December 25, 2024 • 13 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
II 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 twenty fifth, which, as
many people know, is Christmas Day.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, and it's a rare Christmas short stuff where
we also have to issue awarding for kids listening that
this story, while beautiful and lovely, takes a very dark
turn as yet another maritime disaster episode.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, this was so funny to me. I just have
to tell everyone. When Josh Sinnett, I thought he was
sending it as a joke of like, hey, here's a
Christmas thing, because I had already given him a hard
time about all the maritime disaster episodes we do and
here was another one, and You're.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Like, do we do a lot of those?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I was like, are you kidding me? I still couldn't tell.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Yeah, No, I forgot about that, Orang Madan and Mystery
of the Sarah Joe too for in like I think
two weeks in a row or something.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, but hey, this one is about the death of
Captain Santa.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, so just ring some jingle bells for this maritime
disaster and it'll differentiate it from the others, right.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, this one has a very cool story around it though,
because in Chicago around the turn of the Last Entry,
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
(01:40):
temporary Christmas tree lot to pick out your tree.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah. And if you were down on your luck at
the time and you went to a particular schooner, the
Rause Simmons, you would probably meet the captain. He was
nicknamed Captain Santa, and he would if he found out
that you were down on your luck, you would probably
give you one of the Christmas trees free of charge.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Pretty great.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah. So the reason that this was already a thing
this is the late nineteenth 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
(02:24):
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
(02:45):
show up at the Clark Street docks in Chicago, string
up some lights on their boat and just say come
on to board and pick out your tree.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
That's right, It's pretty wonderful, Tradish. Captain Santa was born
one Ermann Schuneman, obviously German and somewhere probably around eighteen
sixty five, 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
(03:16):
was not a rich man. He only owned one eighth
share of the Ralph Simmons. He was heavily in debt
because he owned a saloon that put him about thirteen
hundred dollars in debt about forty two thousand today, So
he wasn't a rich guy, which made you know the
fact that he had some financial hardships even more heartwarming, heartworming,
(03:39):
heartwarming that this guy would still give away trees if
he couldn't afford one.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, 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
(04:08):
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's kind of
a cryptic way to put it. It was November, mid November,
(04:29):
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 ral 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 Schunemann and the ral Simmons would
(04:51):
ever make.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Are we going to be right back after this?
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Yeah? I think so.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
All right, Part two coming up. Okay, we're back. We're somber.
(05:33):
The Christmas joy has now been replaced by yet another
maritime disaster because after they set sail on November twenty second,
nineteen twelve, heavily loaded with three to five thousand Christmas
trees a floating forest. As you said, things went bad.
They knew things could go bad because August, that older
(05:54):
brother that we talked about, he actually already had died
in a boat a shiploaded with Christmas trees, not too
long before, I beg was about fourteen years earlier November
eighteen ninety eight. Devastated the family, obviously, but Erman marched on.
The schooner was spotted by a life saving station at Kiwanee, Wisconsin,
(06:17):
had its flag at half mass, which means I need help.
Their motor boat 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.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah, it was only twenty minutes that had passed. But
by the time that motor boat from Two Rivers made
it out there, they were like, 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 not there. So they don't know exactly where it
went down. They didn't know where it went down for
(06:57):
a very long time, about half 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
(07:19):
daughters were thinking. They were concerned when the Ralph Simmons
did not show up in Chicago as planned, like on
its normal schedule. That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah,
it's a Christmas miracle. I just pulled that word out
of thin air. But they also realized, like, it's possible
they were just sheltering in a harbor for a little while.
(07:40):
Let's give it a few days before we're really worried.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah. That came over the next weeks and months when
Christmas tree 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 twenty three
people perished there. It seems like there were some lumberjacks
who hitched a ride in addition to the Captain Santa
(08:06):
and the crew, and they you know, people would find
things here and there. In nineteen twenty four, this is
pretty remarkable. They actually found Captain Santa's wallet wrapped in
waterproof oil skin.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Yeah, there was no doubting it. It had his business card. Yeah,
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 Simmons was definitely lost. But Barbara herself
(08:43):
carried on this family tradition of delivering Christmas trees in
Chicago for several more years, as a matter of fact,
using schooners. Eventually they moved over to trains, which is
far more sensible, But the loss of the Ralse Simmons
was basically the signal. Like, Okay, the age of schooners
(09:06):
sailing across the Great Lakes using cargo and in particular
showing up at the Clark Street docks with Christmas trees
is probably over.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, But the cool thing about his family continuing even
when they brought him in by train, they would take
them to a docked schooner 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.
