December 22, 2014 • 23 mins
It's a Christmas episode, a shipwreck and a ghost story rolled into one! It's the story of the the Rouse Simmons, which sank in Lake Michigan while hauling a load of Christmas trees to Chicago.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from houtworks
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly fry Say. We have a Christmas episode,
a shipwreck episode, and a ghost story all rold into
(00:23):
one thing, and that is the story of the Christmas
Tree Ship at the Rouse Simmons which thank in Lake
Michigan while hauling a load of Christmas trees to Chicago.
That's a really popular story in the Great Lakes region.
It's popular among Coastguard personnel because the Coastguard is carrying
on this tradition today. Um, It's been the subject of
(00:44):
documentaries and histories and folk tales and story books, and
yet I had never heard of it until listener Alfred,
and then many other people requested it. I'm not exaggerating
when I say many many other people. We've gotten literally
to request for this in the last twenty four hours. Yeah,
we and we've gotten several like throughout the year. It's
(01:06):
not always when Christmas is is imminent, but as we
approached the holidays, it definitely ratchets up in in uh
frequency of request. Yes, So we're gonna start with a
little background on three things. The first is the captain
of the Rous Simmons, the next is the Christmas Trees themselves,
and then the third is the ship that they were
(01:26):
sailing on. And we're going to kind of talk about
those three things before we talk about the actual event.
So Captain Hermann E. Schoeman was originally from Wisconsin. He
was one of six children, and he was born around
eighteen sixty five. This was right at the peak of
sail powered shipping in the Great Lakes. He was growing
up as sail powered ships were being supplanted by steam
(01:47):
powered vessels, and most of the sailing ships that stayed
on the water as steam took overhauled lumber. Herman and
his brother August moved to Chicago when Herman was about
twenty years old. Chicago was home to an extremely busy
harbor where they could try their hands at both sailing
and at other business ventures. On April nine, Herman married
(02:11):
Barbara Schindel. They had three daughters named Elsie, Hazel, and Pearl,
and those last two were twins. Herman in August did
pretty well for themselves, but by far their most money
making time of the year was in November and December
when they sold Christmas trees. So the use of evergreen
bows to decorate homes around the winter solstice is a
(02:33):
European tradition that goes back centuries. Uh Then, in Germany,
medieval Christians began decorating evergreen trees with apples to symbolize
the Garden of Eden, and this eventually morphed into the
tradition of Christmas trees as we know them now, where
it stop being apples and many other ornaments took their places,
and you eventually get what we are used to seeing
in homes today. Decorating Christmas trees really did not spread
(02:58):
far beyond its German roots until the eighteen forties when
Queen Victoria encouraged Prince Albert, who was born in Germany,
to decorate a tree as he had done when he
was a child. Once a sketch of the royal family
next to their tree appeared in the London News, Christmas trees,
as was unsurprising when Queen Victoria did anything, became extremely fashionable.
(03:21):
She's quite a trend setter in many regards. We've talked
about possibly doing an episode on just the things that
she set in motion in terms of cultural popularity, But
by the late nineteenth century, decorating trees had become a
widely popular Christmas activity in the United States, and evergreen
trees were in high demand leading up to the holiday.
(03:41):
To in Chicago in particular, schooners laden with Christmas trees
arrived from Wisconsin and northern Michigan, which were the nearest
evergreen forests. These shipments came much later in the season
than your typical lumber run or even your typical other
shipping across the Great Lakes, because the objective was to
(04:01):
deliver the trees not too long before Christmas, but before
the absolute worst winter storms made the Lake two hazardous
to cross. This meant that Christmas trees were traveling on
Lake Michigan as much as a month after all of
the rest of the shipping operations had pretty much shut
down for the season, and there were not that many
(04:22):
people willing or able to make this late season trip.
Estimates put the number it maybe a couple dozen vessels,
and included among these were ones captained by the Schuneman brothers.
This is a job that Herman Schuneman seems to have
really genuinely enjoyed, and he even continued to Hall trees
after his brother was killed in a shipwreck doing that
(04:44):
exact thing. August Schuneman was aboard the schooner s Thal
which broke up in a storm near Glencoe, Illinois in November.
Of everyone aboard the ship was lost. Most likely the
only reason that Herman was not on board with his
brother was because his twin daughters were newborns at that time.
(05:06):
But after his brother's death, Herman Schunemann kept hauling Christmas
trees on a number of different schooners. As he expanded
the Christmas tree business, he kept meeting to go farther
and farther north to get better trees for less money.
This was great from a business perspective, it gave him
a bigger profit margin, but the farther north he went,
the more likely he was to face really dangerous weather.
