Folktales and Legends of the Middle West Read online

  The war had changed Rosemary, too.

  “You can make more money here than we ever dreamed of back home,” she told Hill. “I’m sure you can get a job at Ford’s. You fixed tanks and jeeps during the war. You’re a veteran, and everyone’s gonna want a new car now after making their old ones last through the war. We can buy the kids new shoes and new clothes every year, and we can even send them to college if they want.”

  “That farm’s been in my family over a hundred years,” Hill said.

  “We don’t have to sell it. We can keep renting it out. We can even build a bigger house there.”

  Hill agreed to stay in Michigan for a year. He got a job on the assembly line at Ford’s in Dearborn. That meant Rosemary had to quit her job at the cafeteria, but she never stopped working, since both Billy and Doris were in school now. Using the homemaking skills she had learned on the farm, she took in alterations as a seamstress. She also drove a school bus. Hill impressed his foremen at Ford’s with his ability to repair machinery, and after a year, he was invited to join an apprenticeship program for tool and die makers. The McCumbers prospered so much that Rosemary could afford to open a beauty shop. Back home, she had always fixed her sisters’ and cousins’ hair, because none of them could afford to go into town. She called the shop Rosie’s and didn’t mind when people called her Rosie the Riveter, because it was good for business. She put up a print of the magazine poster, and another poster of the woman in the red bandana. A local newspaper published a story headlined “REAL LIFE ‘ROSIE THE RIVETER’ OPENS SALON,” and some of the gals from Willow Run stopped in to get their hair done.

  After the children graduated from high school, Billy went to work at Ford’s, like his father, while Doris went to the teacher’s college in Ypsilanti and a got a job at an elementary school in Dearborn. Hill retired from Ford’s after putting in his thirty years, and took Rosie back to Kentucky, to the big house they had built on the McCumber farm with his factory paychecks.

  “I thought I was marrying the prettiest girl I’d ever met,” Hill told her when they moved back home. “But I married the smartest and hardest working, too. We’d have lost this farm if we’d come back down here and tried to work it again. That old war ended being good for something, I guess.”

  LE GRIFFON: THE GHOST SHIP OF THE GREAT LAKES

  he French largely disappeared from Middle West after losing it to the British during the French and Indian War. They left behind only a constellation of nascent cities, whose names their English-speaking conquerors have persisted in mispronouncing: Detroit, St. Louis, Versailles, Des Plaines. Yet the French haunt the Middle West still. Not only Nain Rouge, who has yet to be exorcised from Detroit, but LaSalle, who built the first ship ever to sail on the Great Lakes. Le Griffon, as he christened it, disappeared on its maiden voyage, and still appears to rookie sailors to remind them of the hazards of their new career.

  Every sailor knows that autumn is the deadliest season on the Great Lakes. As winter tries to force its way down from Canada, it collides with lingering warm air, generating violent storms that “have drowned many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew,” in the words of that famous maritime chronicler Herman Melville.

  Don Pryzbyla had a run-in with Le Griffon during his first year on the boats. He had graduated high school in Calcite, as sailors call the limestone port of Rogers City, and gone to work on the Ernest F. Hobby, which carried the chalky white rock to the mills in Gary and Chicago, where it was mixed with iron and coke to make steel. Sailing was dangerous—just two years before, another Calcite boat, the Carl D. Bradley, had carried 33 sailors to the bottom of Lake Michigan. But it paid better than the quarry, and sailors got the winters off.

  All that summer, the Hobby had sailed on placid waters. But as the boat made an October run up Lake Michigan, after dropping off a load of limestone at U.S. Steel South Works in Chicago, a squall arose. The Hobby wallowed over heaping waves, which splashed across the deck, driven by forty mile per hour winds. Deckhands sheltered in their berths, peering out at the storm through portholes obscured by rain. As third mate, Don was in the pilot house, standing the midnight-to-four watch, when the captain of the ship—who all the crewmembers referred to as the Old Man—ordered the boat to seek anchorage inside the breakwater at Milwaukee. As the Hobby headed for its safe harbor, Don spotted another ship. It appeared to be headed in the same direction. He was perplexed, because this vessel was no more than a hundred feet from the Hobby—close enough for a collision—but had not shown up on the radar. Don was also perplexed because this was not a modern steel laker, but an ancient wooden boat, with sails torn to shreds by centuries of storms, and a carved prow washed colorless by wind and water.

  Don walked to the window and alerted the wheelsman.

