Hello! Welcome to Foolkiller Friday, the ongoing Cohost series where we explore the historical record around the International Automatic Lifeboat, a groundbreaking lifesaving apparatus that sank to the bottom of the Chicago River, taking its inventor, his dog, and maybe a few of his friends along with it.
…Or not.
Today, we’re going to do what I probably should’ve done some episodes (? are we calling them that?) ago, and spend some time with the person who is most frequently and directly connected with this whole saga.
(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” (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” (this one!)
- “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)
William “Frenchy” Deneau was the salvage diver who claimed to have found the “Foolkiller” in November, 1915, although he probably did not. He also acted as the public face of its exhibition in 1916, although he was at no point the only exhibitor.
He also went by “Captain” for his entire life, although he was neither a naval captain nor an army officer. It is more, I gather, in the metaphorical “captain of industry” sense, or perhaps the “Invictus” sense. Frenchy was, above all else, captain of being Frenchy Deneau.
He is also, out of all the people who have come up in this series, the one you would most describe as A Real Character. A Personality. A Whole Thing. Handsome, charismatic, utterly unreliable, and gleefully chaotic, he is if nothing else a good mascot for the whole endeavor—back then as, I suppose, now.
So! Let’s give him his time in the spotlight, shall we?
William Matthew Deneau was born in Windsor, Ontario, on May 7th, to Jean Baptiste and Sarah (née Pollard) Deneau, roughly the middle child of eleven who survived to adulthood. They were French Canadians, which one assumes is the origin of his most common nickname.
Which May 7th he was born on, for the record, is not entirely clear; sometimes it’s given as 1889, and sometimes as 1891. Later in life he would say 1892—this is what the military’s records attest–but he’s recorded on the 1891 census so this seems implausible. 1889 is, in any case, the most common date.
He traveled back and forth between the US and Canada for a while; his naturalization papers describe his date of entry as July, 1905, but on May 8th, 1909 he filed for Canadian patent 124,108, “Door Closure for Grain Cars” (*Fermeture de portes de chars à grain”), with fellow Windsorite William Laesser. I will be honest and say that I do not entirely understand what is going on here:
Patent claim
In a grain car the combination of a door opening, door posts provided with vertical grooves, a door closure consisting of boards adapted to be placed horizontally in said doorway with their ends vertically slidable in sid grooves, a gap in the inner wall of each groove near its upper end, large enough to permit the boards to be drawn inwardly, one at a time, and horizontal slideways on the inner wall of the car at the sides of the door opening at the same level as said gaps, said slideways being adapted to receive the boards when withdrawn from the vertical grooves, substantially as set forth.Deneau, though, apparently thought it was worth something. As of late 1912, he was selling half interest in what he described as “an absolute necessity on every railroad,” and listing his address as Windsor, again.
Principally, however, he made his living as a diver. He first came to prominence following the May 11th, 1910 City of Saltillo disaster. On that day, the sternwheeler grounded near St. Louis, killing twelve. Deneau was brought in to recover the bodies, and this was described pretty much in the same way as it would be during the Eastland salvage:
William Denneau [sic], the 20-year-old diver, said to be the youngest, and rated one of the most competent divers in the country, resumed his search for bodies between the wreck and the shore and below the steamer’s stern yesterday, but without result. He said that the weakened upper decks made it almost suicide for a man in diver’s armor to venture in either place. Diving without armor he assisted a crew of eight men from Kimmswick in removing the lighter freight on the forward boiler deck. The men from Kimmswick claim that a woman’s cloak, which some of them found there Friday, was pulled from a body by their pike poles.
The St. Louis Globe-Democrat does not, it should go without saying, identify who has rated young William one of the most competent divers in the country. It also goes without saying that I am not the kind of person who is willing to don a diving suit and recover bodies myself, so I’m going to grant Frenchy his dues here. If I do sound slightly cheeky, though, it’s because his solution to the problem was, uh—
Denneau tried to explode 20 pounds of 40 per cent giant powder yesterday in the hope of raising some of the bodies, which he thinks may be buried in the sticky mud about the vessel, but the swift current fouled the wires leading to the charges and they broke. He will try again this morning.
And, although I described him as “unreliable” in the intro here, to Wile E. Deneau’s credit he did, in fact, try again, “with the result that the steamer caught fire and burned to the waters edge […] the heat was so great that the telegraph poles became ignited and the diver William Deneau climbed the poles with buckets of water and put the fire out.”
