Hello, and welcome back to Foolkiller Friday, where we talk about a (probably not) mysterious (definitely not) submarine (probably) raised from the Chicago river (probably) back in 1915. The previous posts have really been about providing context for you. Now that we have that context, I think we can start to examine more closely the evidence that we have, and see what it tells us.
That means that this post is going to be a shorter one, I think :P or hope, anyway.
(All entries in this series as of October 27th, 2023):
- Introduction
- “The Recovery” (geolocating the location of the 1915 salvage)
- “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” (this one!)
- “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)
In Part 4, I said that the International Automatic Lifeboat was tied up to the Van Buren Street dock of the Chicago Sanitary District between 1906 and 1908. We can infer this, because the IAL Co. paid the Chicago Sanitary District regular docking fees for that time. However, we also have three photos:
The first two photos are credited to Hans Behm, of the Detroit Publishing Company. They are given numbers 070152 and 070153, respectively, for the Detroit Photo Company. Photos 70150, 70151, 70154, and 70156 are unrelated, so I think that we can assume that these are the only ones that Behm took that include the IAL.
A third photograph, listed as Detroit Publishing Col. no. 034706, depicts the same bridge at the same time; the IAL is not visible in this image, but it has to be just off screen to the left. The photos were all clearly taken in close proximity; the lighting is the same, the launch Pacific is in the same position, and there’s an identical bundle of rags resting on the pilings:
The IAL was not the subject of the photos, and neither interesting enough to be a focus of Hans Behm’s composition, nor distracting enough that he made a conscious effort at cropping it out. In any case, the Library of Congress dates this photo only to “1907,” and there’s no ice in the river so it probably wasn’t taken during the winter, but otherwise there’s not really much more to go on here.
…Or is there?
See, there are four vehicles in these images. The MWRR train crossing the bridge is too blurry to be of help. The IAL doesn’t tell us much. I have been able to turn up absolutely nothing about the Pacific, so if that’s a challenge you’d like to undertake please feel free—I believe I’ve seen one classified ad implying it was available for hire. It’s not mentioned in any CSD documentation, that I can see, so it probably didn’t belong to them, but it is tied up to a private dock so perhaps it was part of the photographic crew.
But what about the Pueblo?
SS Pueblo was launched on March 21, 1891, at Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An article from the Inter Ocean on March 22nd, which describes her as “A MODEL VESSEL” in the headline, says:
The handsome steamer Pueblo was launched at the Milwaukee ship yard at 11 o’clock this morning. There was a large crowd on hand to witness the event. The Pueblo is in every sense a model vessel. She was built for B. Merrill and others at a cost of about $90,000, and will be commanded by Captain Michael Fitzgerald. She has a capacity of about 2,000 tons, and will have a speed of about ten miles an hour. Her length of keel is 228 feet 7 inches, with 36 feet 6 inches beam at the widest point; depth of hold, 20 feet 5 inches. She has a hydraulic steering apparatus similar to that on the Denver and Topeka, and which is considered superior to steam steering, as in case of accident it may be uncoupled instantly and the steering done by hand.
As it happens Pueblo did have an accident or two, but otherwise her career seems to have been fairly unremarkable. By 1916, she had been transferred to the Canadian Import Co., who listed her as having been rebuilt in 1913. Before that, she was owned by William E. Fitzgerald; she’s listed as being one of the boats owned by him in Fitzgerald’s obituary on July 8th, 1901.
Fitzgerald was director of the American Shipbuilding Company and president of the Milwaukee Dry Dock company. He was something of a significant figure on the Great Lakes; he got a ship named for him after his death in 1906—a perfectly respectable lake freighter, as you can see here:
The W.E. Fitzgerald sailed for the next 65 years before being finally scrapped in 1971. Incidentally, yes: William Fitzgerald’s son Edmund—that was William’s middle name, in case you were wondering—was also a significant figure on the Great Lakes, and also got a perfectly respectable lake freighter named after him.
In any case, my point is there’s a little bit more information about the Pueblo. For example, at some point in August or early September, 1907 she was damaged and spent the rest of the season in drydock. Before that, though, shipping records indicate that she transited Chicago five times:
| Arrival | Departure | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Date | Cargo | Date | Cargo |
| June 10th | light | June 11th | Grain |
| June 25th | Coal | June 27th | Grain |
| July 12th | Salt | July 14th | Grain |
| July 28th | Coal | July 30th | light |
| August 18th | Coal | August 30th | Grain |
In the image, she’s sailing north, towards the main channel—likely departing, in other words. Let’s look at the reported weather for those days, too:
| Arrival | Departure | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date | Cargo | Weather | Date | Cargo | Weather |
| 6/10 | light | Partly cloudy | 6/11 | Grain | Fair |
| 6/25 | Coal | Thundershowers | 6/27 | Grain | Fair |
| 7/12 | Thundershowers | Salt | 7/14 | Grain | Fair |
| 7/28 | Coal | Showers | 7/30 | light | Fair |
| 8/18 | Coal | Fair | 8/30 | Grain | Showers |
There are visible shadows, so I think we can conclude that the photos were not taken during a particularly overcast day. But, in any case, the load markings on her stern indicate that she’s only loaded to the 12th foot of depth (she had a hold depth of 20 feet, remember, based on the article on her launch), and on July 30th the Pueblo left the south Chicago docks in ballast, the only time that summer she did so.
The shadows cast by the pilings are towards the east-northeast, so the picture must’ve been taken at some point in the afternoon; if we say they’re about 3 meters tall, this seems roughly in line the photo being taken sometime in the early afternoon:
The Chicago River looked slightly different back then, so I’ve also included an outline of the MWRR bridge, as traced from the 1906 Sanborn fire maps*. The observed shadow seems to be at a more northerly angle than the bridge itself; the bridge did not run due east-west, but sat at a bearing of about 83 degrees, and shadows (to me) look like the tips are nearly touching the base of the bridge, rather than being parallel to it.
