"Where did they come from, and where did they go?" These simple questions led author Claudia Goudschaal on a quest to find and record the working boats that visited the shores of Leelanau County, Michigan. The result is this compendium of the schooners and small wooden steamers of 1835-1900-a time of rapid change, of fortunes made and lost, of storms and shipwrecks, and of ordinary working life, too.

During the nineteenth century, most boats traveling the Great Lakes were shipwrecked at some point. Caught on sandbars in harbor entrances, driven ashore by gales, colliding with other boats on the crowded waters-the hazards were many. This booklet asks the questions, Why were there so many shipwrecks during these years? How did some people survive the wrecks, while others perished? Who helped? And what happened afterward?