Coxey's Army Sailed the Grampian: Schooner Days MV (1005)

by C. H. J. Snider

YOU would never guess that Jacob S. Coxey, "General of the Commonwealth of Christ" had anything to do with Schooner Days, but he had.

The early 1890s were hungry years in America, "A dollar a day was very good pay," as the chanteyman asserts in "Lowlands." Here in Toronto, at the end of winter, the Black Flag was carried past the old City Hall by a procession of unemployed. Unemployables, some, but if some heads were empty so were all stomachs. Mine was. The front windows of The News on Yonge Street were piled to the ceiling with loaves of bread, and they were emptied to the floor in five minutes.

There was little waste and no violence. Soup kitchens, The Salvation Army, House of Industry, House of Providence, and missions like the Helping Hand and Fred Victor, worked overtime; besides the Don Jail where they served 30-day portions of skilly bread and water. There was no Relief Department, no old age pension, no baby bonus. But the country pulled through into the "Growing Time" of the last half of the decade. The difference between then and now was that people wanted food more than holidays, and work more than security. "And you all know security is mortals' chiefest enemy." But do you know who said it first? Shakespeare.

It was bellypinch that raised Coxey's army that walked, waded and rode the rods to Washington in a pilgrimage of protest in 1894. The General was not alone in the "movement." One Kelly brought a conitingent down the Mississippi in rafts. Another Jeffries roused farmers starving in the west, and they, too, went on a hunger march for Washington, with accretions of lumberjacks, trainmen and lakesmen whose whole capital was their joblessness and appetites. He wired Coxey, probably collect, that he was coming east to join him at Massillon, O.

When he got as far as Duluth at the head of the Great Lakes he was reinforced by lake sailors, many vessels being laid up. They somehow established themselves aboard the big schooner Grampian fresh from the ways of Davidson's shipyard at West Bay City, Mich. This is the Grampian which Dr. W. N. Watters, of Goderich, saw as a hulk in West Bay City in 1948. She was a wooden vessel of 844 tons register and 218 feet length, with steel strapping on her frames and steam power for her pumps and hoisting gear, meant to tow, with sail as auxiliary.

Brother Roy was shipmates later with a hoist engineer named Cullen, who said he had made the passage down the lakes with the Army of the West. He was vague about details. Sometimes they sailed, sometimes they towed. There was a railway strike on at the time. They got some potatoes and cabbages from stalled freight cars, and some flour. And the great resource of the hungry hobo then was boiled wheat porridge.

They put into Ashland and Marquette and Grand Marais on the way down to White Fish, and made other calls besides the one at the Soo.

There was a war on between Inman and Singer in the towing business, and barges could get a tow from Duluth to Ashland, 85 miles, for $1 while it lasted. But little freight offered. Perhaps that is how the Grampian, got her menagerie. At any rate she reached the foot of Bates st., Detroit, and there anchored. In the excitement of disembarkation Jeffries fell or was thrown overboard. He was once Mayor of Detroit.

The phalanx of 500 reinforced Coxey, or went home by freight, when the strike was over, or hung around Detroit waiting for the Ford plant to open in the next ten years. For that, chillun wuz the real end of reel hard times on this continent, when everybody, even office boys, got $5 a day at Marse Henry's works.

Sure, we had a "deepreshun" after '29, and "reeceshuns" since, but they, ain't nothin 'tall to the hard times Genrul Coxey marched to conquer, and I've lived through them all, "We want good roads and we want them bad," was his slogan, and he was right. It was better to put hungry men to work making good roads than to let them hunger-march on bad ones.

Some of this is contributed by Gordon Garroch, 334 Shepherd st., Sarnia, who generously gives the glory to "that swell book by Mr. Malcolm W. Bingay of the Detroit Free Press, called "Detroit is My Own Home Town'," and says he has enjoyed Schooner Days in the Telegram for many years.

Thanks, Mr. Garroch, both ways. Hope you enjoy the second thousand numbers on which Schooner Days have embarked. That MV at the top means No. 1005 in the series. The first man to congratulate us on passing 1,000 a few weeks back was Jimmy Loree in our composing room. He set No. I twenty years ago. Jan. 31, 1931. Now he's our Chief Copycutter.