The Last Dance on the Lady Elgin Was Suddenly Interrupted

 

The Lady Elgin at dock.

When folks think of ship wrecks and maritime disasters, their thoughts turn to the Titanic and other famous sinkings on the briny deep. 

But in fact the disasters with the most loss of life have occurred on our inland water ways.  By far the heaviest loss of life was on the riverboat Sultana overloaded with former Yankee prisoners recently liberated from Rebel prisons.  The ship’s boilers exploded in April 1865 near Helena, Arkansas killing over 1,800.

Even ships at dock have not been safe.  In 1915 the Eastland, a passenger steamer out of Chicago, rolled over at her moorage when passengers, Western Electric employees on a day excursion, rushed to the dock side to wave goodbye to family and friends.  844 were killed, the largest loss of life in any single Great Lakes shipwreck.

 

The recovery of bodies from the S.S. Eastland which rolled over a dock in Chicago causing the largest loss of life in Great Lakes waters in 1915. 

The Eastland’s record does not stand for any want of competition.  In fact the Great Lakes, particularly the biggest ones—Superior, Michigan, and Huron—are among the most treacherous waters in the world.  According to David Swayze, the acknowledged expert in the field, there have been 4,900 documented ship wrecks on the Lakes in about nearly 500 years of non-native navigation.  Extreme weather conditions and very choppy water caused by the shallow bowl effect on the lake continue to make sailing on them hazardous for even the largest and most modern vessels—witness the famed wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald.

Few Lake Michigan disasters are more storied than the sinking of the Lady Elgin, which went down off the Illinois North Shore near Highland Park on September 8, 1860.  The wooden hulled side-wheel steamer was the pride of the lakes, one of the largest and most elegant passenger packets to ply its waters.

Built in a Buffalo, New York shipyard in 1851, she was named for the wife of the Governor General of Canada James Bruce, Earl of Elgin.

Despite her swanky appointments and favor with well-healed passengers the Lady Elgin in retrospect seems a jinxed ship.  In her 19 years of service she was involved in numerous accidents and mishaps.  In 1854 she sank after striking a rock near Manitowoc, Wisconsin.  After being refloated and repaired an accident with her machinery left her dead in the water the next year and she had to be towed to port in Chicago.  She was damaged in an 1857 fire, struck a reef at Cooper Harbor, Michigan in 1858 and later that same year ran aground on another reef on Lake Superior.  In 1859 she had to be towed to ports in Michigan twice.

But none of these mishaps had caused the loss of life and she was still regarded as a seaworthy, first class ship.

On September 6, 1860 the Lady Elgin was engaged to make a round trip, two day excursion run from Milwaukee to Chicago.  On board were members of the city’s Union Guard militia unit and their families bound for a day of politics including a scheduled speech by Democratic Presidential candidate Stephen Douglas.  After a pleasant day of oration and picnicking the passenger re-embarked as storm clouds gathered looking forward to an evening of gay dancing to the music of a German band on board.

 

The Augusta rams the Lady Elgin amidships.  

The ship made its way south in heavy rain and against a strong head wind.  Despite this, her powerful engines were making decent time.  About 2 a.m. on September 7 the sailing schooner Augusta of Oswego spotted the Lady Elgin by her bright running lights and the lights from the forward cabin where diehards were still dancing.  The captain of the Augusta lost sight of the other ship in the storm and misgauged the distance between them.  At 2:20 the Augusta rammed her amid ship.  Unlike the steamship, the schooner was not required to have running lights and was invisible to the crew of the Lady Elgin who could take no evasive action.

The ship initially stayed afloat but was taking water.  The Captain of the Augusta assumed the other vessel was alright.  Concerned with damage to his bow, he headed to port in Chicago without standing by to render assistance.

Captain Jack Wilson of the Lady Elgin ordered that 50 head of cattle in the hold, cargo, and baggage be jettisoned in an attempt to get the hole in her side above water level.  The chief steward and other crew tried unsuccessfully to plug the breach with mattresses.  A large life boat was lowered on the starboard side to assess the damage.  It never regained the ship, which broke in half after about half an hour, the aft portion sinking.  Life preservers, actually just large planks for survivors to cling to were never issued.  Only two small boats and one large raft got away from the ship.  Many clung to pieces of wreckage.

Prevailing winds drove the survivors, including Captain Wilson on the crowded raft jammed with as many as 300 people, toward the shore.  Two boats with 18 people in them, a smaller raft with 14, and individuals on wreckage did reach shore.  But at day break between 300 and 400, including Wilson and the large raft, were floundering just off shore.

 

Survivors of the sinking cling to wreckage in the storm-tossed lake. 

Students from nearby Northwestern University and the Garrett Biblical Institute worked frantically to pull survivors ashore.  Captain Wilson died heroically trying to save two women as storm-lashed winds beat against the rocks. 

Although the exact number will never be known because the ship manifest was lost, at least 300 people died in the tragedy.  It was the greatest loss of life ever in an open-water wreck on the Great Lakes.

Four years later rules were adopted that required running lights on sail, as well as steam powered ships.

 

Wreckage of the Lady Elgin in 60 feet of water off the North Shore. 

