthouse, and the only access road leading to it, is owned by private interests.
But all was not lost. A group of nearby residents organized and began to press local politicians to act. In 2001, they did, and the town of Fort Erie bought the lighthouse from the federal government. Later, a deal was worked out with the landowners to allow limited public access. While far from a permanent solution, something of a reprieve has been granted. But much work remains to be done if the future of this unique Lake Erie landmark is to be secured.
Chapter 7
Bootleggers and Blind Pigs: Rum-running on Lake Erie
“Prohibition Comes In Without Disturbance,” announced the headline on the front page of the September 18, 1916, Toronto Globe.
And so it appeared, for a short time at least, that eliminating the heartbreak and destitution caused by what was then known as the “liquor traffic” was as simple as passing a law. As the Globe goes on to report:
The bars that closed on Saturday as purveyors of intoxicating liquors open today as restaurants for temperance drinks. The shops stay closed. The passing of King Alcohol was tame and orderly in Toronto, save for a bit of isolated roystering. There was no celebrating, no “rough-housing.” Hotelmen combined with officialdom to preserve order.
Along the shores of Lake Erie, the story was much the same. The Windsor Evening Record didn’t even bother to run a story about the dawn of a “dry” Ontario, and instead devoted most of its front page to reports from the world war that was raging an ocean away on the bloody battlefields of France.
But the cracks in the Ontario Temperance Act, or OTA, the law behind Prohibition, soon began to show. The law marked the end, or so it was thought, of the free sale of liquor in Ontario, wiping out just about any place a cocktail could be enjoyed in the company of friends. The only exception was private homes, and even then, in the words of the OTA itself, the stuff couldn’t be “purchased and received from any person in Ontario.” In other words, it could still be imported, and it was, in record amounts, mostly from neighbouring Quebec.
And this was far from the only way to get around the OTA; there were countless other loopholes. For one, doctors could still prescribe liquor to patients in need, and this privilege was widely abused. The problem was most obvious during the Christmas season, when “illness” ran rampant across the province, causing long lines of “patients” to snake their way out the doors of their local pharmacies.
Clearly taken aback, the province tightened restrictions on doctors and druggists, but as with many of Prohibition’s more stringent rules, these merely had the opposite effect of encouraging drinkers to find other, more creative ways to wet their whistles. Locally produced wines were still being sold, and the pipeline from Quebec remained open, but for the more stout-hearted, there were less legal ways to get one’s hands on alcohol.
In the United States, the advent of Prohibition followed a similar route, but the Eighteenth Amendment, which took effect on January 16, 1920, was much more strict than the OTA, doing away with “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States . . .” But unlike the OTA, which still allowed alcoholic beverages to be made and exported, the Eighteenth Amendment was firm: no alcohol was to be produced in America. Period. It was a crucial distinction. And it was what the whole lucrative enterprise of smuggling booze across Lake Erie and into the United States rested upon.
The Prohibitionists
“Mr. Dobson, I told you last spring . . . to close this place and you didn’t do it. Now I have come with another remonstrance. Get out of the way . . .”
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p; With that, Carry Nation, a six-foot-tall temperance crusader from Kansas, went on a rampage, hurling bricks and bottles in all directions, smashing the mirrors and liquor bottles that the bar’s owner, the aforementioned Mr. Dobson, kept neatly stacked behind the bar. Terrified, Dobson and another man standing beside him hit the deck.
It was June 7, 1900, in Kiowa, Kansas, and the legend of Carry Nation had been born.
Through the rest of that day, she smashed two more bars, and was heard calling to one young bartender: “Young man, come from behind that bar. Your mother did not raise you for such a place.” She then threw a brick at the mirror, and though it didn’t break, “the brick fell and broke everything in its way.”