  “We got another ship right to starboard,” he cried in a panicked voice.

  The wheelsman gazed out the window. He saw nothing but rain.

  “Is it an old schooner, with tattered sails?” he asked Don.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “That ain’t no ship,” said the wheelsman, who had been piloting boats boats since before the war. “That’s a ghost. It’s the Griffin. The first ship that ever sailed on this lake, and the first that ever sank here. I saw it during my first storm, too. Ask the Old Man about it when we get to Milwaukee. He loves to tell that story.”

  The Old Man, the master of the Hobby, was proper and pedantic. He always wore his billed master’s cap and his brass-buttoned jacket, with a gold stripe for every half-decade on the Lakes. Wherever he walked on the boat, an anxious cone of silence descended over his crew. Even so, he only spoke to the mates and the chief engineer. But when he heard Don had seen the Griffon, he invited the young sailor into his office. Its shelves were filled not only with the nautical manuals he followed so scrupulously, but with volumes of maritime history. Had the Old Man not become a ship’s captain, he might have been a high-school teacher, or a minister. He asked Don to sit down, and told him the story of the Griffon, as though it were a lecture he had delivered to generations of students.

  The Old Man began by telling Don about Rene Robert Cavalier, the greatest explorer who ever set foot on the North American continent. He was the first European to descend the Upper Mississippi, and he hoped to discover a route from that great river to the Gulf of Mexico, which he believed would link France to the trading ports of China and India. But his explorations had left him deeply in debt to the moneylenders of Montreal. If they were to continue, he needed a source of income. So Cavalier (who was better known by his title, the Sieur de la Salle —or simply La Salle) decided to enter the fur trade. He dispatched a crew of voyageurs to the Illinois Country to barter with the Indians on his behalf. And then he set out to build a ship, which would collect his purpurchases and carry them back to Montreal, where he would sell the furs and settle all his debts. La Salle also knew that a great ship on the Upper Lakes would allow him to control the Northwestern fur trade.

  According to the Old Man, La Salle laid the keel in the winter of 1679, on Cayuga Creek, which flows into Lake Erie, just west of Niagara Falls. It immediately drew suspicion from the Seneca. They had never seen such a large vessel. They called it a “floating fort,” or a “big canoe.” A Seneca warrior tried to kill the blacksmith who was forging the ship’s cannons, but the blacksmith fended him off with a hot poker. Another group of Indians plotted to burn the ship down, but their destructive designs were thwarted by a tip from a squaw friendly to the French. Luckily for La Salle, most of the Seneca were off hunting while he was building his ship, but a Seneca prophet named Metiomek scolded him for introducing such a monstrosity to the Iroquois Country. In a booming voice, the Old Man quoted what Metiomek told the chief:

  “Great Chief, you are too proud. You have shown contempt for the Great Spirit who rules all things, and you have set up an evil spirit on His throne. Beware, darkness like a cloud is ready to envelop you. A curse rests on you and your great canoe. She will sink
beneath the great water and your blood shall stain the hand of those in whom you trusted!”

  The old man then continued his tale. When the ship was finished, she was forty feet long, eighteen feet wide, and weighed sixty tons. A single mast lifted her sails to catch the winds, and five cannons protruded from each side of her hull. La Salle named her Le Griffon, after the mythical beast with the head of an eagle and the body of a lion. He did that because the griffin was on the coat of arms of Count Frontenac, governor of New France. A man deeply in debt always wants to get in the good graces of a rich nobleman. A woodcarver shaped the prow in the beast’s image, and La Salle bragged that “the griffin will fly above the crows,” by which he meant that Frontenac would overcome the black-robed Jesuits’ influence among the Northwestern Indians.

  Le Griffon was launched on the seventh of August, sent off with a three-cannon salute, a Mass, and a singing of “Te Deum,” a Gregorian chant for God’s mercy. Besides La Salle, some of the passengers were his faithful sidekick, Henri de Tonty; Father Louis Hennepin, a great explorer in his own right; and Luke the Dane, a giant wheelsman who piloted Le Griffon out of Cayuga Creek and onto Lake Erie. On its first day out, Le Griffon passed Long Point, on the north shore of the lake; on the second, it passed Point Pelee; on the third, it sailed up Wa-we-a-tu-nong, which was the Indian name for the river where Cadillac would found his great city a few decades later. The voyageurs on board stepped out and killed deer for the ship’s larder and plucked grapes for wine.

