Chicken Wire for Christmas and Niagara Tidal Wave: Schooner Days DCCCLXXX (880)

by C. H. J. Snider

WINDUP OF THE WING

WHEELSMAN John Leonard, 10 Meredith street, Toronto, sent a smart picture of his ship, the steamer Heron Bay, a fine big freighter, and a film he took of the J. T. Wing, positively the last commercial schooner on the lakes, last year. He says: "She is now in her final berth at Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich. I snapped the picture as we went by last summer. She was quite hog-backed and seemed to leak a lot as the pump was operating all the time. She has now been moved a few hundred feet down the river and land is now all around her, making her a proper dry land ship."

The Wing was not built for the lakes nor of lake schooner model, but came here from the Atlantic coast after an ocean career in lumber freighting and rum-running. She sailed the Upper Lakes in the cedar post trade and as a training ship and is now a nautical museum.

TIDAL WAVE AT NIAGARA

"Sir,—I was reading your article in the last issue of The Tely, about the 'Erie Wave,' and it reminded me of an Ontario 'Wave' which occurred here, at Niagara-on-the-Lake, many years ago, and about which my parents used to speak when we were kids.

"As you know, there used to be a fishing industry of considerable size and importance here, one branch of which consisted of fishing with large seines, or dragnets as they were called here. The shore, all the way from the steamboat landing in the river to past the 'Four Mile Point' was divided into grounds of about a quarter mile frontage. My father and his partners had the ground above the 'Two' when I was a boy, 'The Two' is a point and a pond just where the rifle range is situated, west of the town. This pond used to be quite large and the beach between it and the lake was reckoned one of the best grounds for whitefish, which fish used to come in quite close to shore in the spring, the season lasting from the first week in April till about May 24th.

"One fine quiet day in April, 1854, a gang of fishermen were on this particular beach with their seines, when, without any warning or sign of danger, a huge wave swept in off the lake and carried men, boats and nets into the pond. When the wave had subsided and the men had extricated themselves from the mess they proceeded to fish their tackle out of the pond into which it had been swept, and they found entangled in the gear two bodies, one of them an elderly man named James Forster, and the other a boy of 14 years, William Keith, my mother's brother. No one apparently knew the boy had been on the beach that day until they found his body.

"I always heard this happening described as a tidal wave. There was no storm and no wind at the time and the wave came like the proverbial 'bolt from the blue.' It is the only incident of the kind of which I ever heard on the lakes and its being so unusual I thought you might be interested in it. It is quite authentic, as my own mother spoke of it several times in my hearing. I have also seen a record of the simultaneous funeral of the two victims in an old register in my office of town clerk.

"Your Schooner Days are always interesting and I quite enjoy reading them. I hope you will long be spared to continue them. With all my best wishes I remain sincerely yours,

—"J. E. MASTERS."

LAST SCHOONER ON LAKES THE J. T. WING