On the morning of July 24th, 1915, the SS Eastland rolled over at her berth in the Chicago River, killing hundreds in one of the city’s worst tragedies. On November 24th of that year, a former Eastland salvage diver named William “Frenchy” Deneau uncovered something strange in the muck of the river bottom: a 40-foot-long submarine, which he then exhibited as “the Foolkiller.”
Except: it was not a submarine, and not “the Foolkiller.” It was a prototype lifeboat—the “International Automatic Life Boat”—designed by Robert Brown of Chicago about exactly a decade earlier. It appears in photos taken between 1906 and 1908 docked near the MWRR rail bridge between Van Buren and Jackson. Between 1908 and 1915, it apparently disappeared. After the summer of 1916, it seems to have disappeared again.
The canonical teller of this story is The Constant’s Mark Chrisler, who has put together a multi-part series which you can listen to here. As such, I’m not going to recount too much that is already widely known—the podcast, and this set of episodes in particular, is eminently worth a listen so you should go ahead and do that.
The Foolkiller has been stuck in my head since I first heard about it 15 years ago. I thought the mystery would never be solved—I said “canonical” because I’d nominate Chrisler for sainthood in bringing it as far as he has.
I have spent the last six months or so trying to take up the mantle, as you know if you have ever talked to me for more than about two minutes in that time period. But that’s been scattered between website comments, Discord posts, E-mails, and Telegram conversations and I’d like to start trying to centralize it.
(All entries in this series as of October 27th, 2023):
- Introduction
- “The Recovery” (this one!)
- “The Find; or, The Theory of the Case” (fixing the date and circumstances of the salvage)
- “What If It Was Round?” (a history of the cylindrical lifeboat phenomenon)
- “Everything You Wanted to Know About the International Automatic Lifeboat (But Were Afraid to Ask)” (…)
- “The Man from the East” (covering Harry Fisher and his lifeboat)
- “The Summer of 1907” (fixing the dates of photographs of the lifeboat)
- “Step Right Up” (tracking the relationship between “the Foolkiller” and C.W. Parker’s carnival)
- “The Prestige” (Samuel Winternitz, Waterdrome, and the Foolkiller’s true owner)
- “Postcard Mania” (trying to find out when the last bridge photo was taken)
- “Blow Yourself Up” (all about William “Frenchy” Deneau)
- “Conclusion [citation needed]” (reviewing open questions)
- “The Experiment” (lessons from a model I built of the lifeboat)
- “Back from the Dead” (David B. Marks, and an update on the salvage)
So. This is the first part in a ???-part series about The Foolkiller that I am going to unoriginally call Foolkiller Friday and for which I have—at the moment—content for at least a dozen posts. I am going to try to keep this approachable, so let me know if it becomes too esoteric or you have no idea what I’m talking about and it is worth some kind of expanded recap. There are a bunch of open questions, like:
- What happened to the Foolkiller after 1916?
- What happened to the “International Automatic Life Boat” between 1908 and 1915?
- Why did nobody claim ownership of it in 1915? Who did own it at that point?
- Why did Chicagoans not recognize a boat that had been floating in the Chicago River just a few years earlier and literally appeared in postcards at the time?
- Did someone die in the Foolkiller when it sank? Who?
To be honest: as of right now, March 24th, 2023, I cannot tell you the answers. I am hoping that you might, yourself, have some ideas! The sum total of Foolkiller knowledge has expanded dramatically in the last year. One reason I’ve decided to start writing this is that, after six months, I still make some kind of interesting new progress every few weeks or so. And I am just a silly dog on the Internet!
And today, I figured I would start with a question that I think we can answer, “Where was the Foolkiller found and raised?”, because it also serves as a good introduction to the key players and key problems of this saga.
The first extant reporting comes from the Chicago Tribune, on November 24th, and it goes like this:
SUBMARINE “FOOLKILLER” FOUND AFTER 18 YEARS
Lost Chicago Undersea Boat, Missing Quarter of Century, Discovered by Diver.
The lost Chicago submarine “Foolkiller” was found yesterday. William M. Deneau, known as “Frenchy,” a diver, found the subsea boat near the Rush street bridge. It was buried under three feet of river bottom muck. The boat is said to have belonged to Peter Nissen, spectacular mariner, who was lost in his revolving vessel while attempting to drift across Lake Michigan.
