Stories from the Wreckage by John Odin Jensen

Author:John Odin Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2019-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Divers investigate wreckage of the bulk steamer James Davidson at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron. NOAA, THUNDER BAY NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY

James Davidson was born in the midst of a prolonged depression, but he grew into his teens during an exceptional period of opportunity, optimism, and economic expansion. On Atlantic and freshwater coasts of North America, booming trade sparked what historians remember as the golden age of American shipbuilding. Blessed with vast forest resources, shipbuilders in the northeastern Atlantic and Great Lakes regions of the United States launched thousands of ships during the 1840s and 1850s. Locally, Davidson undoubtedly witnessed the launching of palace steamers such as the Niagara and its larger cousins. We can imagine the young boy walking with his father along the stone breakwater, discussing ships and picking up some finer points of stonework and coastal engineering. We can only speculate what Davidson might have learned from his father. However, Buffalo offered undeniable opportunities for a highly gifted and ambitious boy to become enmeshed in the Atlantic maritime culture as well as the freshwater frontier.

Epidemic diseases periodically ravaged the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, with the frontier ports on lakes and rivers proving especially vulnerable. Both of Davidson’s parents died in 1852, possibly from cholera. His biographical statements do not indicate whether he went to live in an orphanage, or if someone in his family took him in, but it is known that James went to work immediately after his parents died. According to Mansfield’s History of the Great Lakes, published during Davidson’s lifetime, “of necessity he became self-supporting” at age eleven and established a ferry across the river at Buffalo.1 In a version told by another historian, the young orphan built a rowboat and carried sailors out to anchored ships.2

Whatever the specific circumstances, multiple accounts agree that Davidson’s first job at age eleven was ferrying people from a landing at the foot of Main Street to ships in the Buffalo harbor. The work placed young Davidson in direct contact with sailors from all parts of the Atlantic. Orphaned and ambitious, he would have soaked up the seafaring culture, listening attentively to colorful sailor’s yarns. While the entrepreneurial parts of the Davidson ferry story may seem a bit stretched, there is no doubt the boy demonstrated a lot pluck and became a familiar figure on the Buffalo waterfront. In addition to his maritime work, the boy found time for school. Whatever challenges he faced as an orphan, Davidson was lucky to have been born in Buffalo, a city that maintained a system of free public schools that by 1852 included both an evening school and a high school. At a time when most nonelite American men had at most a few years of elementary school, Davidson took every advantage of the opportunities for formal education the thriving city offered. Clearly a maritime model of the self-made man, Davidson’s fusion of vocational, experiential, and formal education equipped him with professional tools and economic resilience matched by few, if any, of his lake-faring contemporaries.

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