Stow Away
Bill Hooker - Glimpses of an Earlier Milwaukee
Bill Hooker - Glimpses of an Earlier Milwaukee
When I was a boy, I was a fixture at the old tugboat office at the south end of the Water Street bridge, where vessel captains came to order a tug to take them out of one of the “creeks,” as they called our rivers.
Rival tugboat lines frequently scouted 30 miles out on the lake, way north of Whitefish Bay, and not infrequently to Sheboygan, to get a line to a tow, especially if there was a calm, and the ship captain was anxious to get to dock and willing to pay for a long haul. Sometimes there were exciting tugboat races and even accidents, as they tried to get a line to these craft. Even before work on the breakwater started, the bay at Milwaukee was considered about the snuggest harbor between Chicago and the Soo. Headwinds sometimes drove a fleet of 50 or 75 sailing vessels “up the lake” to anchor at Milwaukee. I’ve seen masts on the bay so numerous they looked like a forest. About 1868 or 1869, on a Sunday, the bark Nelson, heavily wheat laden, was caught in a big blow and driven back to Milwaukee. The wind was a living gale. I was at the tug dock, when word came that the Nelson was going to pieces a few miles off Milwaukee. The Tifft was ordered to go to her relief. The captain of the Tifft told me that the waves were mountain high, and I was to keep off his tug, but I waited until she swung away from her moorings, then made a run and a jump, and landed on her stern deck. I went into the engine room before we passed the lighthouse, so the captain wouldn’t see me. There I found my friend Charley Gilbert, who jawed me for being a little fool, saying I would be in the way, and I might never get back to shore. I stayed in the engine room, hanging to an iron rod, my heels against the side of the tug one moment, and swinging in the air the next. As we rode the crest of each wave, the wheel would be out of water, and whining fast enough to tear out the machinery. Charlie was pale as he used his lever. After riding mountainous waves, we neared the Nelson, which had all her sails reefed and was wallowing in the trough of the seas. A sailor aboard the Nelson tried to drop a leader, about the size of a clothesline, to our lineman, who was doing a Charlie Chaplin performance to keep his footing. The sailor lost his footing, and plunged into a big wave like a piece of lead. I saw him drown. We made a dozen attempts to get to the Nelson, but at last the wrecking tug Leviathan got to her. Among the thousands who flocked to the lakeshore were my father and mother, who said our boat was out of sight for minutes at a time. Everyone thought we would never be able to get her back to port – but we did. From then on I was barred from the tugboat office and the dock. |