(05:30):
And he also upgraded his vessels, working his way up
through larger, more stable vessels that could hold more trees,
and the last of these, which he used for three years,
was the Rouse Simmons. The Rouse Simmons was a two
hundred five ton three masted schooner which measured a hundred
and thirty two feet long and twenty seven feet wide.
(05:50):
It was licensed and enrolled out of Milwaukee on August
eighteen sixty eight, and it was named after a prominent
merchant from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was one of the primary
investors in the ship. Like most captains, Schuman couldn't afford
to just buy a ship of his own, so in
Captain Schuhman bought a partial share of the Ralph Simmons,
(06:13):
and that same year he established a new business, the
North Michigan Evergreen Nursery. It's address was the southwest corner
of Clark Street Bridge, which let him sell the trees
directly from the ship, rather than having to offload them
and then distribute them to grocers and other resellers. He
wasn't the only person who was doing this. There were
(06:33):
other Christmas tree sellers who were uh selling directly from
their ships, and they would generally decorate the ships and
it would be a big production. And like, getting to
that part of the story made me kind of wistful
that I didn't live in Chicago during this time, because
I think going down to the docks to pick a
Christmas tree off of a ship would have been really cool.
I would love to hunt down some pictures of the
(06:55):
decorated ships if we can. Yeah, I I as of
as as of when we're sitting here, have not been
able to find one that we can use. But I'm
gonna keep looking um So. By nineteen twelve, shoot him
On and Captain Charles Nelson each owned an eighth of
the roup. Simmons and a businessman named Man's Jay Bonner
(07:18):
owned the remaining three quarters of the ship, and by
that year Sheneman had also purchased two hundred forty acres
of land in Michigan, who uses his own Christmas tree farm.
Even by cutting out the middleman and owning his own farm,
his margins were still basically razor thin. He had to
transport as many trees as possible to be able to
(07:40):
pay the salaries of the people who tended and cut
the trees. He also had to pay the crew and
everyone else involved in that chain, even though it was
kind of encapsulated. Even so, he was an extremely generous man,
and he actually gave a lot of his trees away
to Chicago's poor, and he became such a beloved figure
during this Chicago Christmas tree season that people started calling
(08:02):
him Captain Santa. He seems to have loved this title,
and he kept Captain Santa newspaper clippings in his wallet,
which he wrapped an oil skin while he was captaining
the schooner to keep the contents dry. So we're about
to get to the more sad part of the story,
so let's take a brief moment before we do. That.
(08:23):
Sounds like a smart plan, so to return to the
last voyage of the rows Simmons and November of nineteen twelve,
shoot Himan had been doing late season runs to haul
Christmas trees for almost thirty years, so he was really
experienced in doing this. The rows Simmons had also been
on the water for more than forty years, which was
(08:44):
about twice as long as the typical lifespan of a
sail powered ship at the time, so as you might
expect given its age, the ship was not in great
condition anymore. All of those years of service, especially the
ones that were spent sailing in stormy other had taken
its hole on it. The schooner left Thompson, Michigan on
(09:04):
November twenty two and nineteen twelve with somewhere between three
thousand and five thousand Christmas trees. This was too many
to fit in the hold, so many of them were
arranged on the deck. Some people who saw it leaveport
described it as looking like a floating forest. The reason
for being so overloaded was that many of the region's
Christmas tree farms had been hammered by bad weather that year,
(09:26):
and trees were in particularly short supply. There's a lot
of stuff that we don't have really clear details about,
and one of those is that we don't have a
lot of concrete information about exactly who was aboard the
Ralph Simmons for its final voyage. We know Captain Schunemann
was there, as well as Captain Charles Nelson, each of
them owning an eighth of the ship. There were also
(09:49):
probably nine or ten other crew aboard, and there are
reports that a party of lumberjacks had secured passage to
Chicago aboard the schooner. None of this is document did
very well. A huge winter storm hit Lake Michigan while
the raw Simmons was en route. We don't have a
lot of information about what happened between the schooner's departure
(10:10):
on the twenty two and to fifty p m. On
the following day, when a Surfman, which is uh what
you would call a member the Life Saving Service, which
would later become the U. S. Coastguard, told his station keeper,
Captain Nelson Crate, that he'd spotted a ship heading south
and flying a distress signal. Captain Crate tried to find
(10:30):
a tug boat that to go out and help the
then unknown schooner, but the vessel he was after had
actually already left a few minutes later, he lost sight
of the ship, so he called the Two Rivers Life
Saving Station, which was the next station to the south,
to raise the alarm. He ordered that they take their
boat out to try to meet the distressed vessel and
(10:52):
offer aid, and they did, heading out to the approximate
position where they should have been able to meet the schooner,
and at first they had clear weather and good visibility,
but as it started to get dark the gale blue
in visibility became extremely poor thanks to missed and heavy snow,
and the rescue crew couldn't find any sign of the
reported schooner, and forty ft swells meant that their own
(11:15):
lives were then at risk. There are tales that are
break in the storm allowed some of the rescuers to
catch a glimpse of a ship that looked like it
was completely encased in ice and riding dangerously low in
the water. This is probably kind of a romantic embellishment
from later on. When the Ralph Simmons didn't arrive in
(11:36):
Chicago has scheduled on the morning of November, Barbara Shuneman
and her daughters were naturally worried that something had gone wrong,
but they held out hope that the captain had just
pulled into a safe harbor to wait out the storm.
