Short Stuff: Captain Santa

Herman Scheunemann wasn’t the only captain carrying Christmas trees across Lake Michigan to Chicago at the turn of the last century, but he was the most beloved. Which makes this episode even sadder. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:39Josh Clark?

  Hi and welcome to the short stuff. I should say Merry Christmas and welcome to the short stuff, everybody, because this episode comes out on December 25th, which as many people know is Christmas Day.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  That's right. And it's a rare Christmas short stuff where we also have to issue a warning for kids listening that this story, while beautiful and lovely, takes a very dark turn as yet another maritime disaster episode.

• 1:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I had second thoughts about this, but reading over it again, I'm like, no, this is a good Christmas story.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was so funny to me. I just have to tell everyone, when Josh sent it, I thought he was sending it as a joke of like, hey, here's a Christmas thing. Cause I had already given him a hard time about all the maritime disaster episodes we do. And here was another one and you're like, do we do a lot of those?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I was like, are you kidding me? I still couldn't tell.

• 1:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, I forgot about that Orang Madan and Mystery of the Sarah Joe two for in like, I think two weeks in a row or something.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but hey, this one is about the death of Captain Santa.

• 1:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so just ring some jingle bells for this maritime disaster and it'll differentiate it from the others, right?

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, this one has a very cool story around it though, because in Chicago, around the turn of the last century, they did a very cool thing wherein if you needed a Christmas tree, you could head down to the Chicago River and you could go aboard a real sailing ship loaded with Christmas lights and Christmas trees, like a little temporary Christmas tree lot to pick out your tree.

• 2:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And if you were down on your luck at the time and you went to a particular schooner, the Rouse Simmons, you would probably meet the captain. He was nicknamed Captain Santa. And if he found out that you were down on your luck, he would probably give you one of the Christmas trees free of charge.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Pretty great.

• 2:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So the reason that this was already a thing, this is the late 19th century. By this time, the Germans had been decorating Christmas trees for a very long time. But it wasn't until Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, who was from Germany, introduced it to England and it spread to America. So people wanted Christmas trees by this time pretty badly. And it was hard to come by in Chicago. Not a lot of forests in Chicago. So sailors who sailed schooners, or captains who sailed schooners, which are large masted ships used for shipping cargo, would sail from northern Michigan, from Wisconsin, with literal boatloads of Christmas trees and show up at the Clark Street docks in Chicago,

• 3:23Josh Clark?

  string up some lights on their boat and just say, come on aboard and pick out your tree.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  That's right. It's a pretty wonderful tradition. Captain Santa was born one Erman Schoonerman, obviously German, in somewhere probably around 1865. And he was second in line in the family business. His brother August would also do this along Lake Michigan, sell trees from the schooner. But Captain Santa was not a rich man. He only owned one eighth share of the Rouse Simmons. He was heavily in debt because he owned a saloon that put him about $1,300 in debt, about $42,000 today. So he wasn't a rich guy, which made

• 4:09Speaker 02

  the fact that he had some financial hardships even more heartwarming. Heartwarming? Heartwarming? That this guy would still give away trees if he couldn't afford one.

• 4:20Josh Clark?

  So with a failed saloon, he was like, well, I've got to get out there and be captaining the Ralph Simmons as much as possible. He had a wife named Barbara. He had three daughters, two of whom were twins, which is usually how twins come. And so it's important to say, he was not the only ship that would sail to Chicago. In addition to his brother, there were plenty of other captains, but he differentiated himself from his generosity, from his jolliness. And the Chicago papers gave him the nickname Captain Santa. And so by this time, this last run that he would make, and yes, that is kind of a cryptic

• 5:00Josh Clark?

  way to put it, it was November, mid-November. And this was around the last time of the year where you could cross the Great Lakes. In particular, he was crossing Lake Michigan. So he was making one last run with the Ralph Simmons so loaded with Christmas trees that witnesses later said it looked like a floating forest. And it turns out, Chuck, that this was the last trip that both Captain Shuniman and the Ralph Simmons would ever make.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Are we going to be right back after this?

• 5:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  All right. Part two coming up.

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• 7:36Speaker 02

  Okay, we're back. We're somber. The Christmas joy has now been replaced by yet another maritime disaster. Because after they set sail on November 22, 1912, heavily loaded with 3,000 to 5,000 Christmas trees, a floating forest, as you said. Things went bad. They knew things could go bad because August, that older brother that we talked about, he actually already had died in a boat, a ship loaded with Christmas trees, not too long before. I bet he was about 14 years earlier, November 1898. Devastated the family, obviously, but Armand marched on. The schooner was spotted by a lifesaving station

• 8:20Speaker 02

  at Kiwanee, Wisconsin. Had its flag at half-mast, which means I need help. Their motorboat was the only vessel that could make it in the storm. But it was on the lake already doing something out of touch. So by the time they got in touch with the station at Two Rivers and got their motorboat out, it was too late. That boat was gone.

