Shipping and navigation

Summary

The Beaver Island archipelago sits directly in the way. Traffic between the Straits of Mackinac and the southern half of Lake Michigan — and between the Straits and Green Bay — has to pass either north or south of the group, and the group is strewn with reefs. That geography produced everything on this page: a land-locked harbour that became a port of call in the 1840s, a wooding trade that fuelled the steamers, four light stations, a life-saving station, and a run of charts beginning with the U.S. Lake Survey sheet of 1855 and continuing to the present.

The archipelago’s importance to shipping peaked before the island’s own economy did and outlasted it. By 1902 the Coast Pilot could route a master to Beaver Island Harbor from five directions; the settlement it served had already lost most of its people.

The track past the islands

Scott’s New Coast Pilot for the Lakes (1902) makes the position explicit. It gives compass courses from Waugoshance and St. Helena to Green Bay, to Poverty Island Passage, to Sturgeon Bay, to the South, Middle and West Passages down the lake, and to Beaver Island Harbor itself — and it treats the choice of side as a weather decision:

The route from St. Helena and Waugoshance to Green bay north of the Beaver group, will be found very convenient when blowing hard from the northward. By taking this route vessels can keep in smooth water. The distances are about equal.

Two passages of equal length, one sheltered, is a good short description of why the group mattered. The book also gives the anchorages. Of Beaver Island itself:

There is good anchorage in the bight on the east side of the island, and protection from all westerly gales. Large sailing vessels prefer it to Beaver harbor, on account of having more sea room to get away.

High Island’s north-east bay is described as good holding ground with protection from all winds except the south. Gull Island Reef gets its own entry as “This very dangerous shoal, with only 5 feet of water”, four miles from the south point of Gull Island; Hog Island Reef, Whiskey Island Shoal and Squaw Island Shoal are each buoyed and described.

The archipelago’s northernmost light is described as a turning point for the whole lake:

SQUAW ISLAND LIGHT-STATION. … On the northerly end of Squaw island, the most northerly of the Beaver Island group. … A coast-light marks the turning point into Lake Michigan.

That island is Ojibwa Island today; see Strang's biblical toponyms for the renaming and the search trap it creates.

The harbour

Saint James Harbor is the reason the island was settled at all. Strang’s 1854 gazetteer describes it as

the best in the Lakes, having an entrance eighty rods wide, with sixty feet water, a perfectly land-locked cove of great depth, with clay bottom, sufficiently extensive to accomodate a thousand vessels.

The claim is a promoter’s, but the underlying judgment is repeated by disinterested observers for the next sixty years — the Rock Island Argus in 1912 calls it “the best land-locked harbor along the entire lakes”.

Wooding stations

Before coal, Great Lakes steamers burned wood, and they had to take it on somewhere. Beaver Island’s forest and its harbour made it a wooding station, and by the mid-1850s the trade was the island’s second business after fish.

Strang, 1854: at Saint James “the principal articles sold are fish and wood … Three large wharves are devoted to the wood business.” The new village of Galilee at the south-east end existed for this and nothing else — “The only business yet opened is that of getting out wood for steamboats. A large wharf has been built for that purpose.”

The Daily Northern Islander of 1856 gives the market in operation:

Steamboat wood, near the wharves, sells at $1,75 to $2,00, and the quantity is larger than any past season, and of excellent quality. Down till this time the price has been $2,25 for the best quality of seasoned beech and maple steamboat wood. The sales at Galilee have amounted to more than 50 cords a day.

Advertisements in the same issues offer 3,000 cords of “best body wood, beech and maple” at Galilee, and describe an extended “wooding wharf” — the Old South Pier — “stocked with the largest and best stock of steamboat wood ever offered along the Lakes”. The same paper carries the steamer Michigan, Capt. Stewart, advertising regular trips “from Buffalo to Green Bay, stopping at Saint James and Galilee, on Beaver island”, carrying the United States mails.

Elizabeth Whitney Williams describes the seasonal rhythm from the other side of the Strangite/Gentile line: “In winter the cord wood was chopped and brought to the docks for the steamers’ fuel during the summer.” Her family’s neighbour Alva Cable “put out a good dock, built a large dwelling and store, carrying on the wood business for many years, as well as having a fish market.”

The trade was consequential enough that Strang could argue it was pulling commerce away from Mackinac: steamboats “which formerly stopped at no place in the region except Mackinac, now stop more at other points than there.”

Charts

The project holds a catalogue of 186 charts covering the archipelago, spanning 1855 to 2024. Two are U.S. Lake Survey First Series sheets; the rest are later nautical charts. The earliest is:

• 1855 — North End of Lake Michigan Including the Beaver Island Group, chart LS10, 1:120,000. Surveyed and issued while the Kingdom of Saint James was still standing, which makes it the only chart in the series contemporary with Strang.