This was something that he was known to do and
would be uh logical. But sadly the schooner never arrived,
(11:57):
which made this Christmas season are really somber one. In
Chicago that year, on December five, the front page of
the Chicago Tribune read Christmas Ship lost on the Lake
with seventeen on board, and soon after that Christmas tree
started washing up on shore near two rivers. The saddest
(12:17):
part of the story is really the loss of life.
But that part just broke my heart when I learned it.
Uh So, we're going to take another brief moment before
we get back to some discussion about exactly what might
have happened to the to the ship and to the
aftermath of this whole wreck. So there are several theories
(12:38):
about exactly what led to the loss of the Ralph Simmons,
along with all of its crew and its passengers. One
theory is that the ship lost its wheel during this storm,
although the wheel has been brought up by divers. Another
is that the weight of all those Christmas trees is
just too much for the aging schooner to endure once
(12:59):
the storm got really bad, especially considering that in that
kind of storm, the ship and the trees on the
deck would have become increasingly covered in heavy ice. And uh,
if you live anywhere where icy weather is common, you
know how heavy a giant load of ice can be. Oh. Yes.
A third theory is that Schuneman's failure to have the
(13:20):
ship recalked before the nineteen twelve season was ultimately his undoing.
He'd had the ship recalked the year before, and he
probably didn't do it in nineteen twelve because he didn't
have the money in the aftermath of having been sued
over non payment of a debt. The fourth theory is
that a huge wave caught the ship's anchor and kind
(13:42):
of launched it over the bowsprit and that this momentum
pulled the bow of the ship under the water into
a dive it just couldn't recover from. Fisherman did find
a wallet wrapped in oil skin belonging to Captain Schunman
in their nets in nine four. Its contents were still
intact and it was returned to his family. A diver
(14:05):
named Kent Bell Richards found the deck in nineteen seventy
one while he was looking for a completely different shipwreck,
which was the Vernon That was a much larger ship
that sank during a storm in eighteen eighty seven. This
is all kind of serendipitous. He found the wreck by
feeling it after his cobbled together dive like malfunctioned under
the water. The Ralph Simmons was in a hundred and
(14:27):
seventy two ft of water, about four and a half
miles from two rivers, and it was still full of
Christmas trees, Some of the ones below the decks still
had their needles intact. This was coincidentally not far from
where the Ralph Simmons nearly met its end in a
different storm in nineteen o five, when its masks were
(14:47):
thrown off in a gale. In July and August of
two thousand six, there was an underwater archaeological survey of
the ship. It was conducted by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
They found that the anchor chain and the math we're
all lying forward of the bow. And so one possible
explanation for this would be that the bow of the
ship became too heavy and it took a nose dive.
(15:08):
And another is that the heavy items like the rigging
and the chains were all shoved forward as the ship
was sinking and then actually sank for some other reason.
So it's all basically lends to support to the idea
that it sank nose first. We don't have a lot
more clarity about why that happened. Divers have pulled up
a number of artifacts from the ship, including its nameplates,
(15:31):
and as we said before, the wheel. Today it's actually
a popular stop for recreational divers. In nineteen thirteen, Chicago
put up its first Christmas tree and daily plaza in
memory of the Ralph Simmons and the crew. More than
a hundred thousand people came out on Christmas Eve to
pay tribute. There's also a plaque in commemoration on the
(15:54):
Clark Street Bridge. In spite of this tragedy, Barbara and
her daughters continued to sell Christmas tree is, continuing to
ship them by schooner for a number of years, and
the practice of bringing Christmas trees into Chicago on schooners
actually stopped completely by nineteen twenty. Sometime in that window,
the Schotamans started sending the trees by train and then
(16:14):
selling them from a schooner in the port the shoot.
Him and daughters continued to sell trees from the family's
lot for a few years after Barbara died in nineteen
thirty three. In December of nineteen thirty four, they actually
set up a Christmas tree shop in Chicago that they
called Captain and Mrs Schunman's Daughters. That was the only
year that they did that. There continue to be ghost
(16:36):
stories about the Rows Simmons that people saw rats leaving
its hole before it sets sail in nineteen twelve, and
that it continues to sail the waters of Lake Michigan.
