AURORA -- The so-called experts tell Dave Rautio he's wasting his time.
But at the crack of dawn next Sunday , Rautio, owner of an Aurora diving company, and 15 other divers will be in downtown Chicago, preparing to plunge into the frigid Chicago River in search of pieces of one of America's most tragic yet largely ignored accidents.
Rautio, owner of Below H2O on Ogden Avenue, and his crew will dive into about 25 feet of water near the Clark Street bridge in what's believed to be the first organized search for artifacts from the ill-fated Eastland steamer. The Eastland, packed with sight-seers preparing to depart on an excursion trip, capsized in the early morning of July 24, 1915, drowning 844 men, women and children just a stone's throw from shore.
The Eastland tragedy claimed more than three times as many lives as did the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 and came just three years after the Titanic sank. The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora dedicated a marker on the river in 1989 to commemorate those who died. Yet scarcely little else has been done to remember the Eastland and its victims, and Chicago-area historians have largely let time and layers of mud obscure one of the nation's worst maritime disasters.
The Chicago Historical Society believes that is mostly because few artifacts have been salvaged.
But local amateur historians, some personally connected to the tragedy, are determined to give the Eastland its place in history. They feel a sense of hope in Rautio, who was persuaded to make the search by Tim Woolsey, operator of a boat charter service on Lake Michigan. Woolsey will assist in the dive, which was organized with the help of Sam Franks, a member of the Underwater Archaeological Society of Chicago.
The group will have to work fast. A section of the Chicago River near Clark Street will be closed for just six hours so Rautio's team can do its work. He acknowledges the task will be daunting; the river bottom where the Eastland rolled was dredged in 1957, netting only a purse and 80 cents in change.
But Rautio believes the key to the search is finding a section of the Eastland's hull that was cut so passengers could be freed. Divers will use metal detectors and other equipment in their search, guided by maps of the river from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
"That hull is down there somewhere. It is a very large piece of steel, obviously. So if we can find that piece of the hull, other things should be right around it," Rautio said.
The Eastland was christened in May 1903 and almost immediately encountered instability. It nearly capsized on several outings in Lake Michigan, according to the Eastland Disaster Museum in Arlington Heights.
The Eastland, ironically, may have sealed its fate in part with the addition of several lifeboats and rafts, required by the government after the Titanic sank, making the ship top-heavy.
Just before 7:30 a.m. on July 24, 1915, passengers boarded the Eastland and crowded onto the port side to look at other boats, with a ship worker struggling to adjust the ballast below. The boat began to list, passengers panicked and as the Eastland moved away from the wharf, it slowly rolled. Nearly one-third of the passengers perished.
After the accident, the Eastland was righted, pumped dry and towed to a shipyard. It was reworked as a Navy training vessel that sailed the Great Lakes until it was decommissioned and scrapped after World War II.
Rautio balks at naysayers who insist divers won't find much on the river bottom where the Eastland capsized. Once the piece of hull is pinpointed, it's a matter of divers digging and feeling their way through five to six feet of silt that has washed over the site during the past 84 years, he said.
He said there is no record of anyone making a visual inspection of the river bottom, running hands through the silt at the wall of the river, or visually inspecting spots dredgers might have missed. But he acknowledges that with zero visibility, hand-inspecting the river floor will be difficult.
Rautio plans to donate whatever he finds to the Eastland Disaster Museum, which has collected some artifacts over the years. The museum plans to exhibit its Eastland artifacts at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago next year, coinciding with a traveling exhibit of Titanic artifacts.
Rautio also hopes that a recovered trinket or watch will help to dust off stories of the Eastland disaster and give the incident its rightful place in local history. That could bring a sense of closure to the few known living survivors of the accident, and the descendants of those who died on that sultry July morning four generations ago.
"There are a lot of family members who had people perish on the Eastland," Rautio said. "For them, this is still a painful part of their lives."
