This is the completed painting if Detroit fifty six years prior to my birth. I have mentioned this because the city changed so dramatically in the course of that relatively short period of time. Teh scene shows an auxiliary steam schooner hugging the western shore of the Detroit river under power about to head into the main current of the Detroit River which flows to the Southwest. It was a common practice for for ships to be towed northward into Lake St. Claire in much the same way that trains pulled boxcars. There were many tugboats to offer assistance to merchant vessels navigating the river between Lakes Erie and St. Claire. When I was a boy we spent the summers at our cottage on the South shore of Lake St. Claire until I was twelve, when we sold the cottage and our home in Detroit and moved to the Los Angeles area. I used to wade out to swim in the lake and would see the blue smoke trails of the big ore carriers and freighters that plied the waters of the Great Lakes. I only saw one of those ships close up. It was a small freighter that had broken down and was anchored about 1000 yards off our beach. My Uncle George got all of us kids into his solid maple Peterborough speed boat with what was then a great big Evinrude outboard motor on the back and took us out to see this strange visitor from a world far out on the lake. It's memories like that which inspired me to create this painting