When Garfield Was Shot: Schooner Days DLVIII (558)

by C. H. J. Snider

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WM. A. HEAD of Picton, now 87, joined "the timber drogher Bigler belonging to Detroit"—-famous in the lake chanty bearing her name—-sixty-one years ago this summer.

He shipped in her at Kingston on Lake Ontario, to load timber on the Upper Lakes. They went to a place on the shore above the Sauble light. The oak sticks were cut in the woods three miles back and dragged to the beach on heavy wagons, and then floated out to the vessel.

Timber loading was new work to Will Head, but he got on well with it—and with the mate. He lost two or three mauls trying to drive dogs (iron, not Eskimo) into the sticks when they were brought under the stern for quilling up to the port sills. All Capt. Conners, who sailed the Bigler in succession to Cal McKee of the chanty, said when the third steel-headed maul splashed into Lake Michigan's pellucid depths was, "Boy, them mauls won't float." He was a square-shooter, was Conners, and did not log the youngster in the ship's books for the price of three mauls out of his $2-a-day wages. He was nicknamed "Crazy" because of the chances he would take.

LAKE ONTARIO CREW

Spurred by this generosity young Will mastered the art of driving the chisel-pointed dogs into the hard oak and never lost another maul.

Mike Clancy was with him in the Bigler, from Horse Island, and Bill McKee from Wolfe Island, and Tommy Vandusen from South Bay, afterwards drowned on a dark night when a steamer cut down the schooner Oliver Mowat, which he owned. The first mate was Billy Yates from Sproule, and the second a man called Sandy, from Buffalo. She had a big crew, for more men were needed to work the timber than to merely sail the vessel. Mike Fineran, the man who made the Bigler ballad, was not aboard this time, but they all knew him.

In August the Bigler again sailed from Kingston, after unloading her first cargo. She went light up Lake Ontario, for a cargo of coal in Buffalo on Lake Erie, for Marquette on Lake Superior. Here she was to load iron ore for Cleveland; a long voyage at best, a thousand miles on the great freshwater highway. It was a good deal longer before it was finished.

TUGS REAPED SMOKE HARVEST

In Buffalo she got 750 tons of coal, a full summer load. A tug towed her right through Lake Erie and the rivers to Lake Huron—a great time saver.

This was the year of the big forest fires which destroyed so much of the Michigan pine, when the sun was never seen except as through smoked glasses, a ball of fire with no rays, and every point and headland was hidden in smoke, and the lighthouses were quenched by night. Every man on board had sore eyes through the smoke and the continual strain of keeping lookout up and down the five Great Lakes. That was one of the reasons why so much towing was done. The tug gave the schooner a mark to steer by - if she could follow it. The tug trusted to compass and experience, and the schooner trusted the tug.

It was also the year President Garfield, who gave his name to as many little boys as F.D.R. has done in our time, was shot by the disappointed office hunter, C. J. Guiteau, in Washington. They were loading cargo when Garfield was shot—that was on July 2nd, 1881, and the stevedores took the day off, and though he lingered long, dying on Sept. 19th, at Elberon, his public obsequies added another day to the Bigler's long voyage, for the stevedores took another day off then while unloading the same cargo at Marquette.

The Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair river sometimes detained vessels for weeks, if they tried to sail their way up. The Bigler entered Lake Huron a few days after leaving Buffalo, and spread her wings for the great climb north and west.

TROUBLE

All went well until she had heavy weather off the Thunder Bay Islands on the west side of the lake. With difficulty she made the Detour Passage towards the Soo, with 30 inches of water in her hold and the leak gaining. At the Soo, of course, was the canal which would lift her up to the level of Lake Superior. With all the water and all that coal she floated very deep, and she struck going into Detour. That made her leak so badly that Capt. Connors ran her on a mudflat to keep her from sinking. She settled on the soft bottom with the water up to the lower bunks in the three-tiered forecastle. The crew had to double up, or sleep by watches.

