Courtesy Milwaukee Boat Line.
The Iroquois tour boat—a Milwaukee River institution – will make her final run this summer.
This week, I go back to work as a tour guide with the Milwaukee Boat Line. Through the end of October, I’ll be leading tours aboard the Vista King talking about the sights and history of Milwaukee from the rivers and the lake. This is my fifth year with the company and sometime this summer I’ll give my 1,000th tour.
But, thankfully, that is not what this post is about. A much more significant milestone will occur this summer at our docks between Michigan and Clybourn. The old Iroquois tour boat will take one last run downriver to the inner harbor, where it will be plucked from the water and renovated into a combination workshop and office. I gave some of my very first tours aboard the Iroquois back in 2011, playing a tiny part in the 50-year history of the city’s most famous sightseeing vessel.
The Detroit as she looked in her days as an Island-hopping ferry and light cargo boat. Courtesy Milwaukee Boat Line.
Originally christened the Detroit , the 62-foot vessel was built in 1922 by the Defoe Boat and Motor Works in Bay City, Mich.—the same firm that built John F. Kennedy’s presidential yacht and the research vessel that found the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. She operated out of Bay City until 1936, when it was moved to Michigan’s Apostle Islands to operate as a ferry boat. During World War II, it served in Duluth, operated by the H. Christensen and Sons Fish Company, working as a pickup boat on Lake Superior. She was renamed the Iroquois in 1953 when she joined the fleet of the Arnold Transit Company (the firm’s other boats were named the Ottawa and the Chippewa) and spent the next decade as a ferry in the Straights of Mackinac.
By the 1960s, Captain Arthur Fransee was nearly as well-traveled as the Iroquois. Born in 1902 in Green Bay, Fransee had an itch to leave his hometown at an early age. In 1917, he lied to an Army recruiter about his age in order to enlist and hoped to join the war in Europe. An uncle found out and told Fransee’s captain, who gave the 15-year-old the boot and enough money for a train ticket home. But instead of going back, Fransee went to Milwaukee, where he found work—again using an embellished age—at the Goodrich Transport passenger docks on the Milwaukee River. He worked on Goodrich ships until the 1940s, eventually becoming a wheelman and a master caption. He served in the Navy during the war and afterward came back to Milwaukee to captain the Milwaukee Clipper car ferry.
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The Iroquois passing beneath the Clybourn Street Bridge in the early 1960s, shortly after Capt. Fransee brought her to Milwaukee. Courtesy Milwaukee Boat Line.
It had long been Fransee’s dream to operate his own vessel as an owner-captain. In 1961, he made good on this dream. Using $5,000 cash in a brown paper sack he bought the Iroquois from the Arnold Line, bringing her to Milwaukee to run as the city’s newest sightseeing vessel. Fransee ran the Iroquois from the west bank of the Milwaukee River between Michigan and Clybourn Streets. It was the same spot where Fransee had first cut his teeth on the sea with the Goodrich line some 55 years prior. And it would be the Iroquois’s home for the next 50-plus years.
The Iroquois was powered by a Two Rivers-built Kahlenburg diesel engine. Installed in 1947 and made of cast iron, the 13-foot-long engine weighed a staggering 12,000 pounds. As Fransee piloted the boat, Jones Island-born engineer Bill Barleuch sat next to the hulking Kahlenburg to keep it properly oiled and running smoothly. Fransee’s wife, Florence, was the boat’s hostess and tour guide, announcing points of interest over the loudspeaker and selling cold soda from a small concession stand.
The river prowled by the Iroquois in those days was not the same pathway of leisure it is today. Terribly polluted and lined with pea-stone parking lots and run-down brick buildings, the Milwaukee River was described as “oozing” by a Milwaukee Journal reporter who rode the Iroquois in 1974. The Iroquois needed to put herself “quite a distance” off shore, he noted, to get away from the “rancid breath of the summer city.” But from the wooden deck of the boat, passengers could see a growing downtown, a still-bustling inner harbor and the expansive and mostly empty festival grounds.
An Iroquois postcard shows the boat as she looked in the early 1970s. Author's Collection.
Attendance began to slip in the 1970s. While senior groups, tourists and students on school outings remained regular patrons, Fransee saw a significant drop-off of Milwaukeeans taking the trip. Shopping centers, television and the fear of getting caught downtown after dark all acted to keep residents away, he told the Milwaukee Sentinel. Like Milwaukee itself, the Iroquois was without pretension and low on frills. A harbor commissioner in the mid-1970s snidely told Fransee that his vessel was “no Queen Mary.” “No, it’s not the Queen Mary,” Fransee told the Sentinel, “but it sure belongs in the city.”
One afternoon around 1981, Fransee accidentally dropped the boat’s cashbox into the river. He hired a local commercial diver named Roger Chapman to go down and retrieve it for him. The two struck up a friendship and, as Fransee neared retirement, worked out a deal for Chapman to take over operation of the boat. “Jolly Roger” ran the Iroquois for 25 years, making it one of the most recognizable vessels on the rivers and the lake. In 1998, the massive old Kahlenburg engine was replaced with a modern Detroit diesel engine and the boat’s smokestack was removed.
By 2005, Chapman, thinking of retirement, was considering putting the boat up for sale. That same year, Jake Chianelli, the son of a diving partner of Chapman’s, was a recent law school graduate having some serious doubts about a legal career. One day over breakfast, Chianelli’s father mentioned to him that Chapman was looking to unload the Iroquois. The following day, instead of continuing his search for a summer clerkship, Chianelli called Chapman and expressed an interest in taking over. After working on the boat that summer for little more than rent and food money, Chianelli learned the trade and took over operation of the boat the following year. In 2007, he added the Voyageur, a 75-foot expedition yacht to the fleet, now known as the Milwaukee Boat Line.
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The Iroquois in its final years as an operating vessel, turning around in Schooner Harbor, near the lakefront festival grounds. Courtesy Milwaukee Boat Line.
Although the Iroquois had been upgraded and kept in top condition over the past decades, by 2010 it was showing its 88 years. Its single-screw engine made maneuvering a sometimes tricky proposition, particularly on a river that was becoming narrower with docks every summer. With the recent downturn in the economy, a number of purpose-built tour boats had come on the market, including the 80-foot Vista King in Duluth, Minn. With the buyers’ market, it made better economic sense to replace the Iroquois than upgrade it and in the summer of 2011, the Vista King made its Milwaukee debut and the Iroquois was retired after 50 years of touring Milwaukee’s waterways.
The Iroquois today, in her fiftieth-plus year docked just north of the Clybourn Street Bridge. She gave her last tour in 2011 and last ran in 2013. Photo Courtesy Pete Balistreri.
Since 2011, the Iroquois has been docked just north of the Clybourn bridge. No longer certified for commercial use, she last ran in 2013. This summer, 93 years after she was first launched in Bay City, the Iroquois will spend about three months out of the water before returning back to her long-time home, taking on a new role, but remaining a familiar sight on the Milwaukee River. Talking about his time on the vessel, Captain Fransee told the Sentinel in 1975, “I love this. It gets in your blood. No matter how much the lake knocks you around, you always seem to come back for more.” I totally agree. And I think the Iroquois would, too.
Check out Matthew's website and listen to WMSE 91.7 every weekday around 7:40 a.m. or 5:40 p.m. for the What Made Milwaukee Famous radio show.