  “This Father Hennepin could see Detroit was going to be a big deal,” said the Old Man.

  He took down a copy of Francis Parkman’s La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West from his shelf, and from a bookmarked page, read Hennepin’s description of the future site of Detroit:

  We found the country on both sides of this beautiful strait, adorned with fine open plains. Any number of stags, deer, bear (by no means fierce, and very good to eat), pouler d’indes (wild turkey) in abundance, and all kinds of game. The vessel’s guys were loaded and decked with wild animals our French and Indian hunters had shot and dressed. The islands on both shores of the straits are covered with primeval forests, fruit trees, like walnuts, chestnuts, plum and apple trees, wild vines loaded with grapes, of which latter some were gathered, and a quantity of wine was made. The vast herds of deer surprised us all, and it appears to be the place of all other where the deer love to congregate.

  The day after it left Detroit, Le Griffon sailed into a little lake. This was August eleventh, the feast day of Sainte Claire of Assisi, a follower of St. Francis, so La Salle named his new discovery after her, although when the Americans took over, they changed the name to Lake St. Clair.

  When Le Griffon got out onto Lake Huron, a terrific storm blew in. Hennepin and all the Frenchmen prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things. Luke the Dane, who wasn’t a Frenchman, or even Catholic, cursed at La Salle from bringing him to die on French waters. At Michilimackinac, Le Griffon fired its cannons, and was surrounded by the bark canoes of a hundred Odawa who wanted to get a closer look at the floating fort. They were like minnows inspecting a shark.

  Finally, Le Griffon put in at Green Bay, where La Salle’s voyageurs had collected twelve thousand pounds of furs, worth sixty thousand francs—more than enough money to pay off his debts. The voyageurs loaded the furs onto Le Griffon, and La Salle ordered Luke the Dane to sell them in Niagara, then meet him back at the mouth of the St. Joseph River, in Michigan, where he planned to build a fort. It was mid-September by then. As La Salle, Hennepin, and the rest of their party paddled down the shore of Lake Michigan, they constantly had to beach their canoes to escape foul weather.

  Le Griffon was never heard from again. Some people say it sank in an autumn storm. If that’s true, it would not only have been the first ship on the Great Lakes, but the first shipwreck. Others say the ship was captured by Indians, who had always seen Le Griffon as a vehicle for the French to intrude on their territory, and burned to the waterline.

  “La Salle was like a lot of big shots then and now,” the Old Man told Don. “He was obsessed with his men’s loyalty.”

  La Salle thought his men had sunk the boat themselves and made off with his furs and hides. He even wrote a letter to the authorities in Quebec, claiming an Indian boy had told him that a tall white man, about the size of Luke the Dane, had been captured and brought to his village as a prisoner, carrying a bundle of furs he intended to sell to the Sioux. Whatever had happened to Le Griffon, La Salle was in a bind. He couldn’t pay his creditors, so they seized his property in Montreal. Le Griffon had also contained the rigging for a ship he had planned to build at Fort Crevecoeur, a fort he established that winter on the Illinois River, where Peoria is today, so he could sail down the Mississippi. So La Salle walked all the way from Illinois to Montreal, begged another loan from Count Frontenac, and brought a whole new batch of supplies back to Fort Crevecoeur. And with those supplies, he built another ship, and sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Now, I said Le Griffon was never seen again,” the old man said to Don, “but you know that’s not true, because you saw it yourself. It’s been reappearing on the Lakes ever since it disappeared from this corporeal world. All the way back in ’01, the year I was born, a ship headed from Chicago to Muskegon saw it pass right in front of her bow, all covered in ice, just as the sky was darkening for a storm. I saw it during my own first year on the Lakes. I was standing watch during a storm, when I saw that ragged ship headed straight for our hull. I rang the alarm bell to warn the wheelsman, but just as the ship was about to collide with us, she disappeared. When I told the older sailors what I’d seen, they all said it was “the Griffin”—they used the English name. I took that as a warning. The first ship ever on Lake Michigan, and it sank in a September storm!

  “I’m a hawsepipe. I worked my way up from where you are to where I am today.” The old man touched the bill of his cap with two fingers. “I’ve always been a captain who guarded the lives of my men. I’ve never pushed through a storm just to get a tonnage bonus, like some guys who’ve ended up at the bottom of the lake. If you decide to stick with this and work your way up, I’m sure you’ll do the same, because you saw Le Griffon.”