Nation was a fervent Methodist whose first husband, a doctor, had paid for his alcoholism with his life. Until she died eleven years later, Nation firmly believed that God had charged her to go to Kiowa that day to demolish the bars and gin joints that she believed were spreading the disease of alcoholism among the men of the community. According to Nation’s memoirs, which she penned in 1905 under the title The Use and the Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, she had prayed before going to bed the previous evening for “the Lord to use me in any way to suppress the dreadful curse of the liquor.” Her prayers were quickly answered, as she describes:
The next morning before I awoke, I heard these words very distinctly: “Go to Kiowa and” (as in a vision here my hands were lifted and cast down suddenly) “I’ll stand by you.” I did not hear these words as other words; there was no voice, but they seemed to be spoken in my heart. I sprang from my bed as if electrified, and knew this was directions given me, for I understood that it was God’s will for me to go to Kiowa to break, or smash, the saloons.
Over the years, the eccentric Nation would become arguably America’s best-known “dry” advocate, and over time her methods would change. Switching from hurling pieces of brick to wielding a hatchet in order to cause as much damage as possible, Carry would come to call her visits to the pubs “hatchetations,” and proclaim that she was saving their clientele from “a drunkard’s hell.” The police did what they could to control Carry, but she had many deep-pocketed supporters who were willing to help her pay the many fines she ran up. As for the barmen of Kansas, many lived in constant fear of Nation’s wrath, and some closed up shop entirely.
Southern Ontario’s answer to Carry Nation was the Reverend J.O.L. Spracklin, also a Methodist and another rabid prohibitionist. Spracklin was the pastor of the Sandwich Methodist Church in Sandwich, which was then a town of its own (it would later be amalgamated with Windsor). Through 1919 and early 1920, he had been publicly pressuring the police to do something about what he considered lax enforcement of the OTA in the southwest. His argument centred on the huge amount of liquor that was being smuggled across the Detroit River, something that was getting more and more out of hand as Windsorites, from everyday citizens to professional rum-runners in expensive speedboats, came to realize the fast buck waiting to be made by “exporting” booze to their nearby American neighbours.
Almost immediately after Prohibition became law in the United States, the river came alive with bootleggers. Although it is impossible to know for sure, three-quarters of the alcohol that entered the U.S. from Canada during the dry years is said to have come this way, earning the river the nickname the “Windsor–Detroit Funnel.” From Windsor, all the way down to Lake Erie, the river was lined with docks devoted exclusively to the “export trade,” on which were built plain sheds where the booze could be housed until it was smuggled across. (The close proximity of the Hiram Walker Distillery, located on the Detroit River shoreline in nearby Walkerville, didn’t hurt, either.) Day and night, rowboats, speedboats, and even steamers loaded with liquor crowded the river. Not even the bitter winter could stop the parade; rum-runners simply built sleighs or put chains on the tires of their cars and drove them across, often bringing planks of wood along in case they had to drive over cracks in the ice. There were even rumours of underwater cables and pipes running to the Detroit side, and a host of other bizarre contraptions built with one goal in mind: to get as much booze as possible past the authorities and into American “speakeasies” and “blind pigs” — underground bars and clubs where booze was sold in outright defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Spracklin was one of the leading voices against this kind of lawlessness, and the pastor knew how to use his talents as a speaker to maximum effect. He made headlines across the province by appearing at a Sandwich town hall meeting on July 19, 1920, and dramatically presenting a handwritten charge against Sandwich’s police force for, according to a report in the next day’s Border Cities Star, “. . . gross negligence and inefficiency in the discharge of their official duties, and further, that by such negligence and inefficiency on their part, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, the illicit traffic in strong drink, and indecency have for some time past flourished to an alarming degree in the town.”
Not willing to stop there, Spracklin went after the chief of police himself, according to the July 20, 1920, Toronto Globe:
Mr. Spracklin also charges open neglect on the Chief of Police, Alois Masters, citing in particular the night of June 20, 1920: “during which date between the hours of 9:20 p.m. and 11:45 p.m., when the chief remained in front of the Chappell House [a Sandwich hotel], except from 11:40 to 11:55 p.m., when he was inside the place, that men and women staggered from said place evidently under the influence of strong drink, and the Chief of Police during that time failed to enforce the law of the land.”