(09:36):
There are some interesting little sort of ghost stories and rumors,
I guess you might call them that, like you can
still smell evergreen in that area, and that the trees
may have maybe still be in good shape, like preserved
at the bottom of Lake Michigan.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Did you see the photo of it. Yeah, that was
a currently the real deal, like that some of the
they're so well preserved in the silt that some of
them still have their needles attached.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
That's incredible. I don't I can't get my needles to
last through New Year's Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
So a diver in Lake Michigan. I think Lake Michigan
is now the Vogka Clear Lake thanks to the zebra
muscle invasion. Yeah, but at the time in nineteen seventy
one when it was discovered, a diver felt it out
by hand and somehow figured out that this was the
Rouse Simmons that he had found in like one hundred
and seventy two feet of water. And then over time,
(10:31):
I think in two thousand and six, some underwater archaeologists
to the first survey and there's a picture I think
Atlas Obscura has a really great article on this, and
there's an overhead shot of the Rause Simmons sitting upright
on the bottom of Lake Michigan and you can see
some of the Christmas tree timbers still scattered around it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Amazing. And I believe where the evergreen scent is present
is near Barbara's gravesite right at Acacia Park Cemetery in Chicago.
One thing that struck me as very sad. I mean,
obviously the twenty three souls aboard, including Captain Sanna. Is
very tragic. But I also feel bad about five thousand
live trees that just went to waste.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah, that is very sad. It's a lot about that. Wow.
If this wasn't a barmber 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 the
tale of the glory of Christmas is long long ago.
If you ask me and so to kind of tie
the whole thing up in a nice Christmas bow. Captain
Sanna was so beloved the Chicago papers went nuts when
(11:35):
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 Sanna 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 US Coast Guard Cutter Mackinaw
(11:59):
commemorates the Simmons journey across Lake Michigan and brings a
load of Christmas trees to Chicago's disadvantage. Kids.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
That's great, happy ending.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
It is a happy end. You nailed it. It's a
Christmas ending.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, it has a dark center. It's called a happy
Christmas sandwich.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I want to give
a big shout out and thanks to Glen V. Longacre,
who wrote a great two thousand and six article in
the National Archives now defunct Prologue magazine, in addition to
Alice Obscurity.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
That's right, And is this coming out? When would this
be like a couple of days before New Year's.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
No, this comes out on Christmas. It is Christmas right now.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Chuck. Oh well, Merry Christmas.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Merry Christmas, Chuck, Merry Christmas to everybody who's listening, and
happy Holidays. Short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
M
II 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 twenty fifth, which, as
many people know, is Christmas Day.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, and it's a rare Christmas short stuff where
we also have to issue awarding for kids listening that
this story, while beautiful and lovely, takes a very dark
turn as yet another maritime disaster episode.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, this was so funny to me. I just have
to tell everyone. When Josh Sinnett, I thought he was
sending it as a joke of like, hey, here's a
Christmas thing, because I had already given him a hard
time about all the maritime disaster episodes we do and
here was another one, and You're.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Like, do we do a lot of those?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I was like, are you kidding me? I still couldn't tell.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Yeah, No, I forgot about that, Orang Madan and Mystery
of the Sarah Joe too for in like I think
two weeks in a row or something.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, but hey, this one is about the death of
Captain Santa.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, so just ring some jingle bells for this maritime
disaster and it'll differentiate it from the others, right.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, this one has a very cool story around it though,
because in Chicago around the turn of the Last Entry,
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
(01:40):
temporary Christmas tree lot to pick out your tree.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah. And if you were down on your luck at
the time and you went to a particular schooner, the
Rause Simmons, you would probably meet the captain. He was
nicknamed Captain Santa, and he would if he found out
that you were down on your luck, you would probably
give you one of the Christmas trees free of charge.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Pretty great.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah. So the reason that this was already a thing
this is the late nineteenth 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
(02:24):
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
(02:45):
show up at the Clark Street docks in Chicago, string
up some lights on their boat and just say come
on to board and pick out your tree.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
That's right, It's pretty wonderful, Tradish. Captain Santa was born
one Ermann Schuneman, obviously German and somewhere probably around eighteen
sixty five, 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
(03:16):
was not a rich man. He only owned one eighth
share of the Ralph Simmons. He was heavily in debt
because he owned a saloon that put him about thirteen
hundred dollars in debt about forty two thousand today, So
he wasn't a rich guy, which made you know the
fact that he had some financial hardships even more heartwarming, heartworming,
(03:39):
heartwarming that this guy would still give away trees if
he couldn't afford one.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, 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
(04:08):
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's kind of
a cryptic way to put it. It was November, mid November,
(04:29):
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 ral 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 Schunemann and the ral Simmons would
(04:51):
ever make.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Are we going to be right back after this?
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Yeah? I think so.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
All right, Part two coming up. Okay, we're back. We're somber.
