Part Three - One Hundred Years of Michigan Work in Art: 1850 to 1950
The Michigan Worker Afloat: Turtlebacks and Fish Tugs
With only a rusting turtleback for a Bluenose and no ranting Ahab to anchor it in popular culture, Michigan’s commercial fishery is dimly remembered, if remembered at all. Nevertheless, for 150 years the fishing fleets from South Haven to Naubinway on Lake Michigan, Alpena to Sebewaing on Lake Huron, and Isle Royale to Grand Marias on Lake Superior employed thousands, both directly and in support industries.[i]
The isolated fishing communities of the Beaver Island archipelago were the setting for Beloved Pawn (1923) by Traverse City writer Harold Titus (1888-1967). In the novel, fishermen are called the “scum of the Lakes,” whose “slab shacks”[ii] lean disconsolately behind rows of net reels. If the poverty of their living conditions is any indication, fishermen, like workers in most of Michigan’s iconic industries, saw little of the wealth they helped create. [iii]
Escanaba writer Louis Kintziger (1906-1990) mixes naivety with sophistication in the dialogue he gives to the aging fisherman Albert Kane in his novel Bay Mild, set on Bay de Noc in the 1920s. Though Kane blames Chicagoans for “stealing the water from Lake Michigan to flush away their sewage,”[iv] his assessment of the other threats to his livelihood (over-fishing and point-source pollution) are politically canny: “They’re big corporations, them trap netters….they got so much power and money they can keep the state of Michigan from outlawing their deep trap nets.”[v] Citing the toxic discharge from a nearby paper mill, Kane fumes “ [they’re] allowed to dump anything in the water they want to, acid or anything. A slug of something they let go got into my net, that’s why she’s rotten, that’s why she’s done for.”[vi]
A powerful yet serene study of fisherman at work, “Hauling in the Nets,” by painter Zoltan Sepeshy (1898-1974) was completed in 1938. Commissioned by the Treasury Department’s Section for Fine Arts for the Lincoln Park post office (near Detroit), it shows three muscular men in an open boat, the success of their catch visible in the weight of the nets and in the overflowing fish boxes behind them. The dominant image in the thirteen-by-five-foot egg-tempera mural is the elongated arms of the men, whose braided muscles resemble ropes or cable. Though an intense effort is being exerted, the work is paced, the workers confident.
The message implicit in Sepeshy’s painting—“this is man’s stuff, for men”[vii]—is expressed in the opening scene of Bay Mild. The title character is a young man torn between continuing to work with his father in the tiny, dying northern Michigan town that he loves, or leaving home to attend college downstate, a world he knows nothing about:
Bay stepped into the boat’s fish compartments...He dragged his feet through the solid, slippery fish as though to enjoy the feel of them. His arms, his hands, his legs—all of him, had helped get those fish there….Bay dug the dipnet into the mass of fish he stood in, filling it; and then he lifted the fish up and dumped them into the boxes on the dock. Long threads of slime and fish scales dripped down and blew back into his face. And he let the stuff cling there. It was man’s stuff, for men.” [viii]
Though deeply flawed in parts, Kintziger’s lyrical and almost otherworldly novel is an accurate and unsentimental account of the vicissitudes of commercial fishing in northern Lake Michigan, written by a man who knew the life from personal experience. Though Kintziger later endowed a scholarship for writers at Bay de Noc Community College, there’s no record of his ever attending college himself or of his writing another novel.
Part 4 of this series will continue with “The Michigan Worker On Land.”
[i] “By 1929, the number of individuals generating income from commercial fishing numbered in the tens of thousands.” Michigan Department of Natural Resources, “History of State-licensed Great Lakes Commercial Fishing,” Michigan.gov/dnr. Though record keeping was hit or miss in the nineteenth century, it is estimated that “Since 1890, the value of this catch has seldom fallen below $1,500,000 and [in 1941 was] considered to be worth $2,000,000 annually,” (approximately 36 million dollars today.) Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 67.
[ii] Harold Titus, Beloved Pawn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923), 4.
[iii]Making a living as a fisherman was never easy: “You worked ten hours a day, six days a week, twenty-nine bucks for a week’s wages!...It’s a tough game.” Timothy C. Lloyd and Patrick B. Mullen, Lake Erie Fishermen: Work Tradition, and Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 86.
“By the 1850s…investment poured in and profits were made. Continued mechanization meant smaller fishermen, including Indigenous groups, could no longer compete with bank-financed operations….The few that remained independent operated small, mostly family organizations which pulled enough fish from the lakes to feed kin, with little surplus to sell at markets.” Great Lakes Now, “Great Lakes Commercial Fishing History,” greatlakesnow.org.
[iv] Louis J. Kintziger, Bay Mild (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1945), 86. Great Lake water levels fluctuate due to changing weather patterns (snowfall amounts, etc.); they are not controlled by a “big drain” in Chicago.
[v] Kintziger, 101.
[vi] Kintziger, 174.
[vii] Kintziger, 5-6.
[viii] Ibid.
Another well researched and informative article on Michigan history. Years ago (1975) I was hitchhiking out of Traverse City and was picked up by Bill Carlson of Carlson Fish Market in Leland’s Fishtown. We talked until Lansing. It was the start of my awareness of the history as well as the trials and tribulations of commercial fishing in NW Lake Michigan. There is the recreational fishing side too, along with the rights of the resident Native Americans. A mixed bag of considerations.
Really enjoying the series and learning a lot.