Deneau was laying cable on the river bottom. A chance sweep of a shovel from the dredge above exposed the side of the submarine.
The “Foolkiller” was so called because it made its first appearance shortly after the Chicago fire, in the days when submarines were unheard of, and drowned its original owner, a New York man, when it made a trial trip. Nissen then bought it.
A couple things to note. The first is that I have reprinted the newspaper article in its entirety, which I am liable to do often, both because I want us all to be on the same page and because I want to drive home just how little contemporary reporting there actually was, and how scanty it is. The second is that I am going to excerpt this again, retaining only the statements that we do not know, for a fact, to be incorrect.
Discovered by Diver.
William M. Deneau, known as “Frenchy,” a diver, found the subsea boat near the Rush street bridge. It was buried under three feet of river bottom muck. Deneau was laying cable on the river bottom. A chance sweep of a shovel from the dredge above exposed the side of the submarine
That same day, the Chicago Examiner wrote a somewhat lengthier piece:
CHICAGO READY FOR WAR? LOOK!
Why, There’s Been a Submarine in the River for These Fifteen Years.
CHICAGO READY FOR WAR? LOOK!
Why, There’s Been a Submarine in the River for These Fifteen Years.
“The con man,” as Persuadem Lorgan used to say, “can't lie all the time—no matter how he tries.”
For a long time it has been one of the favorite devices of the confidence fraternity in Chicago to lure their victims by the bright promise, “Just let me show you our submarine down by the river.” But a confidence man is not always to be blamed for telling the truth. How could he know that the Chicago River actually does contain a submarine?
It was found yesterday, half buried in the mud at the river bottom near the Wells street bridge.
A diver, Willam M. Deneau, laying cables for the Commonwealth Edison Company, was the discoverer. As he groped along the slimy bottom he stubbed his toe.
“ANY MINES IN RIVER!”
To curse is impracticable when one is at the bottom of a river. So Deneau did the next best thing—he investigated. He felt all around the thing, learning that it was made of steel, that it was shaped something like a zeppelin, and that its engine was not working. He came up then, to ask questions
"Why didn't somebody tell me I was working in a war zone?" he demanded. "A man ought to get extra pay when he has to run the risk of submarines every time he dives, oughtn’t he? It's dangerous. And are there any mines in the river?”
THERE FOR FIFTEEN YEARS
For some time all these questions went unanswered. At last, however, E.S. Monville, federal inspector of rivers and harbors, was found.
“I have heard,” he said, “that a submarine made by a naval architect was sunk in the river about fifteen years ago.”
Hinton G. Clabaugh of the Department of Justice. In spite of the discovery, said he was sure the submarine did not sink the Eastland.
If you have read any other historical piece I’ve written, you are currently thinking: “are you going to tell me that some, or all, of this reporting was fabricated by the newspapermen?” Perish the thought. I don’t have to tell you that, because you already know it, clearly. But I will say two things:
One: for context, the Eastland’s owners claimed that the ship had not been poorly ballasted—that she had encountered some kind of obstruction in the river and rolled over. Indeed, they appear to have gone so far as to have planted pilings in the river as evidence, with the assistance of, uh… well, with the assistance of Frenchy Deneau*, as it happens. Nobody (at this point) was yet associating the Foolkiller and the Eastland, but concern over obstructions is why they get mentioned in the Examiner article.
* So it is worth remembering that name.
Two: the two stories agree on most details, but the Examiner says that it was found at the Wells Street bridge, and the Tribune says it was found at the Rush Street bridge. These are about half a mile apart; there is no Rush Street bridge today, but there was back then (and apparently it was awful). Here’s a map, to orient yourselves:
After this, there’s a few weeks of quiet, and then at some point the Foolkiller was raised from the river. It is not entirely clear when this happened. The event was documented; you can see examples on the Constant’s Foolkiller page. The photos date it to December 20th; scattered reporting as early as the 17th varyingly describe the boat as being raised “today,” but given that the 20th is written on the photos and this seems to be the most common date, I suspect that’s when it was.
These five photos, three of the lifeboat floating in the Chicago River, and one published in Power Boat News in 1906 represent the only photographic evidence I’m aware of, to be clear. Getty has the recovery photos available for purchase although I believe the photos themselves are now in the public domain.
The order isn’t quite clear, at least not to me, but they depict two attempts to raise the boat, using cranes suspended by a floating barge owned by the Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company. The barge seems to remain in a fixed position, but the position of the photographer changes so that they are sometimes looking at the barge from one side, and sometimes the other.
