Now, this one's got a little mischief in it, so settle in.
Back in the nineteen-twenties, this whole country went dry. Prohibition, they called it — the government up and decided that not a drop of liquor could be made, sold, or hauled anywhere in the United States. Trouble was, just across that water there, in Canada, it was perfectly legal to make the stuff and ship it out the door. So you had a thirsty nation on one side, all the whiskey in the world on the other, and in between — this. A skinny little river, dotted with islands, narrow enough to spit across in places. Friend, it might as well have had a sign on it that said help yourself.
And folks did. By the most-cited estimate — and you keep in mind smugglers don't hand out receipts — as much as three-quarters of all the liquor that got snuck into Prohibition America came across right here. Right through this stretch of water. They even had a name for it: the Detroit–Windsor Funnel. Three-quarters of a whole country's outlaw whiskey, pouring through one narrow neck of river. Now, why here? Why not a hundred other spots along the border? Simple. Over in Ontario it stayed perfectly lawful to brew the stuff and sell it for export — so the distilleries ran wide open just across the way — and this river is skinny and freckled with little islands, easy to slip across in the dark, easy to duck behind when the law came looking. The geography did half the smuggling all by itself.
In the warm months they ran it by boat — fast little craft with the lights cut, slipping past the Coast Guard in the dark. But the part I want you to picture is the winter. When this river froze solid, top to bottom, they didn't bother with boats at all. They drove. Loaded up automobiles with crates of whiskey and rolled them straight across the ice from Canada, headlights lined up on the American shore at night like the lights down a runway. They favored the lighter cars — your six-cylinder models, what they called a whiskey six — to spread the weight thin so they wouldn't crack through. And some of them, I'll tell you, cracked through anyhow, and that was the end of the car, the whiskey, and now and again the driver right along with it.
Running the whole show was a Detroit outfit called the Purple Gang, and by the end of the twenties this rum-running business was about the second-biggest industry in the entire city — better than two hundred million dollars a year. Bigger than near everything but the automobiles themselves.
And Belle Isle? This island sat right square in the middle of all of it, watching the whole circus roll by on the water — boats by summer, headlights by winter, a fortune in contraband whiskey crossing under its nose. So next time somebody tells you this is just a quiet little park in the river, you tell them: this quiet little water once helped a whole country break its own law, one frozen carload at a time.
