Scope and ContentThis letter is from the George B. Tisdale Collection in the Society's archives. Tisdale was a Great Lakes sailor and most of the letters of the collection are related to employment on various vessels, mostly lumber hookers. He retired from the Lakes and took over running the West Shore as a ferry between downtown Saugatuck, Douglas and the west side of Kalamazoo Lake during the last illness of the boat's owner, John Campbell. In 1927 Tisdale built the Isabel (named for his daughter), from a Bay City company's pre-cut kit. When the late Robert Wolbrink was a youngster he used to like to sit with Captain Tisdale on a bench at the end of the dock near the Tisdale house (now the Deer Creek Bed and Breakfast) on the southwest shore of Kalamazoo Lake. From there they could see the semaphore signals at the foot of Butler Street, and near the old swing bridge into Douglas that meant that there was a customer waiting. Wolbrink said that Tisdale once told him that he had given up sailing on the Great Lakes because it was making a drunkard of him, since whiskey was the only possible way to keep warm on a drafty lumber boat. According to Wolbrink, Tisdale also had a large red nose that made his story even more believable. The cause of prohibition was an active one in West Michigan. Several Red Ribbon clubs were organized in the wake of a visit by Susan B. Anthony in 1879. (Those who pledged to give up liquor wore a red ribbon in their lapel.) In 1894 a county-wide vote passed local option, making it possible for each local township or incorporated settlement to decide for themselves the advisability of selling spirituous beverages. At a second vote held in 1896 local option was roundly defeated in Saugatuck, 311 to 140. The local newspaper explained: "The election occurred at the most disadvantageous time for the temperance side. The farmers, who were depended on to furnish the votes to defend and uphold the law, were at their busiest and they neglected to attend the polls. Then again the floating vote is larger at this season of the year than at any other, and ninetenths of the floating vote was against prohibition." It is not known whether Tisdale attended the caucuses. Some of the candidates elected were probably not teetotalers, let alone prohibitionists. The local newspaper lists the major issues in the race in 1900 as: 1. Electric lights [This dream was not to be realized until 1912] 2. A bridge across the river to the parklands [Although it has often been talked about a bridge between downtown Saugatuck and Mt. Baldhead has not existed since the 1850s] 3. "The need to settle the disputed title to lands which should be owned by the village." [The major problem here concerned lands in the Mt. Baldhead area. Some had been deeded to prospective railroad projects that had never materialized.] Despite a mass Temperance Rally held on March 30 at Saugatuck, a move to make the township dry last at the annual township meeting in April. More than 500 citizens attended the meeting, too many for the building so the meeting had to be moved out of doors, a chilly prospect in Michigan in early April. The letter reprinted here is also interesting historically because of its form. It is written in carefully executed handwriting with purple ink on rough paper and appears to be an early form of duplicated letter. The electric pen, a predecessor of the mimeograph machine, was invented by Thomas A. Edison in 1877. After a few improvements thousands were sold commercially. The electric pen, used a battery for power and punched tiny holes in the paper along the path of the written words. This paper was then used as a matrix to make duplicates of the letter. When ink was spread on the back it oozed through the holes forming a continuous line. The number of letters that could be duplicated from a single paper matrix was limited, in the early versions to less than a dozen, but it was still an improvement over writing out all of the letters by hand.