Prohibition, a noble experiment that went wrong, generated a thriving black market for liquor in Washington. Along the waterways of the Salish Sea, a new breed of criminal emerged – the rumrunners. These daring individuals defied the law and smuggled booze by boat across the border from Canada to profit from a nation’s thirst for alcohol. Among them, Washington native Johnny Schnarr reigned supreme, his name synonymous with guile, speed, and technological mastery. He evaded capture to make an estimated 400 deliveries, but the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 marked the end of an era, and Schnarr, his legend secure, soon faded into obscurity.
An Opportunist
Though he was not formally educated, Johnny Schnarr gained early experience as a fur trapper, logger, and boater while growing up near Centralia in Southwestern Washington. By the time he was in his mid-20s, Prohibition was in full swing and Schnarr was well positioned to capitalize on illicit opportunities presented by the ban on booze. He soon found that Washington’s porous border with Canada was a rumrunner's paradise. While other smugglers relied on slow boats that were easy targets for Coast Guard cutters, Schnarr saw the risks and inefficiencies inherent in plodding deliveries. He improved boat design, souped up his low-profile craft with mighty engines, and became obsessed with speed. His boats were sleek and agile, carving the water at speeds the Coast Guard couldn't match. Schnarr and his crew became legendary on the Salish Sea, his boats the envy of others in the liquor trade. Bootleggers across the region enlisted him to deliver liquor for them, and his reputation as a dependable contractor soared.
Schnarr's success wasn't just because of speed on the water. He understood the value of discretion and how to plan routes with precision. He preferred to deliver goods at night, ideally in foul weather during the fall and winter months to avoid detection. He steered clear of areas dense in patrols. He curried a network of informants to keep him abreast of Coast Guard schedules. He cultivated relationships with key officials and built webs of kinship that helped to shield his operations. For years, he seemed untouchable. A $25,000 bounty hung over his head, he was told, yet he made some 400 deliveries, outsmarting potential captors while creating a myth of invincibility.
Schnarr's exploits fueled the public's fascination with Salish Sea rumrunners; they were popularly seen not as criminals but as clever underdogs defying unjust laws. As the history of bootlegging and rumrunning in the Pacific Northwest has come down to us a century later, the participants were heroic, honorable, even genteel. Prohibition's repeal in 1933 would mark the end of an era, however, and like many other rumrunners, Schnarr faded from view. But his legacy lives on. He revolutionized rumrunning and ruled as a righteous rebel during a time when the public's thirst for freedom, heightened by a thirst for booze, clashed with laws that were virtually impossible to enforce.
Boyhood Near Chehalis
In a first-person account titled Rumrunner crafted from five years of interviews conducted by his niece Marion Parker, Schnarr chronicled his life up through Prohibition. The 1988 book is notable for its intimate details about his life and Prohibition, both before and after he became a scofflaw. Little documentation of his activities has survived outside of the book, because, according to historian Brad Holden, Pacific Northwest rumrunners "were typically a wary, tight-lipped bunch, careful not to reveal their secrets to others" (Seattle Prohibition ..., 59). In addition, Schnarr’s activities remain vague because he was never captured or charged. No official records were left behind.
The youngest of four siblings, Schnarr was born in 1894 to a homesteading family. He was always small, his stature contradicting his skills in boxing and marksmanship. When the family relinquished its Saltser Valley homestead of 160 acres near Centralia, they moved to "a twenty-six-acre piece of property on Coal Creek, about three miles out of Chehalis" (Rumrunner, 6).
Rumrunner is candid about alcohol. Schnarr’s father was a drunk who thrashed his wife and kids. In a family mutiny led by August, the oldest of four siblings, the young men took away their father’s rifle and banished him from the home. Then the brothers built a 10 by 20, two-story cabin for their mother and sister.
Schnarr was educated no further than sixth grade. He learned about the world through hours of boating, logging, trapping, and hunting. The brothers worked together in logging camps and ran their own traplines. Rules were loose enough, and the brothers audacious enough, that they managed to work both sides of the border between the U.S. and Canada. They built rough-hewn cabins and carved canoes. They hand-logged by scavenging fallen trees from rivers and limbing them for mills. The Schnarr brothers were hardy enough to overwinter in cabins deep in the British Columbia wilderness. Strapping on handmade snowshoes, wading rivers clogged with "mush ice," they ran extensive traplines for furbearing animals. Their foremost stock-in-trade were martens, relatives of weasels. They also earned bounties on mountain lions chased down by their hounds. During World War I, when Schnarr joined the military and was sent to France, the skills he had acquired in the backcountry ranked him ninth in the army as a marksman.