His concern was not the telegraph poles or the bodies, I assume, but that:
The danger of the explosions was increased when the flames spread to the shore and set fire to six barrels of alcohol and one of kerosene, which had been removed from the wrecked hull of the boat […] only the presence of mind of Robert A. McCarran, who assisted William Deneau, the diver, in his work of search for the bodies, prevented another catastrophe when the flames spread to the barrels of oil on the shore.
About five years later, in the winter of 1915, SS Iowa became caught in the ice on Lake Michigan. Hull crushed, on February 5th, 1915, she went down three miles off the shore of Lake Michigan. None of her seventy crew or the single passenger survived the sinking, because by that point they had already walked over the ice and to shore (“the order to leave,” says the Champaign County News, “caused some excitement, but the departure was easy and the crew took it as a lark”).
So, count that as a happy ending. It did, however, leave a 220-foot long steamship that needed to be dealt with. And where you or I might see this as a problem, Frenchy Deneau… well.
Okay, Frenchy also saw it as a problem, but it was the kind of problem he had a ready solution for:
Not to detract from his accomplishments; diving is a dangerous job and it’s not for everyone. In any case, unlike other capital-c Characters I’ve talked about on Cohost, he was gainfully employed and marine salvage was his go-to occupation. From everything I can tell, to the extent that he was regularly employed, he was not salvaging as a scam, and he was both legitimately courageous and legitimately good at his job.
That is, incidentally, his job is as distinct from his hobby, which as we will go into later was “being broke.” On February 17th, 1914, he married Frances Gray; eight months later they had a son, William Homer. In between, in early March, he was declared bankrupt, which is definitely how you want to start things off.
Before that, he was also involved in recovering the copper and silver ore from a wreck in Lake Superior. Apparently. This comes to us from the Detroit Evening News on July 2nd, 1915, which—after relating the work on the Iowa—says:
As a diver, Mr. Deneau holds a record for low depths attained. In a new steel diving armor, made to withstand the pressure of low depths, Mr. Deneau has been down to a depth of 140 feet. He has had some interesting and perilous experiences as a diver in Lake Superior. Not so long ago he assisted in salving a valuable cargo from a copper and silver ore-laden vessel, sunk in that lake.
Did he? I don’t know. Does that seem like the kind of thing you’d expect to be reported in the papers? It seems like the kind of thing I’d expect to be reported in the papers. There just aren’t that many options for what ship could be being talked about here.
The most plausible is SS Comet, which was rammed and sunk by the Manitoba in August, 1875. She went down in Whitefish Bay with a cargo of pig iron, copper ore, and 70 tons of silver ore from Montana bound east for Pennsylvania. The problem here is that the Comet wasn’t salvaged until the 1980s, at which point the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society did the job with apparent thoroughness.
(The GLSHS, if you are not familiar, is the combination grave-robbing enterprise / museum operator that also owns the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald and a number of other artifacts which they acquired quite illegally but are nonetheless allowed to display under a convenient “loan” from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources following a raid in the early 90s)
Another possibility, which I think points us to the truth, is SS Pewabic, which sank in 1865 with the loss of 125 lives. She was extensively pursued for her cargo of copper and silver, with a significant attempt being made in the summer of 1909. And a widely circulated Chicago Tribune piece on June 25th, 1911 (“Romantic Side of Deep Sea Wrecking Business; A Gamble With Men and Big Money as Stakes”) relates this about its salvage:
At various times four different companies have tackled the job and four different failures have been recorded. Four deep sea men have paid the penalty with their lives of attempting to inspect the ship of specters.
Two men once went down together to the wreck in a diving bell. The rays of the sun had fallen upon the glass “window” for a few moments before they were sunk, and the cold water of the depths contracted the glass so that it cracked. The divers were drawn to the surface and could not be persuaded to go down again after the bell was repaired. A French-Canadian tried in an ordinary diving suit. After ten minutes in the depths he was pulled to the surface nearer dead than alive. He refused to go down again.
There’s just the small catch here that the SS Pewabic didn’t sink in Lake Superior; she went down in Thunder Bay, in Lake Huron. Buuuut, William Deneau was employed by the Reid Wrecking Company of Sarnia, Ontario for four years before he joined the Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company, and most of their work was on Lake Huron.
There’s just the small catch here that Reid wasn’t involved with salvaging the Pewabic. Buuut, we should also consider that Frenchy Deneau was just a bit of a fabulist. Back home, he was at the time overshadowed by his brother George “Rube” Deneau, a minor-league baseball player.