In 1989 the wreckage of the Lady Elgin was found off of Highwood by Harry Zych, who after an extended court fight was granted ownership by right of salvage.  Divers, who must get Zych’s permission, have retrieved many artifacts from the wreck which lies in four debris fields in about 60 feet of water.

 

                                                A Wisconsin state historical marker commemorating the disaster.                 

The wreckage was officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.

  

Chicago’s Haymarket Affair Over Shadowed Milwaukee’s Bay View Tragedy

 

The massive Bay View Iron Works was the largest industrial plant in the Milwaukee area and the target of Eight Hour Day strikers on May 5, 1886.

The first week of May 1886 all eyes were on the dramatic events in Chicago—the general strike for the 8 Hour Day on May 1, the confrontation and shooting of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works on the 3rd, and the attack on the Haymarket protest rally by Chicago Police during which a bomb was thrown.  But just up Lake Michigan and over the Wisconsin state line, the class war was also on—and deadly.

Seven thousand building trades workers, many of them, as in Chicago, skilled Germans enthusiastically joined the call for the national 8 Hour Day Strike called by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (ancestor of the American Federation of Labor.)  They were joined by more than 5000 Polish laborers, mostly unskilled recent arrivals, who organized at St. Stanislaus Catholic Church.  Some were members of the Knights of Labor, but most were unaffiliated.  It was a rare act of solidarity between skilled and unskilled labor and between ethnic groups often seen at odds with one another.

May first that year was a Saturday—a regular work day.  The strike was a success and roaming crowds of strikers called out various shops in the course of the day, usually succeeding in emptying them.  The strikers vowed to keep up the pressure and to march on Milwaukee’s largest employer, the Milwaukee Iron Company rolling mill in Bay View, an independent village just south of the city’s downtown on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Hearing of the plans on Sunday Republican Governor Jeremiah M. Rusk called out the National Guard with explicit and highly publicized orders to “shoot to kill” any strikers who attempted to enter the iron mill.

Wisconsin National Guard troops arrayed at the Bay View Iron Works.

None-the-less, on Monday an estimated 14,000 strikers marched on the mill where they were met by 250 Guardsmen arrayed in battle formation in front of the gate.  There was a tense stand-off, but strikers did not try to rush the gates.  Instead, they announced their intention to stay and established a camp near-by.  On Tuesday the camp was swollen with new recruits and many families including wives and children.  In an act of defiance the Kosciuszko Militia, an armed and drilled unit of Poles, including veterans of European armies arrived with the avowed intention of defending the strikers.

By early Tuesday morning, May 5, word of the events at the Haymarket in Chicago reached Milwaukee.  Tensions were mounting.  Their officers warned the Guardsmen that anarchists were coming to kill them.

About 1,500 strikers and their families left the camp to march on the mill, determined to call the workers there out on strike no matter what the cost.  The Guard formed in skirmish lines at the top of a small hill in front of the main gates.  As the crowd got to within 200 yards of troops, an officer ordered them to come no closer.  After a moment of indecision, the crowd pressed forward anyway.

Without further warning, the Guard opened fire.  This was not the raged fire of strike breakers and police with pistols that had resulted in deaths at the McCormick Reaper Works or the panicked wild and indiscriminate fire of the police at the Haymarket after the bomb.  These were disciplined volleys of fire directly into the tightly packed ranks of the strikers.  After the first rank got off their volley, just as they were drilled to do, the second rank stepped through the line and fired a second volley.

The first round tore into the crowd stopping it in its tracks, bodies fell.  Then a wild stampede for safety.  The second volley tore mostly into the backs of the fleeing workers. 

When the smoke cleared there were 7 bodies, including a 13 year old boy littered the ground and dozens of the injured writhed in agony.  The maimed were eventually retrieved by their comrades.  The exact number of injured, both from gunshot and those trampled in the flight, has never been established because few sought medical attention fearing arrest.

The shooting did effectively end the strike and protests.  The Guard patrolled the city and suburbs for some days, aggressively breaking up knots of workers who might gather.  Most went back to work.  Identifiable leaders found themselves blacklisted.

In 2019 the commemoration of the Bay View Tragedy included reenactors and giant puppets.

But the memory of that awful day burned itself into the memory of Milwaukee’s working class.  In subsequent years it would become a hot bed of Socialism and one of the most heavily unionized cities in the United States.

On the centennial of the event, a historical marker was erected by the Bay View Historical Society and the Wisconsin Labor History Society near the sight of the Iron Works.  A commemoration is held annually on the Sunday closest to May 5.

But the echoes of that day are not just historical.  In early 2011 newly elected Governor Scott Walker announced his sweeping program to attack the bargaining rights of Wisconsin public workers.  Realizing that his plan would provoke a strong reaction—and likely public service strikes if it was implemented, the swaggering governor told the press that he was if public employees dared protest or “cause disruptions” he was fully prepared to mobilize the National Guard against them.  That brought memories of the so called Bay View Tragedy to the fore again and was in no small measure responsible for launching the months of massive daily protests at the state capital.

Laying a wreath at the Bay View historical marker.

As William Faulkner once pointed out, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”