The Rum Runners – Winter 1989
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The Great Lakes… 84% of the continent’s fresh water… a different story in every drop.
By Richard F. Palmer
In the days of Prohibition the Great Lakes teemed with adventurous rum-runners. They cached their precious bottles of Canadian-made refreshments in the reeds and rocky crevasses along the shore.
Unfortunately very little has been recorded about the free-booting days of Prohibition as it pertains to the Lakes. Somehow, it was always a topic no one was willing to discuss. It’s been a long time since Customs patrols came to stare out on the horizon, once left cleft by the speedy craft of smugglers, struggling with the might of government, quarreling among themselves, and measuring the seaworthiness of frail launches against the wrath of the Lakes.
Even when the winter tempest was at its height, venturesome navigators of the bootlegging navy pushed forth through broken ice, eager for the thrill of hide and chase. Legitimate trade long had laid away its carriers until another season.
It was the period of squalls and gales, fogs or blinding snow, sleet to weight a light boat to water’s edge. No beacons guided, no buoys flashed warning rays or tolled bells of danger. In essence it was a take back to the days when the lakes were barren of navigational aids and a coast guard.
A rum runner at night faced with coast guardsmen with rifles, 1924. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Rum runners needed to be able pilots who plied the seas when careful mariners put away stauncher ships. Although many knew these waters intimately, they bartered their lives for a cargo delivered.
In the North Country of New York State, 20 miles from the border, a dealer in illicit goods who challenged none less than the collector of the northern boundary, crumpled in his racing car with a bullet through the neck, fixing the price for those to pay who emulated him on highway or waterway. Wilbur J. Hunt led the unfortunate company who perished that their fellows might not thirst.
Wednesday night, October 12, 1921, was cold and rainy. A stiff breeze blew, driven against three men keeping vigil at Hunt’s home in Watertown. The same storm, bringing cave-like darkness, was welcomed by Hunt and a companion who went about their business of transporting contraband property. In Hunt’s touring car were eight cases of rye, a case of Scotch, a dozen bottles of gin and a little wine.
The three men lingering in the drizzle knew every important turn in the booze runner’s movement. Two were former Secret Service men who were capable and experienced. The third, equally competent, had served as a postal inspector. Now they were federal prohibition agents.
They despised the job. The weather was not contributing to their pleasure; they wished Hunt would hasten his coming.
Unknown to the trio at Watertown, another government bureau charged with keeping the nation dry, had an inkling of that night’s expedition.
Collector Holland of the Port of Ogdensburg had been told of the expected crossing. Late that night the tip bore fruit. Recruiting a squad of customs men and State Police, he gave chase. Near Richville, a few miles from Ogdensburg, they were in hot pursuit when Holland ordered a trooper to open fire. The bullet killed Hunt, but his companion eluded the pursuers, carrying his dead associate to Gouverneur. A half hour later the watchers in Watertown were relieved of their comfortable wait by announcement that their expected prisoner was dead.
During succeeding years many more died under more or less similar circumstances. They were a highly organized battalion in a war waged against the government. Before the distributing cars and trucks took over the burden, others had to cross the border, evading the cordon of customs men, immigration inspectors, state troopers and other constabulary.
Long miles of devious lake shore and the mazes of the Thousand Islands invited every boat owner to try his hand at easy money, easy if successful. If lake and river could reveal the bodies they hold, many more names could be added to the scroll of those who died running rum.
One of the most notorious was Stephen Wesley. For years after the Volstead Act was repealed, police and customs men pondered his fate. Did he die at last, neglected by the fates so long guiding him? Hated by his booze- handling cult, watched by police, distrusted by nearly all who dealt with him, he was respected only for his great nerve and the luck or perhaps the quickness of wit that saved him many times when others would have perished.
Gossip made him a Chicago gangster. A Watertown man collaborating in a jaunt with liquor to Chicago, found himself a victim with Wesley of Chicago gunmen after they had reaped their profit. It smacked of collusion between Wesley and his Chicago friends, to divide the other’s share of the velvet.
Wesley wore silk shirts and lived well as a permanent guest at Watertown’s Hotel Woodruff. Then fortune forsook him.