For want of a bit of excitement, I’m guessing the most straightforward explanation is that he made his involvement up. A 1917 article, for example—the source of the image at the top of this post, which invents a whole platoon’s worth of companions for the Foolkiller’s inventor and his unfortunate collie—relates that:
Deneau says he was the first man to live in 150 feet of water in Lake Geneva, wearing a submarine diver’s outfit. While working 55 feet below the surface in a Colorado reservoir his air hose broke and for five minutes he struggled. When he was brought to the surface his face was black. It was by the hardest work of men with the latest respirators he was revived.
Far be it from me to doubt this, but I don’t think he went to Switzerland for this experiment. On the other hand, the deepest Lake Geneva in the United States (the one in Wisconsin) has an average depth of 61 feet and a maximum depth of 135.
Also, for the early part of the 1910s he was with Reid Wrecking, and then with the Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company in Chicago, and then self-employed as a sideshow operator at 208 South State Street lying about a submarine. Then he was broke, again, so I also have no idea when he found time for his near-death experience in Colorado.
In any case, the Detroit Evening News says Deneau is interested in working on the Belle Isle bridge, but of course that didn’t happen, because he went back to Chicago. And there, when the city experienced one of its greatest tragedies, he became the Hero of the Eastland. He recovered dozens—perhaps hundreds–of bodies as the principle salvage worker, which became one of his signature achivements.
But then there was the matter of the pilings.
As I’ve mentioned before, SS Eastland’s owners contended that the ship had encountered an obstruction in the river, which caused it to tip over. And, indeed, William Deneau reported having found, sawed off, and recovered some suspicious stumps of wood. On January 24th, 1916 he testified to that effect, saying: “I found them in the offset in the mud. The longer pile was about seven feet from the dock line and the shorter one about ten feet out.” He also testified to having found “stone and an iron chain,” also six or seven feet out from the dock.
There were just two problems with this. The first problem is that, testifying before a grand jury the previous October, Deneau had said there was no rock, and that the shorter stump was only three feet away from the dock—therefore too close to have affected the ship. The second problem is that the government had decided to investigate this themselves back in October:
In the course of this investigation, Hinton Clabaugh had discovered the objects in question, mapped them out, and concluded that, of the two stumps, one of them was only two feet away from the dock and the other was deep enough that there was at least a foot of water between it and the Eastland’s keel. Having gone to the river bottom himself, Clabaugh was qualified as an expert witness, and this (among other things, that a ship with a significantly deeper keel used the dock immediately afterwards without incident) put paid to the stump theory.
Of course, Clabaugh–“chief of the bureau of investigation”—was not a salvager himself. The Tribune piece that talks about his “U-Boat Disguise” doesn’t name any of the people who helped him don a diving suit, but they are mentioned, so we know he had help. Who? The February 3rd, 1916 article (“SMASHES THEORY THAT OLD PILES UPSET EASTLAND: Federal Officials Prove They Located Stumps Before Defense Knew of Them”) explains:
Clabaugh said Harry Halvorsen and William Deneau, divers, held him while he felt the top of the sawed off stump. He said Deneau told him that was the stump which the defense now claims caused the boat to tip over.
At this point—late January, 1916—he was giving lectures about the Foolkiller down on State, in between continued work for the Eastland’s owners. He would continue talking about the pilings as late as 1919. As I said, Deneau was not what you would call a dependable man, or an honest man in the strictest sense. He appears to have had a hard time being successful. On July 12th, 1916, Frances filed for divorce. By December, he was facing jail for failing to pay alimony.
Thus begins the phase of his life in which he becomes really interesting.
On March 24th, Deneau was reported to be $200 behind in said payments because he owed $550 for a diving suit. The judge, apparently, found this persuasive and gave him another two weeks to catch up. Two weeks later, Deneau… well. Okay. He didn’t have the diving suit, but he did have something better: a new safety jacket of his own design.
Deneau first leaped from the bridge, garbed in a swimming suit and a safety jacket. When he had enough air pressure to warrant his floating he was able to smoke a cigar and read a newspaper with comfort. A shot gun was lowered and Mr. Deneau fired several shots. This feat greatly impressed the people as it was shown that the jacket will be very advantageous in warfare.
Then he went back to Canada—let us not say “skipping out on” the whole alimony thing, because for all I know he wired the money back—to demonstrate his jacket for the Canadian government, again jumping off a dock and, one assumes, firing a shotgun into the air for effect.
And then his plans were put on unceremonious hold by world events.