People also claim that they can smell the scent of
evergreens at Barbara Schumann's Chicago grave site and today, which
is I think one of the reasons that people ask
us to do this episode so often the US Coast
(16:59):
Guard cutter Mackinaw carries a load of more than a
thousand Christmas trees to Chicago every year for distribution among
Chicago's poor in commemoration of the Rows Simmons. So it's
become this Chicago tradition that has gone on for a while. Uh,
and I think some of I know for sure this
is not a thing. I know for sure that some
(17:20):
of the people who requested it sort of wanted to
know the story behind this tradition without already knowing that
it involved the a shipwreck with the loss of all
aboard writing Christmas time. So now we know. You know,
they're seemingly fun in a hurry. Yeah, it's We've had
(17:42):
a series lately where in some cases we knew it
was going to be sad before we started, but we
didn't realize how sad, or in the case of this one,
did not really know that it was going to be sad,
and then it turned out sad. Uh. Do you have
unsad listener mail? Perhaps? Do you have listener mail? I
don't remember which when I picked today and whether it
is sad or not, but but it is about shipwrecks
(18:04):
because it comes from our episode about this submarine S five,
which several people have written to let me know that
a submarine is a boat and target the ship that
it targets the ship, so you don't call a submarine
a ship, which I think we did in the episode,
because I didn't know that me either. This is from Thomas,
(18:26):
and Thomas says I enjoyed the S five episode and
all the others too. Dying in the water is probably
my second biggest fear of death two. But first isn't
drifting into outer space, which is what I said. Mine was.
It's dying in a fire and would probably feel about
the same. I'm sure you've gotten all kinds of feedback
with various other great acts of calm under fire prompted
(18:47):
by the captain's hell by compass comment. My favorite is
from Captain Al Haynes as he was cleared to land
United Flight two three two in Sioux City, Iowa, July.
As with the sub commander's comment, one just needs a
little context to appreciate the gravity of the situation, maybe
in a black hole being too recent to be part
of quote history and too far back for you to
(19:10):
remember so here is the high level. The DC ten
heavy set out of Denver and had two hundred and
ninety six souls on board. It was just beginning to
be sequenced for its arrival in Chicago. It was over
Iowa a catastrophic failure rendered one of three engines and
all control surfaces inoperative. There is no car analogy, because
(19:33):
the car lives in two D land, not three D
and can just stop. The closest you might come is
thinking about a car's steering locking up and the accelerator
being stuck wide open, and you're leaning one way or
the other to try to influence the direction. That is
not an exaggeration. I heard the captain speak in an
aviation seminar. He said that when they reached the base
(19:54):
on the radio to ask for help and describe the situation,
the base reassured them that they didn't under stand what
was wrong, because if the situation was as they said,
the plane would have long since crashed. Compound the situation
with the next forty minutes of pressure mounting as they
bobbed through the skies of Iowa. Able to modestly control
(20:15):
left hand turns with engine differential, the three guys in
the cockpit carrying the other two people's lives in their hands.
You can see the desperation of the situation. So finally,
near the end of the ordeal with Sioux City Insight,
the air traffic controller clears them to land quote on
(20:35):
any runway and Captain Haines response, you want to be
particular and make it a runway. Huh. Some transcriptions add
notation that there was a chuckle in his voice. Anyway,
that's my favorite cool under fire quote. By the way,
his leadership in the event saved over a hundred and
(20:55):
eighty lives. Thank you so much for sending this story, Thomas.
Although I was old enough during this event that in
theory I could have remembered it, I do not remember it,
probably because for many years I had a phobia of
air travel and I studiously avoided all news about any
(21:18):
kind of air disaster. Um that which I think. I
think He's sent a separate email that included uh, footage
of the crash itself, And even though I am now
able to fly and it's I'm usually pretty okay, I
was like, no, I'm not looking at that. I love
that quotes there, So thank you so much, Thomas for
(21:39):
sending it. If you would like to write to us
with an episode request, or another Christmas tree story, or
another airplane story or anything else. You can were a
history podcast that how stuffworks dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash ms in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Are Tumbler is miss
in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're on interest
(22:00):
at pentest dot com slash missed in History. We have
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It is at missed in History at spreadshirt dot com.
And if you would like to learn a little more
about what we talked about today, you can come to
our parent company's website that is how stuff Works dot com.
