"Roaring" Dan Seavey
Dan Seavey was born in Portland, Maine on March 23, 1865. Growing up, he loved ships, and the tales and legends of the sea. Seavey ran away from home at the age of twelve. He travelled on steamers and joined the Navy when he grew old enough. However, he noticed that he didn't fancy taking someone else's orders, so when his enlistment was up, he left the Navy and travelled west and made it to Pestigo, Wisconsin. He worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, along with various other duties that usually involved arresting bootleggers. By age twenty he was sailing the Great Lakes. He ended up working as a commerical fisherman, he married, and had a daughter.
Seavey later appeared in Milwaukee as a fisherman and owner of two saloons and a farm. One day, his brewing tycoon friend, Captain Frederick Pabst, asked him to accompany him on a gold-mining expedition in Alaska. Seavey sold his properies for $14,000 and invested it in the Rosebud Mining Company in Alaska in 1898. Seavey complained that he only ever earned $500 from Alaska, from when he paid to hoist a safe back through the hole in a saloon floor which it fell through. He aquired a two masted, forty-foot schooner named the WANDERER. By 1890, he returned to Michigan a man of a dusty wallet. He soon began stealing, under the guise of freight-hauling. Sailing into shore at night in the WANDERER without lights, he would snatch everything he could, without being seen. When the trail became hot, he disappeared again.
He reappeared in the black market and started a business of poaching deer on Summer and St. Martin Islands, and selling venison in Chicago. One day, the gangster that Seavey did business with desided that he didn't much fancy Seavey owning his monopoly on venison, so he sent some of his thugs out to Seavey's islands. The two crews fought on Summer Island, and the thugs prooved victorious. However, Seavey mounted a canon onboard his ship, caught up to the ship of the thugs, and sunk every last one of those city boys. Deputy Charlie Olmstead was sent to arrest Seavey. Seeing as how Olmstead didn't know where Summer Island was, Seavey escaped once again.
June 11, 1908, Seavey and two friends swaggered up to the docked NELLIE JOHNSON in Grand Haven, Michigan. As he waved a javiel greeting to the captain, Captain Pabst, he roared "I’m a lonely sailor without a ship. I’ve got booze enough for all of us and I’d like to have a gain with you." (Gain being slang for a drinking party). After passing his jug around for nearly an hour, the three-man crew was drunk into hilarity, while Seavey was completly sober. He stole the ship, leaving the crew behind on the deck, (and possibly his two friends, as they disappeared after the hijacking). However, the captain put a fight, but Seavey overpowered him and dumped him overboard half-way down Lake Michigan. He sailed the ship to Chicago and sold it and it's cargo of lumber and shingles. By this time the owner, R.J. McCormick, had convinced authorities that his ship had been stolen, and the TUSCARORA went after Seavey.
Seavey had never missed an opotunity to make money, even honest money. One man paid him to sail his private yaht to Mackinac. As he rounded Point Betsy, the TUSCARORA found him. For weeks, Seavey spent his days slipping in and out of the coves of Lake Michigan islands. One day, the TUSCARORA receaved news that Seavey was heading to Frankfort. The TUSCARORA lay in wait, but Seavey say the TUSCARORA before she saw him. Under the cover of night, he made a break for shore, and when unnoticed by this trap. On his way sailing to shore, he shot out the red buoy light and replaced it with his own, home-made, look-alike elsewhere. The TUSCARORA fell for the trick and went aground, but was not drastically damaged. Seavey roared with laughter. Then the TUSCORORA shot a canonball over his deck, and Seavey ran. It is unknown how the TUSCARORA freed herself, but she took flight after Seavey. After a long race, Seavey was captured. The captain of the TUSCARORA, Preston H. Ueberroth, later noted that the race was so exciting that the paint and the TUSCARORA's smokestack burned off. At Seavey's trial, he originally faced the crime of piracy, which carried execution, but he was tried with a lesser crime, which carried a $10,000 fine and 10 years in prison. However, Seavey was found inocent againsts all charges. Since noone knew what happened to the captain, Seavey's story won over the jury. Seavey claimed that the captain had gotten drunk, and asked Seavey to take the NELLIE JOHNSTON to Chicago to sell the goods onboard.
Whenever Seavey was docked in Frankfort, children were always free to play on the deck of the WANDERER. But there was this one father that didn't want his son keeping company with such a man. One night, when the boy departed from the WANDERER, his father grabbed him and spanked him right on the dock. Then Seavey boomed of his boat, grabbed the boy's father, and repeated the boy's punishment on the man. Years later, the authorities come up with a creative idea to stop Seavey's criminal carear, and Seavey became a U.S. Marshall. Their palan worked, overtime. The Great Lakes crime rate was at an all-time low. This was in part because Seavey himself was no longer stealing, but also because noone wanted to deal with the mighty "Roaring" Dan. Only one criminal ever stood up to Seavey, and he found himself under a piano. The man died the next day.
He was the last one the dock in Frankfort that winter before ice closed in the harbor. At a saloon, he threw out any man who would'nt join him in drinking. However, he was bounced out of the saloon himself, but a professional fighter had to be brought up from Chicago in order to do so. For some reason, he burnt down the sawmill, the flames of which spread to the WANDERER and destroyed it, along with his pirate days. He replaced his ship with aa 45-foot launch. The extra speed and space prooved handy, as he soon took up bootlegging as a hobby. Because, marshal or not, prohibition was on.
He later showed up acting in an early movie about wrecking and salvaging, playing a deep sea diver. Many more years later, he was standing on the shore when he saw two ships collide and watched a teenaged boy thrown from one. He jumped in and, after three dives, and cried, with teers in his eyes " I had a hold on him but I couldn’t bring him up." He was sixty at the time. Two years later, he saw a group of kids stealing apples from a shipping vessel and eating them. Instead of punishing the kids, he purchased a large bussel of the largest, red apples and told the kids that they could have as many apples they wanted out of his basket. In 1949, Seavey passed away in Pestigo, Wisconsin, at the age of 84.
This site created by Jon Lamphere, October 6, 2006
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