Apr 9, 2009 1:39 pm US/Central
Arrrr! Real Pirates Once Sailed On Lake Michigan
Some Even Plundered The Shores Of Chicago
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
While the world watches
the Somali pirate drama, there's a story to be told of pirates right here on Lake Michigan.
WBBM Newsradio 780's Steve Miller found out that the lake in Chicago's front yard was home to a few pirates from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
You'll find proof in an edition of the New York Times from Oct. 10, 1855. The headline: Wholesale robbery by pirates on Lake Michigan.
The New York Times reported on people in the area around Saugutuck, Mich., "thrown into the most intense excitement by the operations of a gang of marauders, who are reported to be Mormons from Beaver Island."
But these pirates weren't attacking other ships. They were going after land-based stores.
Beaver Island is located toward the north end of Lake Michigan between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan, and it has its own bizarre history. In the 1850s, James Jesse Strang crowned himself the king of the island and declared it a separate country from the United States. Strang was eventually assassinated.
Another incident of piracy came in June 1908, when "Roaring" Dan Seavey took control of a Great Lakes cargo ship and sailed it to Chicago.
Seavey got control of the 40-foot schooner Nellie Johnson in Grand Haven, Mich., by out-drinking its captain and crew, then stealing it.
Seavey was known as a large, intimidating man who drank hard and fought harder. In the years since he sailed the lakes, other legends have sprung up around him.
Rumors said that Seavey killed a man by dropping a piano on him, and that he hunted gold in Alaska with Frederick Pabst of beer notoriety. And no one knew where the skulls he kept on the hull of his ship came from, the Sun-Times reported.
Nonetheless, the Sun-Times said Seavey "found no fortune in his pirating: He was unable to sell the load of cedar posts in Chicago and was captured back near his home in Frankfort, Michigan." Seavey died in 1949.
There were also pirates that roamed and plundered right in the heart of Chicago. During the 1870s, Dick Dooley and his partner "One Night Stand" Cullen sailed along the city's lakefront and riverfront, stopping to raid warehouses and distilleries and steal their cargo, according to the book
Strange but True Chicago.
And most infamously of all, Captain George Wellington Streeter stranded his boat on a sandbar on the lake just north of downtown in 1886, then stranded declared that his land was outside of the jurisdiction of Illinois law.
Authorities tried to evict Streeter numerous times, in conflicts that led to gun battles, before a court finally succeeded in removing him in 1918. The trendy Streeterville neighborhood still bears Cap'n Streeter's name.
WBBM Newsradio 780's Steve Miller contributed to this report.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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