You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Look at you! You've found part three of our series on Great Lakes Piracy. As a reward,

here's something approximating a recap. There have been, so far as we're concerned,

four and a half ages of Great Lakes piracy.

The half refers to the legends and rumors of fur pirates in the 18th century, which could totally have existed,

but all the specific accounts of specific fur pirates available are bullshit.

As far as we're concerned, the first real Great Lakes pirate was Bill Johnston,

and even he might seem like a bit of a stretch.

Not just because he dressed in three-piece suits and abstained from alcohol, tobacco, and even swearing,

but because he was arguably, very arguably, a privateer rather than a pirate.

His motives weren't totally piraty either.

He devoted a significant portion of his life to trying to defeat the British Empire,

first during the War of 1812 and then during the 1837 Patriot War.

The second age of Great Lakes piracy crested in the 1850s,

when timber poachers waged a low-grade rebellion against the federal government.

The feds won the battle, but lost the war. When in 1854, the timber barons

succeeded in lobbying Congress into defanging enforcement efforts, effectively allowing timber

poaching to proliferate at scale for the rest of the century when the poachers were

finally halted by their own success. All the pine forests around Lake Michigan had been depleted.

As a consequence of the War of 1812, Britain and the United States had agreed to mostly

demilitarize the northern border between America and Canada. This left just one armed ship on

the Great Lakes, the USS Michigan, which was essentially both the first steam ship and the

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