Schnarr also developed a talent for building boats. He learned by watching indigenous people carve canoes out of entire cedar and fir logs. He developed a keen eye for matching hull designs to water conditions. As a hired hand on the Victoria, British Columbia, waterfront after the war, he repaired engines and learned how to fix and install motors in his own boats. As a rumrunner, he spent weeks carving wooden models before hiring Nisei shipwrights in Victoria to scale his boat models up to full size and produce fast, low craft, some more than 50 feet in length.
A total of 33 states, including Washington, had adopted laws prohibiting alcohol before the 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919. Well before then, Washington harbored several anti-booze activists and groups including the Reverend Mark Matthews (1867-1940), who founded the Seattle Presbyterian Church, regarded as the first megachurch. Chapters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League also actively supported Prohibition. Schnarr was 26 when Prohibition became a national law. He soon got his first taste of smuggling.
The Language of Prohibition
Like most criminal activities, bootlegging and rumrunning generated their own argot (or criminal jargon). To move booze from Canada to the U.S. was known as "jumping the line," a phrase that regained currency in the 1960s when "B.C. Bud" (marijuana) was being smuggled, until 2012, when marijuana became legal in Washington. Moving liquor across land by car, train, or airplane was called bootlegging – a portmanteau word believed to have sprung up during the Civil War, "when soldiers would sneak liquor into camp by hiding bottles of it in their boots and next to their legs," wrote Holden in his book Seattle Prohibition: Bootleggers, Rumrunners & Graft in the Queen City. "Rumrunning" names the transport of bottled booze across water, deriving from the antique phrase "demon rum," for liquor. Whisky – the drink of choice, the most readily available – dominated the illicit trade. Little rum from the West Indies was smuggled in the Northwest.
Whiskies distilled in the British Isles or Canada arrived in wooden crates containing 24 bottles. In warehouses (entrepôts in French Canada) the crates were hacked open with axes and the bottles sewn into sacks for easy handling by smugglers, a process known as "sacking." To offload the sacks or cases from wharfs or "motherships," dockhands slid them down canvas chutes to "daughter boats" tied or docked below. "The 'cases' were unique – not wooden ones but far lighter, consisting of six paper-covered bottles stacked in a pyramid and tied in a burlap sack" ("Rumrunners Delivered ..."). The cases were padded at times with excelsior, cardboard, hay, or straw. Each burlap sack, or gunny sack, was tied at the corners in tufts or "ears" that made for easy handling. Smugglers’ boats often ran at night without displaying lights, earning them the apt name "shadow boats" (Asla and Sole).
Secrecy and security were the bywords. One group of brewers and distillers equipped engines with a "smoke-making apparatus for protection if a Coast Guard cutter caught sight of them" (Don't Never Tell ..., 198). Such a smokescreen, as in a James Bond movie, might thwart pursuers from drawing an accurate bead.
Holden’s book provides details that fill in gaps Schnarr omitted in Rumrunner. "Boxhouses," Holden wrote, were saloons that "offered gambling, narcotics, and prostitution." After viewing a bawdy show, a patron might find a private cubicle, or box, where "transactions could be negotiated" (Seattle Prohibition ..., 18). The boxes often held a couch or small bed. "One popular boxhouse, located on an Elliott Bay pier, was known for having trapdoors hidden in the floor. If a customer became too drunk or belligerent the saloonkeeper would simply pull a lever, sending the person plunging into the cold Puget Sound waters below.” Billy’s Mug, one such saloon, "hosted cockfights and pit bull fights with his bar packed full of loud and drunk customers shouting their bets" (Seattle Prohibition ..., 19). Schnarr no doubt encountered such scenes and locales, but his caution about rivals and statutes of limitations kept him from including lurid details in his memoirs. Foreseeing the repeal of Prohibition, he framed his illicit activities as having been undertaken for a just cause.