Put the word Christmas Trees in the search bar. You
will find how Christmas Trees Work, which includes some of
(22:21):
the history of Christmas Trees. You can also come to
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will find uh show notes on all of our episodes
and all of the episodes themselves in a giant archive
and other cool stuff so you can do all of
that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com and missed in History dot com. For more
(22:46):
on this and thousands of other topics because its dot
com
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from houtworks
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly fry Say. We have a Christmas episode,
a shipwreck episode, and a ghost story all rold into
(00:23):
one thing, and that is the story of the Christmas
Tree Ship at the Rouse Simmons which thank in Lake
Michigan while hauling a load of Christmas trees to Chicago.
That's a really popular story in the Great Lakes region.
It's popular among Coastguard personnel because the Coastguard is carrying
on this tradition today. Um, It's been the subject of
(00:44):
documentaries and histories and folk tales and story books, and
yet I had never heard of it until listener Alfred,
and then many other people requested it. I'm not exaggerating
when I say many many other people. We've gotten literally
to request for this in the last twenty four hours. Yeah,
we and we've gotten several like throughout the year. It's
(01:06):
not always when Christmas is is imminent, but as we
approached the holidays, it definitely ratchets up in in uh
frequency of request. Yes, So we're gonna start with a
little background on three things. The first is the captain
of the Rous Simmons, the next is the Christmas Trees themselves,
and then the third is the ship that they were
(01:26):
sailing on. And we're going to kind of talk about
those three things before we talk about the actual event.
So Captain Hermann E. Schoeman was originally from Wisconsin. He
was one of six children, and he was born around
eighteen sixty five. This was right at the peak of
sail powered shipping in the Great Lakes. He was growing
up as sail powered ships were being supplanted by steam
(01:47):
powered vessels, and most of the sailing ships that stayed
on the water as steam took overhauled lumber. Herman and
his brother August moved to Chicago when Herman was about
twenty years old. Chicago was home to an extremely busy
harbor where they could try their hands at both sailing
and at other business ventures. On April nine, Herman married
(02:11):
Barbara Schindel. They had three daughters named Elsie, Hazel, and Pearl,
and those last two were twins. Herman in August did
pretty well for themselves, but by far their most money
making time of the year was in November and December
when they sold Christmas trees. So the use of evergreen
bows to decorate homes around the winter solstice is a
(02:33):
European tradition that goes back centuries. Uh Then, in Germany,
medieval Christians began decorating evergreen trees with apples to symbolize
the Garden of Eden, and this eventually morphed into the
tradition of Christmas trees as we know them now, where
it stop being apples and many other ornaments took their places,
and you eventually get what we are used to seeing
in homes today. Decorating Christmas trees really did not spread
(02:58):
far beyond its German roots until the eighteen forties when
Queen Victoria encouraged Prince Albert, who was born in Germany,
to decorate a tree as he had done when he
was a child. Once a sketch of the royal family
next to their tree appeared in the London News, Christmas trees,
as was unsurprising when Queen Victoria did anything, became extremely fashionable.
(03:21):
She's quite a trend setter in many regards. We've talked
about possibly doing an episode on just the things that
she set in motion in terms of cultural popularity, But
by the late nineteenth century, decorating trees had become a
widely popular Christmas activity in the United States, and evergreen
trees were in high demand leading up to the holiday.
(03:41):
To in Chicago in particular, schooners laden with Christmas trees
arrived from Wisconsin and northern Michigan, which were the nearest
evergreen forests. These shipments came much later in the season
than your typical lumber run or even your typical other
shipping across the Great Lakes, because the objective was to
(04:01):
deliver the trees not too long before Christmas, but before
the absolute worst winter storms made the Lake two hazardous
to cross. This meant that Christmas trees were traveling on
Lake Michigan as much as a month after all of
the rest of the shipping operations had pretty much shut
down for the season, and there were not that many
(04:22):
people willing or able to make this late season trip.
Estimates put the number it maybe a couple dozen vessels,
and included among these were ones captained by the Schuneman brothers.
This is a job that Herman Schuneman seems to have
really genuinely enjoyed, and he even continued to Hall trees
after his brother was killed in a shipwreck doing that
(04:44):
exact thing. August Schuneman was aboard the schooner s Thal
which broke up in a storm near Glencoe, Illinois in November.
Of everyone aboard the ship was lost. Most likely the
only reason that Herman was not on board with his
brother was because his twin daughters were newborns at that time.
(05:06):
But after his brother's death, Herman Schunemann kept hauling Christmas
trees on a number of different schooners. As he expanded
the Christmas tree business, he kept meeting to go farther
and farther north to get better trees for less money.
This was great from a business perspective, it gave him
a bigger profit margin, but the farther north he went,
the more likely he was to face really dangerous weather.
(05:30):
And he also upgraded his vessels, working his way up
through larger, more stable vessels that could hold more trees,
and the last of these, which he used for three years,
was the Rouse Simmons. The Rouse Simmons was a two
hundred five ton three masted schooner which measured a hundred
and thirty two feet long and twenty seven feet wide.