• 8:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was only 20 minutes that had passed, but by the time that motorboat from Two Rivers made it out there, they were like, we, we couldn't see it. I mean, it was dark. And this was in the afternoon, but it was so dark and the snow was so heavy and the mist was so thick that they were like, it's, it's not there. So they don't know exactly where it went down. They didn't know where it went down for a very long time, about half a century. But the thing is, is despite the fact that it had vanished, no one saw it go down. So like in maritime thinking, it was not necessarily lost. It could have made it out of sight into a safe harbor and waited that mid-November storm out. And that's what Barbara and her

• 9:25Josh Clark?

  daughters were thinking. They were concerned when the Ralph Simmons did not show up in Chicago as, as planned, like on its normal schedule. That's the word I'm looking for.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:36Josh Clark?

  It's a Christmas miracle. I just pulled that word out of thin air.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  [laughing]

• 9:41Josh Clark?

  But they also realized like it's possible they were just sheltering in a harbor for a little while. Let's give it a few days before we're really worried.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. That came over the next weeks and months when Christmas trees started washing up on the Wisconsin shoreline. It turns out that they were, their fears were confirmed. The Ralph Simmons was never seen again. Up to 23 people perished. There, it seems like there were some lumberjacks who hitched a ride in addition to the Captain Santa and the crew. And they, you know, people would find things here and there in 1924. This is pretty remarkable. They actually found Captain Santa's wallet wrapped in waterproof oil skin.

• 10:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there was no doubting it. It had his business card.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:29Josh Clark?

  It also had like clippings of some of the newspaper accounts on him as Captain Santa. It was definitely his wallet. And I mean, found in a fishing net is not the way you want to find your lost husband's wallet. No. So the Ross, the Ross Simmons was definitely lost, but Barbara herself carried on this, uh, this family tradition of delivering Christmas trees, uh, in Chicago for several more years. As a matter of fact, using schooners. Eventually they moved over to, to trains, which is far more sensible. But they, uh, the, the loss of the Ralph Simmons was basically the signal like, okay,

• 11:09Josh Clark?

  the, the, um, the age of schooners sailing across the Great Lakes using cargo and in particular showing up at the Clark Street docks with Christmas trees is probably over.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the, the cool thing about his family continuing, even when they brought him in by train, they would take them to a docked schooner.

• 11:26Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  And sell them from that. And even after that, they sold trees from a lot. So they were just a legit Christmas tree business family by that point. But like you said, that kind of was the beginning of the end for the whole practice. There are some interesting little, uh, sort of ghost stories and rumors, I guess you might call them, that like, uh, you can still smell evergreen in that area, uh, and that, that the trees may have, uh, maybe still be in good shape, like, uh, preserved at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

• 12:01Josh Clark?

  Did you see the, the photo of it?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:04Josh Clark?

  That was apparently the real deal, like that some of their, they're so well preserved in the silt that some of them still have their needles attached.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  That's incredible. I don't, I can't get my needles to last through New Year's.

• 12:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So a diver in Lake Michigan, I think Lake Michigan is now the Vogte Clear Lake, thanks to the zebra, zebra muscle invasion.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:24Josh Clark?

  But at the time in 1971, when it was discovered, a diver felt it out by hand and somehow figured out that this was the Ralph Simmons that he had found in like 172 feet of water. And then over time, I think in 2006, some underwater archaeologists did the first survey. And there's a picture, I think Atlas Obscura has a really great article on this. And, um, they, uh, there's a overhead shot of the Ralph Simmons sitting upright on the bottom of Lake Michigan and you can see. Some of the Christmas tree timbers still scattered around it.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, amazing. And I believe where the evergreen scent is present is near Barbara's gravesite.

• 13:03Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  At Acacia Park Cemetery in Chicago. One thing that struck me as very sad, I mean, obviously, the 23 souls aboard, including Captain Santa, is very tragic, but I also feel bad about 5,000 live trees that just went to waste.

• 13:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that is very sad.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  It's a lot of trees.

• 13:20Josh Clark?

  I hadn't thought about that. Wow. If this wasn't a bummer Christmas episode, it sure is now. It's a but, but it might be, it might not be a scary ghost story, but it is a tale of the glory of Christmas is long, long ago, if you ask me.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  True.

• 13:34Josh Clark?

  And so to kind of tie the whole thing up in a nice Christmas bow, Captain Santa was so beloved, the Chicago papers went nuts when the Ralph Simmons was lost. There was a legend, which was apparently true, of a poor little girl who was waiting at the Clark Street docks for Captain Santa himself to get her Christmas tree and was left waiting forever, essentially. But he's still so beloved around this area that every year in early December, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Mackinaw commemorates the Ralph Simmons' journey across Lake Michigan and brings a load of Christmas trees to Chicago's disadvantaged kids.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  That's great. Happy ending.

• 14:15Josh Clark?

  It is a happy ending.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  You nailed it.

• 14:18Josh Clark?

  It's a Christmas ending.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has a dark center. It's called, it's called a Happy Christmas sandwich.

• 14:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah, there you go.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:26Josh Clark?

  I want to give a big shout out and thanks to Glenn V. Longacre, who wrote a great 2006 article in the National Archives' now-defunct Prologue magazine, in addition to Atlas Obscura, too.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  That's right. And is this coming out, when would this be, like, a couple of days before New Year's?

• 14:43Josh Clark?

  No, this comes out on Christmas. It is Christmas right now, Chuck.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Oh, well, Merry Christmas.

• 14:49Josh Clark?

  Merry Christmas, Chuck. Merry Christmas to everybody who's listening, and Happy Holidays. Short Stuff is out.

• 15:00Speaker 05

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