(05:33):
The Christmas joy has now been replaced by yet another
maritime disaster because after they set sail on November twenty second,
nineteen twelve, heavily loaded with three to five thousand Christmas
trees a floating forest. As you said, things went bad.
They knew things could go bad because August, that older
(05:54):
brother that we talked about, he actually already had died
in a boat a shiploaded with Christmas trees, not too
long before, I beg was about fourteen years earlier November
eighteen ninety eight. Devastated the family, obviously, but Erman marched on.
The schooner was spotted by a life saving station at Kiwanee, Wisconsin,
(06:17):
had its flag at half mass, which means I need help.
Their motor boat 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.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah, it was only twenty minutes that had passed. But
by the time that motor boat from Two Rivers made
it out there, they were like, 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 not there. So they don't know exactly where it
went down. They didn't know where it went down for
(06:57):
a very long time, about half 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
(07:19):
daughters were thinking. They were concerned when the Ralph Simmons
did not show up in Chicago as planned, like on
its normal schedule. That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah,
it's a Christmas miracle. I just pulled that word out
of thin air. But they also realized, like, it's possible
they were just sheltering in a harbor for a little while.
(07:40):
Let's give it a few days before we're really worried.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah. That came over the next weeks and months when
Christmas tree 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 twenty three
people perished there. It seems like there were some lumberjacks
who hitched a ride in addition to the Captain Santa
(08:06):
and the crew, and they you know, people would find
things here and there. In nineteen twenty four, this is
pretty remarkable. They actually found Captain Santa's wallet wrapped in
waterproof oil skin.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Yeah, there was no doubting it. It had his business card. Yeah,
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 Simmons was definitely lost. But Barbara herself
(08:43):
carried on this family tradition of delivering Christmas trees in
Chicago for several more years, as a matter of fact,
using schooners. Eventually they moved over to trains, which is
far more sensible, But the loss of the Ralse Simmons
was basically the signal. Like, Okay, the age of schooners
(09:06):
sailing across the Great Lakes using cargo and in particular
showing up at the Clark Street docks with Christmas trees
is probably over.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, But the cool thing about his family continuing even
when they brought him in by train, they would take
them to a docked schooner 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.
(09:36):
There are some interesting little sort of ghost stories and rumors,
I guess you might call them that, like you can
still smell evergreen in that area, and that the trees
may have maybe still be in good shape, like preserved
at the bottom of Lake Michigan.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Did you see the photo of it. Yeah, that was
a currently the real deal, like that some of the
they're so well preserved in the silt that some of
them still have their needles attached.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
That's incredible. I don't I can't get my needles to
last through New Year's Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
So a diver in Lake Michigan. I think Lake Michigan
is now the Vogka Clear Lake thanks to the zebra
muscle invasion. Yeah, but at the time in nineteen seventy
one when it was discovered, a diver felt it out
by hand and somehow figured out that this was the
Rouse Simmons that he had found in like one hundred
and seventy two feet of water. And then over time,
(10:31):
I think in two thousand and six, some underwater archaeologists
to the first survey and there's a picture I think
Atlas Obscura has a really great article on this, and
there's an overhead shot of the Rause Simmons sitting upright
on the bottom of Lake Michigan and you can see
some of the Christmas tree timbers still scattered around it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Amazing. And I believe where the evergreen scent is present
is near Barbara's gravesite right at Acacia Park Cemetery in Chicago.
One thing that struck me as very sad. I mean,
obviously the twenty three souls aboard, including Captain Sanna. Is
very tragic. But I also feel bad about five thousand
live trees that just went to waste.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah, that is very sad. It's a lot about that. Wow.
If this wasn't a barmber 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 the
tale of the glory of Christmas is long long ago.
If you ask me and so to kind of tie
the whole thing up in a nice Christmas bow. Captain
Sanna was so beloved the Chicago papers went nuts when
(11:35):
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 Sanna 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 US Coast Guard Cutter Mackinaw
(11:59):
commemorates the Simmons journey across Lake Michigan and brings a
load of Christmas trees to Chicago's disadvantage. Kids.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
That's great, happy ending.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
It is a happy end. You nailed it. It's a
Christmas ending.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, it has a dark center. It's called a happy
Christmas sandwich.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I want to give
a big shout out and thanks to Glen V. Longacre,
who wrote a great two thousand and six article in
the National Archives now defunct Prologue magazine, in addition to
Alice Obscurity.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
That's right, And is this coming out? When would this
be like a couple of days before New Year's.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
No, this comes out on Christmas. It is Christmas right now.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Chuck. Oh well, Merry Christmas.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Merry Christmas, Chuck, Merry Christmas to everybody who's listening, and
happy Holidays. Short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
M
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