(05:50):
It was licensed and enrolled out of Milwaukee on August
eighteen sixty eight, and it was named after a prominent
merchant from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was one of the primary
investors in the ship. Like most captains, Schuman couldn't afford
to just buy a ship of his own, so in
Captain Schuhman bought a partial share of the Ralph Simmons,
(06:13):
and that same year he established a new business, the
North Michigan Evergreen Nursery. It's address was the southwest corner
of Clark Street Bridge, which let him sell the trees
directly from the ship, rather than having to offload them
and then distribute them to grocers and other resellers. He
wasn't the only person who was doing this. There were
(06:33):
other Christmas tree sellers who were uh selling directly from
their ships, and they would generally decorate the ships and
it would be a big production. And like, getting to
that part of the story made me kind of wistful
that I didn't live in Chicago during this time, because
I think going down to the docks to pick a
Christmas tree off of a ship would have been really cool.
I would love to hunt down some pictures of the
(06:55):
decorated ships if we can. Yeah, I I as of
as as of when we're sitting here, have not been
able to find one that we can use. But I'm
gonna keep looking um So. By nineteen twelve, shoot him
On and Captain Charles Nelson each owned an eighth of
the roup. Simmons and a businessman named Man's Jay Bonner
(07:18):
owned the remaining three quarters of the ship, and by
that year Sheneman had also purchased two hundred forty acres
of land in Michigan, who uses his own Christmas tree farm.
Even by cutting out the middleman and owning his own farm,
his margins were still basically razor thin. He had to
transport as many trees as possible to be able to
(07:40):
pay the salaries of the people who tended and cut
the trees. He also had to pay the crew and
everyone else involved in that chain, even though it was
kind of encapsulated. Even so, he was an extremely generous man,
and he actually gave a lot of his trees away
to Chicago's poor, and he became such a beloved figure
during this Chicago Christmas tree season that people started calling
(08:02):
him Captain Santa. He seems to have loved this title,
and he kept Captain Santa newspaper clippings in his wallet,
which he wrapped an oil skin while he was captaining
the schooner to keep the contents dry. So we're about
to get to the more sad part of the story,
so let's take a brief moment before we do. That.
(08:23):
Sounds like a smart plan, so to return to the
last voyage of the rows Simmons and November of nineteen twelve,
shoot Himan had been doing late season runs to haul
Christmas trees for almost thirty years, so he was really
experienced in doing this. The rows Simmons had also been
on the water for more than forty years, which was
(08:44):
about twice as long as the typical lifespan of a
sail powered ship at the time, so as you might
expect given its age, the ship was not in great
condition anymore. All of those years of service, especially the
ones that were spent sailing in stormy other had taken
its hole on it. The schooner left Thompson, Michigan on
(09:04):
November twenty two and nineteen twelve with somewhere between three
thousand and five thousand Christmas trees. This was too many
to fit in the hold, so many of them were
arranged on the deck. Some people who saw it leaveport
described it as looking like a floating forest. The reason
for being so overloaded was that many of the region's
Christmas tree farms had been hammered by bad weather that year,
(09:26):
and trees were in particularly short supply. There's a lot
of stuff that we don't have really clear details about,
and one of those is that we don't have a
lot of concrete information about exactly who was aboard the
Ralph Simmons for its final voyage. We know Captain Schunemann
was there, as well as Captain Charles Nelson, each of
them owning an eighth of the ship. There were also
(09:49):
probably nine or ten other crew aboard, and there are
reports that a party of lumberjacks had secured passage to
Chicago aboard the schooner. None of this is document did
very well. A huge winter storm hit Lake Michigan while
the raw Simmons was en route. We don't have a
lot of information about what happened between the schooner's departure
(10:10):
on the twenty two and to fifty p m. On
the following day, when a Surfman, which is uh what
you would call a member the Life Saving Service, which
would later become the U. S. Coastguard, told his station keeper,
Captain Nelson Crate, that he'd spotted a ship heading south
and flying a distress signal. Captain Crate tried to find
(10:30):
a tug boat that to go out and help the
then unknown schooner, but the vessel he was after had
actually already left a few minutes later, he lost sight
of the ship, so he called the Two Rivers Life
Saving Station, which was the next station to the south,
to raise the alarm. He ordered that they take their
boat out to try to meet the distressed vessel and
(10:52):
offer aid, and they did, heading out to the approximate
position where they should have been able to meet the schooner,
and at first they had clear weather and good visibility,
but as it started to get dark the gale blue
in visibility became extremely poor thanks to missed and heavy snow,
and the rescue crew couldn't find any sign of the
reported schooner, and forty ft swells meant that their own
(11:15):
lives were then at risk. There are tales that are
break in the storm allowed some of the rescuers to
catch a glimpse of a ship that looked like it
was completely encased in ice and riding dangerously low in
the water. This is probably kind of a romantic embellishment
from later on. When the Ralph Simmons didn't arrive in
(11:36):
Chicago has scheduled on the morning of November, Barbara Shuneman
and her daughters were naturally worried that something had gone wrong,
but they held out hope that the captain had just
pulled into a safe harbor to wait out the storm.