By the time he hit the water full time in 1921, the year after the Volstead Act came into effect, Schnarr was living year-round in Victoria and returning to Washington chiefly on business, and often furtively. His worries concerned not only Coast Guardsmen and state shore patrols, but also hijackers who would brandish pistols and appropriate the liquor. A further hazard for rumrunners who transported goods at night were logs or tree trunks known as "deadheads." Such waterlogged timbers, mostly submerged, could puncture the hull of any unfortunate ship that collided with them. Such was the case for several of Schnarr’s own vessels, resulting in the need for extensive repairs. After such collisions Schnarr had to replace many of his shafts and propellers. He attached a protective steel plate against logs on the bow of one boat. Other rumrunners mounted plates behind the wheel to bullet-proof against machine guns. By 1924, "the fleets of Canadian booze ships were so plentiful that they soon became known as the 'whiskito' fleet" (Seattle Prohibition ..., 60). All manner of fishing boats flocked to the water and made the fleet denser. In Canada, boats were loaded by Consolidated Exporters, a company so cautious that its "directors all agreed to burn the company books at the end of each year to protect the nature of its business" (Seattle Prohibition ..., 61). Smugglers like Schnarr held bogus "landing certificates" or "clearance papers" that claimed nearby Bowen Island or even Mexico as their legal destination.
To try to stanch the rumrunning traffic out of Canada, the Coast Guard beefed up its fleet. It reconditioned minesweepers and destroyers from World War I for the Prohibition cause. Using period jargon for coinage, "four-bitters" were 50-foot-long boats, "six-bitters" were 75 feet long, and "dollar" boats 100 feet in length. These cutters, bigger if not faster than the smugglers’ own, wielded serious firepower. They carried machine guns and cannons and the Coast Guard did not hesitate to use them. The cannons were most often "one-pounders,” their range more than two miles, their accuracy good to 500 yards. The .50 caliber machine guns spat periodic tracer rounds to illuminate their trajectories and help the triggermen zero in on targets. Schnarr recalled tracer rounds zipping inches from his head as he and his deckhand sped away from a Coast Guard boat. One of those square tracer bullets embedded in the deck before them and commenced to glow there. They dug it out with a pocketknife and kept it as a good-luck charm.
On the Run on the Salish Sea
Seattle was a hotbed of rumrunning due to its proximity to Canada, whose liquor laws were more relaxed. In Puget Sound alone, 22 Coast Guard vessels were patrolling by 1928. Painted gray or black, just like the boats Schnarr designed, these vessels blended with forested shorelines and the night. As a veteran of World War I, Schnarr knew the technology the military had made available, including night-vision goggles. In one gripping escapade, he saw what appeared to be a fire on the shore behind him. Grasping his goggles, he identified the "fire" as phosphorescent algae stirred up by a Coast Guard boat in close pursuit. Gunning the Kitnayakwa, which he had fitted with expensive airplane engines, he raced away. Back in Victoria he counted 18 embedded slugs and worked for hours to drill them out and disguise the holes.
Not all escape attempts were successful. On one occasion Canadian Customs tracked him down in Victoria. In his stern, its crew found an embedded slug, evidence he’d been fired on the night before in Washington. His boat was impounded. Instead of losing business for the months until his trial, he paid the $500 fine to get up and running once again. On another occasion he trusted two men to pilot his boat Moonbeam on a run. Disabled by gunfire near Samish Island, the boat was grounded, forcing them to sprint ashore. The crew was fired on, and one of them hit by a slug in the foot. His buddy dug it out before they made it back to Canada. The Moonbeam was seized.
Schnarr's smuggling began in 1921 with an apprenticeship under his longtime friend Fred Kohse. Because Kohse gave Schnarr the use of his boat, he required one-third of the profits. Schnarr split the leftover two-thirds with deckhand Billy Garrard, who was Kohse’s brother-in-law. Canada turned a blind eye to such deliveries, the bulk of which were going to Washington, because Canadian customs were collecting $19 per case as duty for each export. After one month using Kohse’s boat, Schnarr had earned $1,000, a fabulous return at the time. He calculated how much he could make if he owned a boat himself. By means of sweat equity and growing savvy about engine capacity and hull design, he pitched his maritime ambitions high. Schnarr had five fast launches built to his specifications. Those boats became a point of pride. The faster they were, the more deliveries he could make, and the greater the peace of mind he could keep while going about his business. Favoring isolated drop-offs on the Olympic Peninsula and sites north and south of Seattle, he could leave Victoria, traverse the Strait of Juan de Fuca, swap his cases for cash, and be home in time for breakfast when all went well.