The government got him in late summer, and Wesley lay in the Jefferson county jail until autumn. Still wearing his straw hat, he pleaded poverty before the judge, getting released from his long jail confinement. As he left the court house, he shied his straw hat into a comer, extracting a warm cap from a spacious pocket.
But he was broke, his friends believed. Someone grubstaked him for a few cases to get a fresh start. In December, 1929, in a row boat, he set out on what may have been his last journey. He is known to have obtained his small load in Canada. Long after dark he reached the north side of Grindstone Island on his return. He was wet, ice-coated, tired and cold. He put into a small bay and there dried himself at the home of an acquaintance.
His host urged Wesley to remain until morning, but the Chicagoan was resolved to push through. The St. Lawrence River was filled with ice. A heavy northwest wind was blowing. Wesley pulled out into a sleety rain. He was never seen again.
Lake Ontario Rum Runners
Lying across the eastern end of Lake Ontario is a series of four large islands, each paired with a little one. Twenty miles off the St. Lawrence, in Canadian waters, are the Main Ducks. Between there and the Canadian mainland the False Ducks continue the chain to Green Point, Ontario.
On the American side of the international boundary, opposite the Ducks, the Galloup and Little Galloup are outposts, and behind them Stony Island is four miles from Stony Point, marking the eastern extremity of Mexico Bay. These islands forming an outer shelter against the prevailing southwest and westerly gales, often have been sanctuary for mariners, but the liquor runners preferred the Main Ducks where they were safe in Canadian territory. Yet from here they could shape a course east, west or across to Mexico Bay, as exigencies and delivery contract made feasible.
Miles of the American shore are so rock strewn that customs boats hardly could land. Mexico Bay is lined with sand bars and shoals that give to it the name Bay of Dead Ships. From Fox Creek to Mexico Point were isolated miles of likely landing places.
Captain William Sheridan, Cecil Phillips and Tony Kane were victims of the perils of the seas. Kane, of Syracuse, was a quite notorious rum runner who, like others, eluded the long arm of the law. Eventually, however, one too many rides in a speed boat brought him to an abrupt end, the lake claiming its own.
Sheridan was an experienced sailor and Kane had handled many loads when they cleared Bath, Ontario, in January, 1931. A few weeks before they had been marooned on the Main Ducks, a rather bleak place to spend Christmas. When they failed to return on their next expedition, friends sent out a search party, who were lost for four days, until themselves rescued from the False Ducks, where they had taken shelter with boat trouble.
The wrecking tug Salvage Prince searched the lake for Sheridan but found no trace until two bodies drifted ashore in Wilson’s Bay and the third on Wolfe Island.
Benjamin Kerry was a boat builder and exporter from Hamilton, Ontario. Love of adventure apparently led him to rum running. A launch built by him and seized by the customs became the fastest craft of the patrol squadron. In March, 1928, an open winter on the Lake, Kerry, with Alfred Wheat, an associate, delivered a load to the American shore, presumably along Mexico Bay. They started back across the lake. Nothing further was heard from them until their bodies washed ashore near Coburg.
The fate of Harry Sheldon of Oswego and David Tugwell, a Canadian, was never learned. They left Oswego in high seas on a Sunday morning in August, 1924, and did not reach their announced destination of Kingston, some 60 miles across the lake.
Strangest of all the fatal romances of those years is the story of the Sea Hawk, the Mary Celeste of the Great Lakes. Like that ocean windjammer of lyric and novel, the Sea Hawk’s crew of four disappeared without a trace, and stranger still, compass, motor and every available fitting went with them.
The Sea Hawk was a 50-foot cabin cruiser, powerfully engined, finely appointed, known to be exceptionally seasworthy, capable of weathering any gale. January 18, 1928, she sailed from Charlotte, ostensibly on a trial run after an overhaul from Charlotte, the port of entry for Rochester, N.Y. Later, bootleg circles rumored that $2,000 in cash carried for dealings across the Lake was aboard.
Aboard were John Gunway, a Canadian, William McElhone and Norman Mallette of Oswego and Donald Walker of Scriba, a rural community east of Oswego. Two weeks later, on February 2, the Sea Hawk was located in the ice off Pleasant Bay, near Hillier, Prince Edward County, Canada.
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