This was something that he was known to do and
would be uh logical. But sadly the schooner never arrived,
(11:57):
which made this Christmas season are really somber one. In
Chicago that year, on December five, the front page of
the Chicago Tribune read Christmas Ship lost on the Lake
with seventeen on board, and soon after that Christmas tree
started washing up on shore near two rivers. The saddest
(12:17):
part of the story is really the loss of life.
But that part just broke my heart when I learned it.
Uh So, we're going to take another brief moment before
we get back to some discussion about exactly what might
have happened to the to the ship and to the
aftermath of this whole wreck. So there are several theories
(12:38):
about exactly what led to the loss of the Ralph Simmons,
along with all of its crew and its passengers. One
theory is that the ship lost its wheel during this storm,
although the wheel has been brought up by divers. Another
is that the weight of all those Christmas trees is
just too much for the aging schooner to endure once
(12:59):
the storm got really bad, especially considering that in that
kind of storm, the ship and the trees on the
deck would have become increasingly covered in heavy ice. And uh,
if you live anywhere where icy weather is common, you
know how heavy a giant load of ice can be. Oh. Yes.
A third theory is that Schuneman's failure to have the
(13:20):
ship recalked before the nineteen twelve season was ultimately his undoing.
He'd had the ship recalked the year before, and he
probably didn't do it in nineteen twelve because he didn't
have the money in the aftermath of having been sued
over non payment of a debt. The fourth theory is
that a huge wave caught the ship's anchor and kind
(13:42):
of launched it over the bowsprit and that this momentum
pulled the bow of the ship under the water into
a dive it just couldn't recover from. Fisherman did find
a wallet wrapped in oil skin belonging to Captain Schunman
in their nets in nine four. Its contents were still
intact and it was returned to his family. A diver
(14:05):
named Kent Bell Richards found the deck in nineteen seventy
one while he was looking for a completely different shipwreck,
which was the Vernon That was a much larger ship
that sank during a storm in eighteen eighty seven. This
is all kind of serendipitous. He found the wreck by
feeling it after his cobbled together dive like malfunctioned under
the water. The Ralph Simmons was in a hundred and
(14:27):
seventy two ft of water, about four and a half
miles from two rivers, and it was still full of
Christmas trees, Some of the ones below the decks still
had their needles intact. This was coincidentally not far from
where the Ralph Simmons nearly met its end in a
different storm in nineteen o five, when its masks were
(14:47):
thrown off in a gale. In July and August of
two thousand six, there was an underwater archaeological survey of
the ship. It was conducted by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
They found that the anchor chain and the math we're
all lying forward of the bow. And so one possible
explanation for this would be that the bow of the
ship became too heavy and it took a nose dive.
(15:08):
And another is that the heavy items like the rigging
and the chains were all shoved forward as the ship
was sinking and then actually sank for some other reason.
So it's all basically lends to support to the idea
that it sank nose first. We don't have a lot
more clarity about why that happened. Divers have pulled up
a number of artifacts from the ship, including its nameplates,
(15:31):
and as we said before, the wheel. Today it's actually
a popular stop for recreational divers. In nineteen thirteen, Chicago
put up its first Christmas tree and daily plaza in
memory of the Ralph Simmons and the crew. More than
a hundred thousand people came out on Christmas Eve to
pay tribute. There's also a plaque in commemoration on the
(15:54):
Clark Street Bridge. In spite of this tragedy, Barbara and
her daughters continued to sell Christmas tree is, continuing to
ship them by schooner for a number of years, and
the practice of bringing Christmas trees into Chicago on schooners
actually stopped completely by nineteen twenty. Sometime in that window,
the Schotamans started sending the trees by train and then
(16:14):
selling them from a schooner in the port the shoot.
Him and daughters continued to sell trees from the family's
lot for a few years after Barbara died in nineteen
thirty three. In December of nineteen thirty four, they actually
set up a Christmas tree shop in Chicago that they
called Captain and Mrs Schunman's Daughters. That was the only
year that they did that. There continue to be ghost
(16:36):
stories about the Rows Simmons that people saw rats leaving
its hole before it sets sail in nineteen twelve, and
that it continues to sail the waters of Lake Michigan.