Building Boats
The first boat Schnarr set about designing was Moonbeam. Carving a small model, as he had carved whole canoes, he commissioned Tomotaro Yoneda in Victoria to build it. That craft, finished in 1925, was 35 feet in length and had a narrow beam (or hull width) of 6 feet. He equipped it with an 80-horsepower Marmon car engine of six cylinders. (A Marmon-equipped auto had won the inaugural Indianapolis 500 in 1911.) The speed of the Moonbeam, at 18 knots, exceeded the 12 knots of the fastest Coast Guard vessel, which must have gratified the former trapper and logger. Installing each of his own engines took him weeks.
After U.S. Customs leaked plans that it was having 10 six-bitters built for patrols around Puget Sound, Schnarr decided he needed more speed. And so, he installed a Fiat airplane engine of 300 horsepower. That faster Moonbeam, he claimed, became the toast of the waterfront in Victoria. Dozens of kids lined up to appreciate its splendor and hear it roar. His later boats are reputed to be among the prototypes for the hydroplanes that race each summer in the Seafair Festival on Lake Washington. Such hydroplanes achieve more than 200 miles per hour today. A photo of a Prohibition-era "fireboat" illustrates the likeness (Asla and Sole).
As impressive as Moonbeam was, it had its limitations. Namely, due to its stature, it could haul only 75 cases, much less than other rumrunning vessels. In 1924 Schnarr went back to the Yonedas, father and son, to build him another boat. In February 1925, Moonbeam was seized by the U.S. Coast Guard and was lost to him forever. "If he’d been aboard and at the wheel, they probably wouldn’t have lost her," Rick James wrote in his 2018 book Don't Never Tell Nobody Nothin' No How: The Real Story of West Coast Run Running. Schnarr, besides his other talents, was an expert navigator who managed to throttle himself out of tight spots. Luckily, his new boat was almost complete.
Fiat had made more than 15,000 aircraft engines in WWI. For Schnarr’s second custom-built boat, Miss Victoria, he chose two Fiat engines that cost more than he could afford. One of his most reliable customers, Tacoma businessman Pete Marinoff, loaned Schnarr the $3,000 he needed to complete his new watercraft. Marinoff – a brewer, bootlegger, and rumrunner – kept his businesses on the up-and-up by barring his employees from running guns, narcotics, and prostitution. Schnarr himself claims he declined an offer of $25,000 to transport a boatload of narcotics during Prohibition (Parker, 218). His new craft Miss Victoria, when completed in 1925, was much larger than Moonbeam at 48 feet in length and 9 feet in the beam. She was good for 30 knots when fully loaded with 100 cases, much faster when running dry. Schnarr had trouble deciding what kinds of boats would best suit his current and his future needs. Part of him wanted to build sprint boats to push the boundaries of the possible. Trying to plan for such career transitions and more, he built Miss Victoria with a cabin stretching the full length of the hull, allowing room for a stove and a couple of bunks. Hard experience soon revealed the boat took too long to load and unload, though, its underdecks the only stowage space. Moreover, Miss Victoria’s cabin made too high a silhouette for his covert purposes. He put the boat to the best use he could for a couple of years before Better-Boat Fever once again took hold of him.
In 1927, he had the Yonedas build him something faster and more cargo-worthy. Miss Victoria II was 36 feet long and could haul 125 cases. By now he had a steady set of customers who were relying on his prowess. Miss Victoria II began with a six-cylinder Fiat engine providing 300 horsepower, but its speed disappointed. And so, he traded up to a 12-cylinder Packard that generated 450 horses. That new setup was also good for 30 knots wet, more than enough to evade the bigger, slower Coast Guard boats. Watercraft in Canada had to be registered to citizens of that nation, and Schnarr was still a U.S. citizen. As before, he registered Miss Victoria II under the name of “Wm. Garrard,” aka Billy, who had been his right-hand man for years and enjoyed rumrunning profits right along with him. That same year, 1927, he married his first wife, Pearl Bromely. They met at a racetrack for horses. Pearl had a daughter named Doreen. Two years later the couple had a son, and in short order they built a house on Vancouver Island, a spacious two-story home overlooking Victoria’s Telegraph Bay. That lot faced Haro Strait and featured a harbor where Schnarr could moor his boat 500 yards away and keep an eye on it.