ARMY MAKES LANDLUBBER OF ‘HUMAN FISH’
Capt. Deneau, Hound in Water, Now a Doughboy
ARMY MAKES LANDLUBBER OF ‘HUMAN FISH’
Capt. Deneau, Hound in Water, Now a Doughboy
Probably ere this spies have learned the captain has vacated his aquarium at 30 North La Salle street for a life on the dry land and have notified the kaiser to double the watch on the Rhine.
But the news didn’t “leak out” to the Chicago press until last night promptly at 6 o’clock. It was then that the captain, flecking an Imaginary bit of seaweed from his chin, entered The TRIBUNE office, towed a seagoing chair alongside a waiting reporter's desk, parked himself, and said:
“Ain't it a shame?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“What is—what—don't you know what's happened?”Must Flouder [sic] on Dry Land
A look of sublime pity overflowed the captain’s glittering eye. He was silent for two bells.
”Don't you know they've called me—that I’ve got to serve on dry land with a lot of doughboys—me, with my aquatic experience!”
It’s true. Capt. William M. Deneau, the human submersible, leaves today for Rockford with the contingent from the Forty-sixth exemption district.
”Can you beat it?” resumed the captain. “Me! Why, I'm a hound in the water. Look at what I've done. All the lives I've saved, the diving I've done. Remember that submarine—the Foolkiller—I found it near the Madison street bridge.Water Walking Jacket.
”It was just a few weeks ago I was down east showing a lot of government officials my newest inventions—the water jacket, with which a soldier can walk on the water and fire a rifle. With one of those jackets you could carry a bomb and sink a submarine. They seemed to like my stuff, too. And here I get this call!”
As he was leaving the office the captain hinted he might bring back a couple of U-boats if he could sneak away from terra firma long enough.
Something I started wondering a few months ago, about when I kicked off Foolkiller Fridays, is how much the Tribune played along with the Foolkiller thing because they liked Deneau, or at least because someone on their staff liked him. Maybe September 20th, 1917 was a slow news day, for this to take up as much space as it did. Or maybe he was just fun, the kind of charming rogue that it’s a lot easier to write stories about than it is to live with.
I get a sense of that in this article—I am guessing they talked to Deneau for it, even if the conversation isn’t quoted verbatim. I don’t think he was notorious enough to be worth making it up wholecloth. In any case, he served dutifully, deploying with the 108th Engineer Regiment of the 33rd Infantry Division. The 108th was the first of the 33rd Infantry to arrive in France; they joined the Second Battle of the Somme and the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918.
In 1919, Private William Deneau was discharged, and reverted to being Captain William Deneau. He was reported as saying “he intends to organize a company for the salvage of ships sunk in the submarine zone around the British Isles. ‘There are hundreds of ships that it would be easy to bring up,’ he said, ‘and there are millions of dollars at the bottom of the sea waiting for someone to get them.’”
He didn’t do this, obviously. He went back to his bathing suit—I assume, although I guess it’s possible somebody let Deneau into the TNT again:
The woman in the image is apparently one Aurelia McCormick. She is not, incidentally, his wife, although on March 22nd, 1920 (three days after that photo ran) he married again, this time to Agnes Frederickson, with whom he would go on to have four children. Before any of them came into the world, he was, naturally, broke again.
Friends of Impoverished Diver Come to Rescue of Alimony Delinquent
CHICAGO, Nov. 7—Captain William M. Deneau failed to pay his wife $262 alimony when it was due, and as a result spent three days in the county jail until his friends could raise the money. It was paid Saturday morning and he was released.
”I needed a new suit,” he explained, “and it cost $500, and it left me short of ready cash.”
”You’re foolish to pay $500 for a suit these days, with the merchants tumbling over each other to offer you bargains. You can get the best suit in Chicago today for $135, and this includes two pairs of trousers,” advised one of the court spectators.
Then the captain further explained that the suit he referred to was an outfit worn by submarine divers, made of heavy waterproof materials, with a lot of fancy copper trimmings. He is the famous “Frenchy” Deneau, one of the heroes of the Eastland disaster, and later served abroad with the 108th engineers.
So that’s twice, if you’re counting, that Deneau has been $200 in the hole because he needed a suit. But, again, if you read the way this story plays out, he seems like the kind of low-tier scoundrel that people enjoyed reading about and the kind of person who would have friends to bail him out.
Unlike, say, William T. Love, he wasn’t a swindler. He was just prone to big talk, and bad at followthrough, or perhaps chronically unlucky—in 1923, for instance, he made a go at motion pictures, and the glass tank he was demonstrating “deep sea movies” in caved in, soaking his onlookers.