  Don did work his way up, to become the master of his own boat, the Joseph A. Block. During his first season, he heard that a rookie deckhand had reported seeing a rotting wooden ship float out of the morning fog. The ship, he insisted, had disappeared just before it collided with the bow. Don took the kid into his office, and told him the story of Le Griffon, just as the Old Man had told it to him.

  BESSIE: THE LAKE ERIE MONSTER

  f you live in Northeast Ohio, you’ve probably heard of Bessie, the Lake Erie Monster. You may have drunk an IPA called Lake Erie Monster, which is produced by the Great Lakes Brewing Co. of Cleveland. Or you may have watched the Lake Erie Monsters, a minor league hockey team that plays in Quicken Loans Arena. But have you ever seen the Lake Erie Monster in real life?

  Two fishermen, who liked to spend summer Saturdays out on the lake with a pole in one hand and a can of Schlitz in the other, saw Bessie one terrifying afternoon in the 1980s. Frank and Joe left the East 55th Street marina in Cleveland just after dawn, in Frank’s twenty-foot fishing boat, the Cool Breeze. They had a cooler full of beer and sandwiches and a carton of worms they’d purchased from Vic, the old Croat who ran the bait shop. Lake Erie was waveless, windless, and as smooth as a blue tarpaulin stretched from Detroit to Buffalo. Frank and Joe motored fifteen miles from shore, set their lines, pulled the brims of their caps over their eyes to shade them from the white sun, and cracked open a couple of tall boys. By the afternoon, the six-pack was gone, replaced in the cooler with the glittering corpses of walleye and perch. They planned on picking up another six-pack on the drive back to Joe’s place, where they’d gut and fry the fish to eat with greens and cobbler. Mrs. Joe Deshazer made the best peach cobbler in East Cleveland.

 
The two anglers were hauling in their lines when the water beneath them began to heave and swell. Frank grabbed the side of the boat. His foot reached forward in awkward half step, as he struggled to keep his balance. Frank and Joe looked each other bewildered. Storms whip up quickly on Lake Erie, the smallest and shallowest of the Great Lakes, but it had been as gentle as a pond all day, and still no waves disturbed its glossy sheen, no storm clouds darkened the Canadian shore. Frank was pitched against the railing. He looked down into the lake and saw a black shape, longer than his boat, gliding beneath the surface. The wavering water blurred the creature’s shape, but Frank thought it looked like the biggest alligator he had ever seen.

  It was no alligator. The creature gripped the hull of the Cool Breeze with its long arms and began rocking the boat back and forth. The cooler slid across the deck, struck the railing, and tumbled into the water, its lid flying off and releasing the day’s catch back into the lake. Shaking and tingling, fear filling his body like helium, Frank stumbled to the captain’s chair and fired up the engine. As he opened the throttle, the creature released its grip, and the Cool Breeze sped back to Cleveland at top gear. As soon as he calmed down enough to let go of the wheel, Frank radioed the Coast Guard.

  “I just saw a creature that looked like a really long alligator,” he reported. “The damn thing grabbed my boat and tried to tip it over! I was shaking like a bell!”

  “Sir, can you tell us what color it was, how long it was?” the officer on duty asked.

  “It was black, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and it was longer than my boat, and my boat is twenty feet long.”

  “Sir, it sounds as though you saw the Lake Erie Monster. If you give us your coordinates, we’ll send a cutter.”

  The Lake Erie Monster was Cleveland’s creation. During the city’s industrial heyday, the Cuyahoga River—the slow, sinuous channel that carried the effluent of steel mills, paint manufacturers, and chemical plants into Lake Erie—was one of the filthiest bodies of water in the world. The Cuyahoga was so combustible that a spark from a passing train ignited a fire that floated downstream, charring a railroad bridge. It was said that the toxins did not just kill the river’s wildlife, but mutated them. There were stories of three-eyed trout and hermaphroditic carp that carried both eggs and milt. As the river became packed with industrial waste, it barely qualified as water anymore, so a clever fish decided that if he couldn’t beat the factories, he would join them. Born with abnormally long flippers and a pair of lungs, the fish crawled out of the river and presented himself at the employment office of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, wearing a hard hat to conceal the fact that he had no hair or ears. Giving his name as Norbert Bass, he was hired as a stoker, shoveling ore into the furnace on the night shift. The fish worked his way up to inspector, earning enough money to buy a house in Parma and a vacation timeshare in Florida. Sadly, his success led to his demise. A freshwater fish, he died while swimming in the Gulf of Mexico with his wife and children.