They sent to the Soo for a steam pump, and young Will was of much appreciated service in devising a sort of box-well or caisson, of pointed planks reinforced with iron, which could be driven down through the coal so as to let the pump get at the water. Otherwise the coal, which came running in when shoveled back, would have choked it. The steam pump was powerful enough to keep the leak under control, so a tug was engaged to tow the poor Bigler all the two hundred miles back to Port Huron, the nearest available drydock.

This, with good luck, only took two days, and she was put on the drydock, patched, and caulked in two days more. When being towed out of the dock, after it had been watered again, the current of the St. Clair River caused her to take such a sheer that she almost capsized the poor tug, puffing frantically to straighten her up. Her stern swung into the wharf and she smashed the yawlboat and the davits on which it hung.

MORE TOWLINE SAILING

Another day was spent in repairing this further damage and getting another yawlboat, and at night they started up Lake Huron again, in tow of the tug which had brought them down. She was going back to the Soo from whence she had come, and the Bigler had to get there somehow, and Capt. Conners, knowing he might have a $1,000 salvage bill anyway, wisely decided to get another good tow out of it. He would have to take a tug from Detour to Lake Superior in any event.

A southeast gale was behind them. The water was smooth under the lee of the land, but as the sea increased in the open, Will Head says, the Bigler began to yaw around until the lights of the towing tug, which should have been directly ahead of her, appeared alternately in the main rigging, to port and to starboard. She was wandering all over Lake Huron, as far as her hundred-fathom towline would let her range. Her wake, if the gulls could have seen it in the dark, looked like the fever chart of a rail fence.

But the tug got her to the Soo and through the lock, and up the St. Mary's River and into Lake Superior at last.

BLIND MAN'S BUFF

The Bigler tackled Lake Superior under sail, after all this towing, her expenses having already exhausted all the freight money of this and other voyages. No one aboard had ever been into Marquette before, and Capt. Conners was undecided how he was going to "take" the place. "Crazy" like a fox, he sighted a steamer whose course showed she was bound to Marquette, and grimly he followed her, carrying sail on the Bigler till the water was gushing through the vessel's hawsepipes and washing her lines off the deck. The steamer had the legs of him, and disappeared into the fog-smoke, but not before she had brought the Bigler up on another schooner, and one she could hold. This one was also bound into Marquette; and Conners stuck to her, shortening sail to do so. It was sleeting and blowing hard, and it took two hours to brail in the big double raffee the Bigler carried. It folded in to the topmast in bulgy sausage-links, instead of bunching up like a gafftopsail. Thus shortened, the Bigler followed the stranger in, making every move she did. When the stranger anchored the Bigler anchored just outside her swinging range.

"Heigh!" hailed the stranger's Old Man, as the echoes of the second chain cable died away, "is this a good place to let go? I've never been in here before!"

It proved a "good place," and the Bigler at last unloaded her Lake Erie coal and took on a load of the "red iron ore" of the song. Then back down the long stairway of the lake she staggered till she reached Cleveland still mourning for the late President Garfield, Cuyahoga County's favorite son, who had gone from log cabin to White House and from White House to the cemetery. It was July when he and she started their respective voyages. It was on in November when she finished hers. It was longer than Mike Fineran's come-all-ye about her, which we printed last week. A respected correspondent is sure that her name was the George Bigelow, because his mother heard the song that way, but Bigler was the name when Aemilius Jarvis heard the song in 1875 and Bigler was the name on her stern when Will Head was in her in 1881.

"Oh give her sheet and let Lar live

The boys'll put her through."

They used to sing in the old chanty. The Bigler's bluff bows continued to make the chilly lake water boil for three years longer. Then in 1884 she was lost on Lake Michigan. All hands saved. Capt. Murray was her last master.

"WE DROVE THEM ALL BEFORE US, BOYS,

THE PRETTIEST EVER YOU SAW,

RIGHT DOWN INTO LAKE HURON THROUGH

THE STRAITS OF MACKINAW."