The series then continues 1863 (LS26, the north-east end of the lake including the Fox and Manitou groups), 1867 and 1880 (LS33, 1:400,000, Green Bay and the Straits), 1874 (Straits of Mackinac), and from 1895 onward at increasing frequency. Counted by decade of issue, the catalogue is thinnest in the 19th century and densest in the 1900s (24), 1930s (22) and 1960s (26) — a distribution that reflects chart-revision practice and NOAA’s digitisation coverage rather than any change in the islands.

Two things follow. The charts are a continuous record of how the group was represented over 169 years, so they are the right instrument for dating changes in aids to navigation, in soundings, and in names. And because a chart of this kind is revised rather than resurveyed, a name or a hazard can persist across editions long after the ground truth has changed.

Hydrography beyond the charts

The project also holds a different kind of nautical evidence: the USGS Open-File Report 03-120 bathymetry collection, based on 2001 SHOALS airborne lidar. Its metadata covers Boulder, Dahlia, Gull, High, Hog, and Trout reef or coastal areas, including several features in and around the archipelago. The data can support questions about reef morphology, depths, and habitat context that a printed sailing direction cannot answer.

The distinction is important. A historical chart and Scott’s Coast Pilot are navigation documents with aids, courses, anchorages, and warnings. The 2001 SHOALS files are technical survey data, and their own metadata says they are not intended for navigation. The KB therefore links them to reef and shoal articles as survey evidence, not as a replacement for a current chart.

Lights, signals and rescue

By 1902 the Coast Pilot records a dense system around the group: fixed lights with named characteristics at Beaver Island (a fixed white light with white flashes, on the 60-foot bluff at the south end, guiding vessels through the 9½-mile channel between Beaver and North Fox), Beaver Island Harbor (a fixed red light on the north side of the harbour entrance), and Squaw Island; the guiding lights at Skilligallee (Isle aux Galets) and Waugoshance on the mainland approach; light-vessels on White Shoal and Gray’s Reef; and steam fog-whistles with timed blast patterns at most of them. Buoys are listed individually with their bearings from the lights.

The Coast Pilot places the Beaver Island Life-Saving Station “about 165 feet west of light-house” at the harbour entrance, and its Twelfth District keeper table lists Owen Gallagher against the Beaver Island station. (That table’s columns interleave badly in the PDF text layer; the pairing should be confirmed against the page image before being relied on.) The Rock Island Argus in 1912 mentions “an antiquated life-saving station” in the village.

The December 1970 local accounts preserve a later Great Lakes shipping career that began in this Beaver Island setting. John Roen reached the island through Gus Mielke’s sawmill, cut timber there, and used the resulting Schnoton to haul fruit and pulpwood. The Courier separately calls the Marquis Roen his first boat built in Charlevoix in 1920, and traces the Fred W. Green, the Roen companies, and the 1944 salvage of the George M. Humphrey. These are source-bounded links between island lumbering and the wider shipping network, not a complete Roen fleet or company history.¹

Open questions

• Where are the wrecks? The Michigan Underwater Preserve Council layer records 334 shipwrecks statewide and none in this archipelago, because the preserve system does not include Beaver Island. For a passage this heavily trafficked and this thoroughly reefed, zero is not a fact about the seabed; it is a fact about the dataset. A different source is needed — Great Lakes wreck registries, Life-Saving Service annual reports, or the marine columns of the Chronicling America papers.
• When did the wooding trade end? No source held here dates the transition to coal on this route. A traveller’s letter reprinted in the Bismarck Tribune in 1873 still describes a large cordwood pile on the dock worth $3 a cord (the quantity is illegible in the OCR); by 1912 the Argus describes a sawmill cutting lumber, not fuel.
• How do the 1855 chart’s soundings and names compare with the GLO plats and Farmer map? The chart title block, survey credit, light table, and sailing directions have been read from the held image; a full feature-by-feature transcription and comparison with the circa-1849 plat series remains open.
• Tonnage and traffic counts. Nothing held here quantifies how many vessels passed or called. Corps of Engineers annual reports on lake commerce would.
• The Life-Saving Station’s record. Its establishment date, service statistics and closure are not documented in the sources held here beyond Scott’s 1902 keeper listing.

See also

• Scott's New Coast Pilot for the Lakes
• North End of Lake Michigan Including the Beaver Island Group (1855 Lake Survey chart)
• General Land Office survey plats for the Beaver Island archipelago
• Saint James Harbor
• Gull Island Reef
• Ojibwa Island
• Beaver Island Light Station
• Beaver Island Harbor Light
• Squaw Island Light Station
• Beaver Island Life-Saving Station
• Commercial fishing
• Lumbering
• Strang's biblical toponyms
• Trout Island Shoal