And I guess, by “big talk” I mean mostly-harmless-in-the-end lies. He filed for a patent on the bathing suit, for instance, which was granted; in it he describes himself as a United States citizen, although he wouldn’t actually be naturalized until several years later. Like most of his endeavors, the bathing suit didn’t go anywhere, and he continued work as a salvager for the next twenty years. He served again in World War 2, and retired from the Army Corps of Engineers in 1954.
Before that, in 1943, he and Agnes divorced; “the hearing was high lighted in Deneau’s testimony when his wife shouted ‘that is not true,’ as he testified he had turned over certain war bonds.” But he seems to have been remembered fondly, judging by a comment over on Mysterious Chicago from one of his grandchildren:
It's fun to see that he is still making Chicago fun thirty years after his death in 1977.
Apparently he was not afraid to swim in the Chicago River. During the victory parade after WWI he jumped in the river and swam part of the parade route. His aquatic abilities were passed down to many members of his family. The military finally used his skills in WWII to lay anti-landing craft barriers in the Aleutians prior to the Japanese invasion.
If you look at pictures of the SS Catalina (1922-2009) there are similarities to the Eastland. The statment he made in 1958 might be based on those similarities.
In the late '60s my father (Frog) and I took Frenchy to the museum that has the German U-Boat. I remember him laughing about it being a "fool killer”.
(The comment about 1958 is a reference to a July 25th, 1958 article in the Chicago Tribune in which Deneau, having moved to LA, asserts that he doesn’t believe the Eastland was scrapped in 1946: “I rode on that ship last year,” he asserted, “on a run from California to Catalina island. It used another name, but I knew her as soon as I saw her.”)
After retirement, he made a few attempts at selling his concept for a concrete structure that would serve as a lakefront promenade:
Which he also tried to pitch in Santa Barbara. That also didn’t go anywhere. He died on January 24th, 1977, at the age of 87. His eldest son, William H., also had a good, long life, passing away in 2009. If the Mysterious Chicago comment is any indication, this—not submarines, bathing suits, or readymade harbors—is really what his legacy proved to be.
He was unquestionably a flawed individual, as his string of failed business ideas and marriages testifies. But he does, also, seem to have been “fun.” You can imagine that it would’ve been a blast to hear him talk about the Foolkiller, even if it was all bullshit. Even if it was all self-aggrandizing bullshit, because one has the sense he also had the appropriate level of self-deprecation to go along with it.
I don’t believe that Frenchy found and exhibited a submarine any more than I believe he lived at the bottom of Lake Geneva in a diving suit. But as a fiction author, I also don’t know that I could write a character like him, either.
And, in the context of the Foolkiller, I think he’s worth talking about because he’s the single figure most identified with it. But, at the same time, it was a very small part of a very long, very large life for Frenchy. With one exception—the 1917 Tribune piece about him being drafted—I can’t find any evidence that Deneau ever mentioned the Foolkiller after early 1916. It was just something he was involved with, and immediately moved past—like everything else in his life.
(Even the quote from his grandkid has him describing a U-boat as a fool killer, but not saying it was the Foolkiller or mentioning the submarine he found)
One of the narrative arcs of the 21st-century Foolkiller—probably the primary arc of this series—has been confronting a similar reality. For most of its history, the Foolkiller story has been about Frenchy Deneau finding a submarine, and the mystery over where the submarine came from and where it went. Now we know for a fact that it wasn’t a submarine, and had only been in the Chicago River a few years when it was found.
And, if you believe me, I think we also know now that Deneau was a minor player (“the narrator”) in a minor arc (“the carnival months”) of a minor story about a boat that never went anywhere. A story, further, in which Frenchy was not the author. All the same, I think Frenchy would’ve appreciated where it went. The canonical Foolkiller tale in the modern day—as recounted by Cecil Adams, etc.—is based on just under 800 words of newspaper reporting, five photos, and a few advertisements.
And yet, for some people, that was apparently enough to make them whatever kind of crazy Mark Chrisler and I are :P
With this paragraph, if you’ve been following the Foolkiller Friday series since the beginning, you’ve just now read over 40,000 words. Fortunately for your eyes, maybe, we’re getting towards the end. Next week, unless I come across something startling or unless you have some questions you’d specifically like answered, I’d like to spend some time going over some of the remaining unanswered questions and mysteries about this whole affair, including an odd quirk about The Big One:
What the hell happened to it?
See you next week!