Submitted by Sandy Richardson
I found Robin Hilborn’s Bruce County Memories article in Issue #5 of the Bruce Peninsula Press interesting. What Hilborn and Bruce Krug describe as a “poem” I know as a song. It was collected in 1934 by Ivan H. Walton from John “Red” McDonald, the son of Captain John McDonald, the owner and captain of the schooner Kolfage, 20 years before Bruce Krug collected the poem from Bert MacDonald who I assume was “Red’s” brother. (McDonald is the spelling Walton used; he also recorded the name of the author of the poem or song differently – Jack MacCosh rather than John McCuish.)
The information about the poem/song reported by the two brothers differs somewhat. In Walton’s recording the trip was to a lumber camp on Georgian Bay, not Johnston’s Harbour (Johnson’s?) on the Bruce Peninsula. Walton also records that the song was written so that the two men could get off the ship at the camp and not have to return, rather than to pay for their return trip. The poem/song itself as recorded by both Krug and Walton is nearly identical.
Here is Walton’s description of the song and the story behind it:
A Trip on the Schooner Kolfage
Owner-operator Captain John McDonald, nicknamed “Minister” for the frequency with which he invoked the Lord’s name, appreciated a good song even more than he appreciated heartfelt cursing. According to his sailor son, John “Red” McDonald, “The Old Man would damn near give away his schooner for a good song.” In this case, the schooner was the Kolfage. Not much distinguished the tiny, 93-net-ton lumber hooker Kolfage from scores of similar boats that sailed the Great Lakes in the mid-1800s. Not much, that is, except this song. A shallow, scow-built schooner, the Kolfage could slip up and down rivers where deeper vessels dared not venture. Such vessels, some said, could sail on as little as a heavy dew. The Kolfage had seen more than twenty seasons since it came down the ways at Port Burwell, Ontario, on Lake Erie in 1869.
On this trip, the Kolfage stops at Chatham, Ontario, about twenty miles up the Thames River from Lake St. Clair, to load supplies for a Georgian Bay lumber camp. Ready for the tow back out into the lake, but being short of hands, McDonald signed two men, Jack MacCosh and Herb Pettigrew, for the round-trip. “They wasn’t no real sailors,” said the younger McDonald, “just two men the Old Man picked up to help out. They got enough of sailing on the up trip and wanted to get off. The Old Man cussed them out plenty and wouldn’t give them no pay. Then he said to them, ‘If you’ll make me a good song, you can go.’ They went away and came back the next day with this one… He gave them each a dollar extra and tacked the song up in the cabin where it still was when he sold her.”
The song tells how the Kolfage ran up Lake St. Clair before the wind, racing a steamboat into the “Cut,” the dredged channel through the St. Clair Flats. With neither boat giving way to the other, the schooner struck the steamer a glancing blow, turning it aground. Before the crews came to blows, a fresh breeze blew the schooner up the river to Sarnia, where the Kolfage became windbound in the bay under Point Edward. The next day, after a tow into Lake Huron, the schooner had an easier race with two slow, bluff-nosed canallers mocked as “Lake Ontario clippers.”
“Red” McDonald said he was a member of the crew on the trip described. He supplied these stanzas in the summer of 1934. The same summer, Robert Reid of Red Bay on the lake side of the peninsula said that a copy of the song was on a cabin wall when he purchased the vessel from McDonald. Reid recited it all the way through. When asked about the tune, he replied, “I just use any tune that fits.”
Ivan Walton was a professor of American literature at the University of Michigan and a leading authority on Great Lakes folklore. He collected stories and songs from Great Lakes sailors from the days of sail starting in the 1920s through to the 1950s, amassing a large collection of material. He prepared notes for an anthology of songs and lore of Great Lakes sailors, but it was unpublished at the time of his death in 1968. Following his death, his family donated his collection of diaries, field notes, transcription and recordings to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. Joe Grimm worked with the Walton collection and published Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors (Wayne State University Press) in 2002. (The description of the song quoted above is from this book.)
In 2004, Lee Murdock, (a folk musician from Kanesville, Illinois) created a “tune that fits” and recorded the song “A Trip on the Schooner Kolfage” on his CD Between Two Worlds (see https://leemurdock.com).
It would be interesting to know whether Kolfage Island at the mouth of Pike Bay is tied to the schooner Kolfage in some way.