The photos claim to have been taken at the Wells Street Bridge. Were they actually? There are some tantalizing clues. For example, there’s some large buildings in the background here, and a distinctive building in the foreground, and some train cars labeled “(something) North Western Line”:
The “something” isn’t too difficult; that has to be the Chicago and North Western Line, and the Chicago and North Western Line happened to have a depot at Wells Street, where the Merchandise Mart is currently located. They also had a terminal on the west side of the river, between Madison and Adams streets on the South Branch.
Here, we can see what appears to be a crane, and a large building with some kind of hatches or structures on the roof in the background:
Finding pictures of the Wells Street depot has proven to be extremely difficult, and the whole waterfront area was undergoing rapid change through the 1910s and 20s. But we do have some promising leads. For example, right near the top here is an aerial photograph from 1925, apparently taken by dirigible. And here is a panorama dated to January, 1919 with the Wells Street Bridge located at left (before its replacement).
And I’m pretty sure these give us our answer. The distinctive crane, in particular, shows up clearly in the 1919 panorama:
And the buildings next to the train cars, the crane, and the warehouse (or whatever it is) all seem to be visible in the dirigible photo:
All together, this seems to rule out the new CNW depot and put the pictures as having between taken from the northwest side of the Wells Street Bridge, in the direction of Wolf Point. There was some kind of drydock at Wells Street in this time period, so that’s not too surprising. But given all the uncertainties in this story, I think it is helpful to have some things known definitively.
This does suggest a certain obvious question, which is: why do all this work in the first place?
One issue in researching this is the degree of ambiguity in early reporting. For example, without knowing where the photos were taken, and with the Foolkiller having been reported at multiple bridges, all we really knew was that the boat was found near a bridge. Maybe the Examiner was wrong in identifying it and the person labeling the photos later just happened to scrawl “Wells street” because they were misinformed by that paper. Maybe it was actually found at State Street, or some bridge in the South Branch.
Now, though—presuming you accept my geolocation skills for the photo locations—we have two possibilities:
- The Tribune was wrong; the Foolkiller was never anywhere near Rush Street, and Rush Street is a red herring.
- The Foolkiller was found at Rush Street, but moved to Wells Street before it could be hauled out of the river properly.
I am not sure what would constitute strong evidence against option 2, except that it seems unlikely to me. It would have required traversing multiple bridges while either towing a waterlogged hulk or dragging it along the river (risking damage and catching on any other obstacles). The most likely answer, to me, is the first one. We already knocked out a bunch of the Tribune’s early reporting. What’s a bit more?
Discovered by Diver.
William M. Deneau, known as “Frenchy,” a diver, found the subsea boat near the Rush street bridge. It was buried under three feet of river bottom muck. Deneau was laying cable on the river bottom. A chance sweep of a shovel from the dredge above exposed the side of the submarine
The other thing is that, if we take as a given that the boat was found and raised at Wells Street, a chunk of the ambiguity of “so many things were said, what can we know for certain?” drops away. Suddenly there isn’t confusion about a basic fact like where the Foolkiller was. And this opens up new opportunities for research. We can focus our efforts on other reporting—did this mean the bridge had to be closed for a bit? Did someone mention it in another paper? Maybe there’s a police blotter from 1911 that goes something like: “two local pranksters were arrested for stealing a boat and sinking it near the Wells Street Bridge. The boat was due to be scrapped and is not considered worth recovering.”
That, to be clear, is not a spoiler. I don’t know, much as I wish I had something that cool. But I hope it helps narrow the search down a bit. And this has gone on much longer than I wanted (I’ll try to keep these shorter, but I needed to do some groundwork here I figured), but I will give a spoiler for next time and say that I think the unambiguously factual elements of the Tribune piece are actually more like:
SUBMARINE “FOOLKILLER” FOUND AFTER 18 YEARS
Lost Chicago Undersea Boat, Missing Quarter of Century, Discovered by Diver.
The lost Chicago submarine “Foolkiller” was found yesterday. William M. Deneau, known as “French,” a diver, found the subsea boat near the Rush street bridge. It was buried under three feet of river bottom muck. The boat is said to have belonged to Peter Nissen, spectacular mariner, who was lost in his revolving vessel while attempting to drift across Lake Michigan.
See you next time!