In the text of this story I have acknowledged my debit to Louise Wade and Thomas Jablonski for telling me the real story of the “Jungle” and exorcising the versions of both Upton Sinclair and my predecessors at the University of Chicago.
There are scores of books about Great Lakes shipping and shipwrecks. They are available from Northern Lights Bookstore—www.norlights.com. Two that were especially useful were “A Fully Accredited Ocean”: Essays on the Great Lakes edited by Victoria Brehm and Great Lakes Shipwrecks and Survivals by William A. Ratigan. A beautiful book of photographs and prints is Ladies of the Lake by James Clary. There is an especially wonderful drawing of the graceful David Dows, a five-masted barkentine on which the Charles C. Campbell is based. The largest sailing boat ever to appear on the Great Lakes, the ship was launched in 1881 and sank in the ice off Whiting, Indiana, in late November of 1889. She did ram and sink a ship but no lives were lost.
Although Chicago was the busiest port in the world in 1870 and the fourth busiest (after New York, London, and Hamburg) at the turn of the century, there, alas, is no comprehensive history of shipping into Chicago.
The shipwreck on which the story is based was the ramming of the Lady Elgin off Winnetka, Illinois, by the schooner Augusta in the summer of 1860. God rest those that died in the wreck and all those who have died on these terrible inland oceans.
I am indebted to Robert Hornaday for the story of the wreck discovered in the dune forty years ago at Grand Beach and to John and Richard Daley for background about the Yards and Canaryville. Seamus Heaney and Nóirín Ní Rrian found Irish lullabies for me.
None of the people in the story exist outside my imagination.
Will there be more people in the Coyne family, when next we meet them? Well, isn’t that up to God?
AG
Grand Beach
Summer 1998