Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships
Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships
Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships is a book that brings together solid research and good story telling to provide a lively picture of the human side of life as a Great Lakes sailor in the latter half of the 19th century. The book begins with a shipwreck – the wreck of the schooner Rouse Simmons, Chicago’s Christmas Tree Ship. But questions that arise from the shipwreck then become a springboard into the lives of the people who sailed the lakes. Who would take the risk to sail an aging wooden schooner through a gale on Lake Michigan in late November to deliver a load of Christmas trees that could just as easily have been sent by rail and why would they do it? The answers are found by delving back into the lives of the men who sailed Christmas tree ships, not just the schooner Rouse Simmons, but all the Christmas tree ships, for there were, in fact, many. The investigation carries the reader back to a time when there were communities around the shorelines of the Great Lakes that were almost wholly dependent on waterborne transportation. In these communities sailors had both an important role and an influential voice. But these were not the brass button sailors, neatly uniformed, highly regimented and beholding to the stock holders and directors of the company that owned the vessel. These were the sailors of what was derisively referred to as the “Mosquito Fleet.” Their boats were small and often locally-made vessels. Their crews were the farm boys and family members who could be cajoled into joining the merry crew for a season of adventure. The captains themselves were men who learned to sail on the quarter deck, not in the classroom. Along the way the reader of Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships will become well acquainted with a number of these venturesome and daring men, all of whom sailed through the regular season on the lake (April to October), and then went out once more to end their year with a cargo of Christmas trees for one of the larger cities around the lake. The lives of these men provide the context within which to understand what happened on Lake Michigan on November 23, 1912, when the schooner Rouse Simmons disappeared into the deep. The era had long since past when commercial sailing vessels – the “white-winged fleets” – dominated the Great Lakes. Only the remnants, worn and tired old hulls, remained afloat and the sailors who owned them often did so either out of a stubborn resolve or a gnawing despair that there was little else that they could do to keep body and soul together. Some sailors lived meager lives bordering on poverty. Others had fallen into a dissolute life supported by ill-gotten gain. But Herman Schuenemann fell neither into dissolution or despair. Instead, he found a way to lift both his old schooner and himself to be icons of a treasured past and harbingers of a season of plenty and joy. In Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships Fred Neuschel shows how Herman Schuenemann’s upbringing in Ahnapee (now Algoma), Wisconsin, had given him valuable lessons about making the most out of limited resources and making populist causes triumph over the status quo. As a child Herman had lived with poverty and discrimination. He had seen the tragedy of war, physical illness and mental disability strike his family. But he had also seen how people of little means could adopt a cause and fight for what they believed was right. Both he and his brother brought these lessons to Chicago to make their career as urban sailors just as the city was about to claim its place on the world stage with the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Against the backdrop of that most dynamic period in Chicago’s history Lives and Legends shows how the Schuenemanns strove to join the middle class and, in the process, became the stuff of legend. by Fred Neuschel
University of Michigan Press, 2007