* The narrowing of the river occasioned by the MWRR’s bridge was one reason that there were calls for its removal as early as 1911. It would eventually fall out of use in 1958, and finally be torn down as an “eyesore” in 1961; the tracing really gives you a feel for the impact it had on the river’s navigability.
I am not going to claim this latter part is especially scientific, because it is if nothing else not my specialty. If you want to try it yourself, I used ShadowCalculator to produce that image. If you want to play around with it yourself, you can click “import/export” and then paste this in:
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So that’s two of the photos spoken for. What about the third? This one is trickier. It’s the one that is by far the most widely circulated, having appeared in multiple postcards, with multiple different crops. The earliest postmark I’ve found is from 1909.
However! David Sadowski, writer for The Trolly Dodger, apparently found a version of the postcard that they were able to scan at fairly high resolution, and then clean up. You can find details of that here, including a restoration that Sadowski pulled off in Photoshop.
And this is… mm. Well. There are no explicit clues, but compare the bits of construction debris visible on the northeast side of the bridge between the Behm photograph and the one that would eventually be turned into a postcard:
Not everything is the same—for one, the bundle on the piling in all three Behm photos is missing in the postcard. But a lot of it lines up. Indeed, basically everything that could line up lines up, down to whatever it is that’s furled up against the western side of the bridge close to the waterline. There are no other pictures of that northeast corner from around the same time, so maybe this was just the state of the bridge for the entire summer of 1907.
But, even if that is the case, the maximum length of time represented by these photos is on the order of a couple of months. Most probably, I think it’s a matter of weeks. Which means that, while we can infer that the IAL was sitting in the Chicago River for the eighteen months in which IAL Co. paid docking fees to the Chicago Sanitary District, the only hard photographic evidence we have is from a much, much narrower slice of time.
I do not know what to make of this, to be honest. Since there are not that many photos of the MWRR bridge, full stop, really all that can be said is that the bridge was chiefly interesting during the summer of 1907. The next earliest photo is of… indeterminate origin:
It is given a copyright date of 1907 in the corner of one postcard example, but it clearly predates that because I’ve found an example postmarked as early as July, 1906. It lacks the circular piling visible in the 1907 photos, and there are three horizontal planks connecting the bits of wood as opposed to just one at the top. This makes it most similar to another photograph dated September 1st, 1903…
Although the building visible at the furthest left in the postcard is absent in the 1903 photograph. That would be the building constructed, or at least occupied, by the Percival B. Palmer garment company, which is labeled in the 1906 Sanborn fire map and so must’ve been constructed at some point between 1903 and 1906. So the photograph was probably taken at some point in 1904 or 1905.
The next photo of the bridge dates from September, 1908. At this juncture, the IAL is gone—as we would expect, given that by September IAL Co. had not paid docking fees for six months. We’ll get back that in a moment, but there are a couple of other things that I think bear noting about the Third Photo.
One is that it is a different, closer crop than many of the postcards, which show all of the IAL including some kind of gangplank that leads down to the boat. This makes me at least somewhat hopeful that the original photo that was used for all of these might still be out there, because the version that the Trolley Dodger found was of much higher quality than any of the other postcards I’ve seen.
Two: I’d like to find a better quality version if for no other reason than I’d like to know what is written on the light-colored sign visible just above the IAL (perspective-wise; it’s actually well to the boat’s north) in the photograph. In the high-resolution version, it seems to have some kind of writing on it, and one almost wants to think they can read what that writing says, but it’s hard to know what is image artifacting and what isn’t.
And three: a lot of things are the same between the Behm photographs and the Third Photo, but one thing isn’t:
I don’t know what those chock-like things are—perhaps some boat-inclined person reading this has a better idea. But whatever they are, they’re on the port side in the Behm photograph and the starboard side in the Third Photo. So—and I know this sounds like it shouldn’t be surprising—the IAL was still be actively used and, perhaps, even moved around during the summer of 1907. Why? Where did it go? What was done with it? I don’t know! But at least we can say that it hadn’t been completely abandoned by that point.
Now. About that 1908 photograph:
Things have changed over the preceding year; a whole bunch of cabling has been added to the west side of the bridge, for example, and the ropes (chains?) around the bridge pilings have been resecured. The northeastern landing has been… well, not cleaned up, but at least the debris is in a different configuration. And whatever that white sign was in 1907 is gone. Instead, there’s something else—another sign that must’ve been added in the interim.
The photo has been posted by the MWRD (the successor to the Chicago Sanitary District) a few times, often with different crops. Here is the widest I’ve found, centered on that sign.
If they were there at the same time, this sign would’ve been directly behind the IAL. Is it related? I don’t know. What does it say? I also don’t know, and so far I haven’t been able to find anything useful in any possible matches. I make it as:
WORLD [T/I]HE [1?]
EAT[H/R]E ?DE
What was this advertising? Did it have anything to do with the lifeboat? Or was it, perhaps, added after March, 1908 when the boat was no longer there to obscure it? I’m not sure. And let’s go ahead and see where we’ve ended up with all this…
✔️ End without clear answers
✔️ Digression into weird history trivia
✔️ Shorter than previous article
❌ Introduction of new weird character
❌ Everything you Thought You Knew Is Wrong
Well, heck. Okay, okay. I guess we’d best wrap this up now, and I’ll tell you to come back next Foolkiller Friday, when I’ll introduce you to the last main character, take you to a few carnivals, and make my case for what actually happened to the Foolkiller in 1916.