People also claim that they can smell the scent of
evergreens at Barbara Schumann's Chicago grave site and today, which
is I think one of the reasons that people ask
us to do this episode so often the US Coast
(16:59):
Guard cutter Mackinaw carries a load of more than a
thousand Christmas trees to Chicago every year for distribution among
Chicago's poor in commemoration of the Rows Simmons. So it's
become this Chicago tradition that has gone on for a while. Uh,
and I think some of I know for sure this
is not a thing. I know for sure that some
(17:20):
of the people who requested it sort of wanted to
know the story behind this tradition without already knowing that
it involved the a shipwreck with the loss of all
aboard writing Christmas time. So now we know. You know,
they're seemingly fun in a hurry. Yeah, it's We've had
(17:42):
a series lately where in some cases we knew it
was going to be sad before we started, but we
didn't realize how sad, or in the case of this one,
did not really know that it was going to be sad,
and then it turned out sad. Uh. Do you have
unsad listener mail? Perhaps? Do you have listener mail? I
don't remember which when I picked today and whether it
is sad or not, but but it is about shipwrecks
(18:04):
because it comes from our episode about this submarine S five,
which several people have written to let me know that
a submarine is a boat and target the ship that
it targets the ship, so you don't call a submarine
a ship, which I think we did in the episode,
because I didn't know that me either. This is from Thomas,
(18:26):
and Thomas says I enjoyed the S five episode and
all the others too. Dying in the water is probably
my second biggest fear of death two. But first isn't
drifting into outer space, which is what I said. Mine was.
It's dying in a fire and would probably feel about
the same. I'm sure you've gotten all kinds of feedback
with various other great acts of calm under fire prompted
(18:47):
by the captain's hell by compass comment. My favorite is
from Captain Al Haynes as he was cleared to land
United Flight two three two in Sioux City, Iowa, July.
As with the sub commander's comment, one just needs a
little context to appreciate the gravity of the situation, maybe
in a black hole being too recent to be part
of quote history and too far back for you to
(19:10):
remember so here is the high level. The DC ten
heavy set out of Denver and had two hundred and
ninety six souls on board. It was just beginning to
be sequenced for its arrival in Chicago. It was over
Iowa a catastrophic failure rendered one of three engines and
all control surfaces inoperative. There is no car analogy, because
(19:33):
the car lives in two D land, not three D
and can just stop. The closest you might come is
thinking about a car's steering locking up and the accelerator
being stuck wide open, and you're leaning one way or
the other to try to influence the direction. That is
not an exaggeration. I heard the captain speak in an
aviation seminar. He said that when they reached the base
(19:54):
on the radio to ask for help and describe the situation,
the base reassured them that they didn't under stand what
was wrong, because if the situation was as they said,
the plane would have long since crashed. Compound the situation
with the next forty minutes of pressure mounting as they
bobbed through the skies of Iowa. Able to modestly control
(20:15):
left hand turns with engine differential, the three guys in
the cockpit carrying the other two people's lives in their hands.
You can see the desperation of the situation. So finally,
near the end of the ordeal with Sioux City Insight,
the air traffic controller clears them to land quote on
(20:35):
any runway and Captain Haines response, you want to be
particular and make it a runway. Huh. Some transcriptions add
notation that there was a chuckle in his voice. Anyway,
that's my favorite cool under fire quote. By the way,
his leadership in the event saved over a hundred and
(20:55):
eighty lives. Thank you so much for sending this story, Thomas.
Although I was old enough during this event that in
theory I could have remembered it, I do not remember it,
probably because for many years I had a phobia of
air travel and I studiously avoided all news about any
(21:18):
kind of air disaster. Um that which I think. I
think He's sent a separate email that included uh, footage
of the crash itself, And even though I am now
able to fly and it's I'm usually pretty okay, I
was like, no, I'm not looking at that. I love
that quotes there, So thank you so much, Thomas for
(21:39):
sending it. If you would like to write to us
with an episode request, or another Christmas tree story, or
another airplane story or anything else. You can were a
history podcast that how stuffworks dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash ms in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Are Tumbler is miss
in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're on interest
(22:00):
at pentest dot com slash missed in History. We have
a spreadshirt store full of cool things you can buy.
It is at missed in History at spreadshirt dot com.
And if you would like to learn a little more
about what we talked about today, you can come to
our parent company's website that is how stuff Works dot com.
Put the word Christmas Trees in the search bar. You
will find how Christmas Trees Work, which includes some of
(22:21):
the history of Christmas Trees. You can also come to
our website, which is missing history dot com, and you
will find uh show notes on all of our episodes
and all of the episodes themselves in a giant archive
and other cool stuff so you can do all of
that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com and missed in History dot com. For more
(22:46):
on this and thousands of other topics because its dot
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