spite of all the commerce of the cities, the drum still beats its roll
for every ship lost on the lake, one beat for every life.

So--men say--they heard and counted the beatings of the drum to
thirty-five upon the hour when, as afterward they learned, the great
steel steamer _Wenota_ sank with twenty-four of its crew and eleven
passengers; so--men say--they heard the requiem of the five who went
down with the schooner _Grant_; and of the seventeen lost with the
_Susan Hart_; and so of a score of ships more. Once only, it is told,
has the drum counted wrong.

At the height of the great storm of December, 1895, the drum beat the
roll of a sinking ship. One, two, three--the hearers counted the drum
beats, time and again, in their intermitted booming, to twenty-four.
They waited, therefore, for report of a ship lost with twenty-four
lives; no such news came. The new steel freighter _Miwaka_, on her
maiden trip during the storm with twenty-five--not twenty-four--aboard
never made her port; no news was ever heard from her; no wreckage ever
was found. On this account, throughout the families whose fathers,
brothers, and sons were the officers and crew of the _Miwaka_, there
stirred for a time a desperate belief that one of the men on the
_Miwaka_ was saved; that somewhere, somehow, he was alive and might
return. The day of the destruction of the _Miwaka_ was fixed as
December fifth by the time at which she passed the government lookout
at the Straits; the hour was fixed as five o'clock in the morning only
by the sounding of the drum.

The region, filled with Indian legend and with memories of wrecks,
encourages such beliefs as this. To northward and to westward a half
dozen warning lights--Ile-aux-Galets ("Skilligalee" the lake men call
it), Waugaushance, Beaver, and Fox Islands--gleam spectrally where the
bone-white shingle outcrops above the water, or blur ghostlike in the
haze; on the dark knolls topping the glistening sand bluffs to
northward, Chippewas and Ottawas, a century and a half ago, quarreled
over the prisoners after the massacre at Fort Mackinac; to southward,
where other hills frown down upon Little Traverse Bay, the black-robed
priests in their chapel chant the same masses their predecessors
chanted to the Indians of that time. So, whatever may be the origin of
that drum, its meaning is not questioned by the forlorn descendants of
those Indians, who now make beadwork and sweet-grass baskets for their