The $25,000 reward for Schnarr’s capture motivated him to upgrade boats often. The longer he ran a given craft, the surer it was to be recognized inside Washington waters. On March 1, 1928, his hometown newspaper the Daily Colonist in Victoria reported a close scrape involving his Miss Victoria II. The report placed the encounter near Anacortes, between Bellingham and Seattle. The unnamed captain eluded a Coast Guard boat in hot pursuit "amid a volley of gunfire. 'Two men and a woman on the shore likewise thwarted capture, but the coastguardsmen seized fifty cases of liquor and three automobiles and took one prisoner' in the encounter" (Don't Never Tell ..., 210). The report identified neither the captain nor the prisoner.
Close scrapes or no, Schnarr still was in it to win. He had the Yonedas build another boat in 1928 named the Kitnayakwa. Its name, after a river in British Columbia, was purposely obscure. He chose it to be forgettable by stateside authorities. At 45 feet long and 10 feet in the beam, its twin engines could deliver 1,036 horsepower and haul 200 cases at 30 knots, fast enough to outrun authorities. Eighty years later, in 2009, the partly submerged Kitnayakwa was discovered on Seattle’s Craigslist and purchased by a B.C. couple. They had it hauled on a flatbed truck to their home in Harrison Mills, and then began the restoration of the craft, a project that was ongoing 10 years later.
As Prohibition lengthened, Washington, D.C., pressured Ottawa to shut down exports from Canada. It did so in 1930, meaning no more open loading from Vancouver or Victoria docks. Smugglers such as Schnarr were forced to journey into the Pacific 12 miles offshore to meet motherships and pick up cases. To satisfy these new conditions, Schnarr needed a more seaworthy craft. In 1931, two years before Prohibition was repealed, he hand-carved another model, this one featuring a deep V hull like a destroyer, so that it could cut through waves rather than ride atop them, he said. The result was the 55-foot Revuocnav (Vancouver spelled backwards). It could reach 40 knots on the open sea. Consolidated Exporters in Canada helped him finance the boat with a loan. With its exhaust ports below the waterline like hydroplanes today, its twin Packard engines kicked out 1,720 horses and burnt 40 gallons of gasoline every hour. Revuocnav was built on a "step hydroplane" design. A notch or step, "thirty-four feet back from the hull," diminished friction (Parker, 180). Such boats, like today’s cigarette boats, are breathtakingly fast but hard to handle.
The Missing Years
If Schnarr's story suggests a tragic end, he was too scrappy for that, too crafty. He lived a long full life. His career included runs to California and Mexico to deliver booze. But he learned that oceangoing made him sick, and at last the big money stopped flowing. When Prohibition ended, he had $10,000 in the bank, had spent $75,000 on boats, and reckoned he had brought $4 million to the Canadian economy. His post-Prohibition days, when he returned to logging briefly before taking up commercial fishing, were by contrast uneventful. He died on November 7, 1993, at the age of 98.
Like many biographies and memoirs, Rumrunner: The Life and Times of Johnny Schnarr is incomplete and partisan. Based on transcriptions of interviews conducted by his niece, it omits details of his second marriage, the friends he lost when they got arrested, and the dirty dealings of confederates such as Frank Gatt and Al Hubbard (1901-1982), those kingpins of Seattle bootlegging. Both men at different times were his customers and competitors. Both spent time in McNeil Island prison. Convicted and put away after very public trials, they might have sullied the reputation Schnarr crafted so well in his book. They might have smirched the valor his self-told story bestowed.
An anecdote from the youth of this ancient mariner bears on his rumrunning years. He and his brothers enjoyed a summer sojourn in the wilds of early twentieth-century Washington. Toting along rifles, they lived off the land. They shot a deer, though the season was closed. They boned out the carcass and loaded the meat in backpacks. On their way home, a game warden accosted them and asked to see the contents of their packs. Deer, he said, that’s poaching. No, the quick-thinking August replied, that’s bear meat, and bear season is open. When the warden left them in the custody of a logging crew and went to get a paddy wagon, the three boys bolted back home.