The Globe called Spracklin’s colourful oration at the town hall meeting, given with a number of Sandwich’s prominent citizens standing behind him, nothing less than “the biggest sensation ever in town.” A spectator captured the mood best when he told a reporter from The Border Cities Star: “This man Spracklin has, tonight, lighted a torch which shall not die out until the whole province of Ontario is awakened to the conditions existing along the Essex border.”
And Sandwich’s police were not the only ones feeling the heat; the fiery preacher’s outspokenness was also proving to be an embarrassment for the provincial government, which at this point was desperate to find a solution to the ever-worsening situation in the “wild west.” But the province’s new attorney general, William E. Raney, had a plan. Instead of trying to silence Spracklin, as American authorities had tried to do with Carry Nation years earlier, Raney decided to harness the pastor’s boundless energy — and use it to bolster the OTA along the border. To the shock of many, less than ten days after Spracklin’s outburst at the Sandwich town hall meeting, Raney gave the pastor a temporary appointment as a provincial liquor license inspector, armed him, and allowed him to hire as many men as he needed to bring the bootleggers to heel.
Not surprisingly, Spracklin wasted no time putting his newfound powers to use, hiring a squad of fellow license inspectors to help him, including William H. Hallam and S.M. Hallam, two Windsor brothers who were known around town for being little more than petty thugs. Still, if Spracklin was going to operate in the dark and seedy world of the bootleggers, he figured he would need some added muscle.
But it wasn’t only gangsters and small-time smugglers who had to worry about a visit from the “fighting parson” and his anti-liquor squad. The high and mighty were not safe, either. Little more than two weeks into Spracklin’s appointment, he and S.M. Hallam took down the mayor of nearby Amherstburg, Doctor W. Fred Park, and Sam Renaud, one of the town’s constables. The pair, according to the license inspectors, had received 230 cases of whiskey, which they had stashed in Park’s barn after loading some of the hooch into a small boat. Park explained that he didn’t own any of the liquor, but was simply storing it, in the words of the August 27, 1920, Border Cities Star, “in the public interest, so that it might not be stolen.”
None of this washed in the eyes of Magistrate Alfred Miers, who promptly slapped Park with a $1,000 fine for possessing liquor in a place other than a private dwell
ing.
For a churchman, Spracklin was also remarkably cavalier about using his gun — something that would later come back to haunt him. Early on the morning of August 26, 1920, Spracklin and S.M. Hallam stopped four boats on the Detroit River and arrested nine men, all Americans, on grounds that they were smuggling whiskey into the United States. Three of the boats came quietly, but one, a large cruiser called the Eugenia, needed a little coaxing before yielding to Spracklin and his men, who stalked the rum-runner in a government-supplied speedboat appropriately named the Panther II. The agents fired on the slower-moving boat, no doubt scaring the life out of the rum-runners aboard. In a sense, Spracklin and his agents were lucky that night; although the Eugenia had reportedly been equipped with a rifle, there were no guns aboard when it was loaded with whiskey at a nearby Windsor hotel and sent on its way. All nine bootleggers were charged with violating the OTA, and the license inspectors asserted that, according to the August 20, 1920, Border Cities Star, they were using the tiny fleet for “transporting liquor from the border to Toledo or some other downriver point.”
Although it appeared on the surface that Spracklin was having some success in controlling the carnival atmosphere that hung over the border, any gains he made were obscured by the conflicts that arose shortly after the Sandwich pastor became an overnight lawman. Complaints about his methods quickly sprang up, including a charge by a Windsor lawyer that Spracklin’s men were carrying pads of blank search warrants and simply filling in the names as they went along. Throughout the region, people’s cars were being searched at random — even while they attended Sandwich Methodist on Sunday mornings. Worse, the bootleggers responded to Spracklin’s raids in the only way they knew how: with violence. Death threats were phoned and mailed in to Spracklin’s home, and on Halloween night in 1920, the house was sprayed with bullets, with one whistling past the pastor’s wife before burying itself in a wall. In one particularly strange incident, bootleggers even tossed Spracklin into a canal near the town of La Salle. Far from getting better, the situation along the border seemed to be getting more brutal with each passing day.
