Harriet Colfax tended the Michigan City light for forty-three years, retiring in 1904 at the age of eighty. She rowed the inner harbor in gales, carrying lard oil up the tower stairs by hand. Her station still stands at the western edge of Washington Park, now the Old Lighthouse Museum, a short walk from the slips where Lake Michigan sunset cruise Michigan City tours take on passengers. The keeper's dwelling dates to 1858 and replaced a smaller tower of 1837. It is the oldest surviving lighthouse structure on Indiana's forty-five miles of Great Lakes coast. The town was platted in 1832 by Isaac Elston, a Crawfordsville banker who bought the sandy mouth of Trail Creek and expected a metropolis. The name came from the Michigan Road, the state highway that ran north from the Ohio River and ended at this beach. Congress funded harbor works four years later. Lumber schooners came first, then sand barges, then grain. Chicago absorbed the commerce Elston had imagined, and the city settled into a quieter life of railcars, foundries and summer excursion traffic. After 1908 the South Shore Line carried Chicagoans east to the dunes by electric interurban. The harbor stayed useful throughout. Trail Creek still bends past the marina before it empties into open water. Geography explains the rest. Indiana holds the southern curve of the lake, so this shoreline faces north and west rather than east. The sun does not drop behind land here. It goes down on open water, close to the axis of the outbound channel. On clear nights the Chicago skyline stands on the horizon some forty miles off, a gray serration that holds the last light after the beaches have lost it. Mount Baldy, a migrating dune inside Indiana Dunes National Park, rises a mile west of the pier. Michigan City harbor cruises pass beneath the East Pierhead Light of 1904, whose elevated catwalk — among the last of its kind on the Great Lakes — was built so keepers could reach the tower when waves broke across the concrete. Washington Park has ordered this frontage since 1891, when the city reserved its dunes for public use. A zoo followed in 1928, its stone enclosures cut into the hillside by Depression-era crews. The breakwater arms were lengthened and rebuilt across a century of storms, and the generating station's chimney now marks the harbor from thirty miles out. What draws people to a Lake Michigan sunset cruise Michigan City tour is continuity rather than novelty: the same channel, the same two lights, the same water that captains once read for bearings. Indiana Dunes lakefront sailings follow a line this port has kept open for nearly two centuries, out past the pierhead and back again while the sky empties of color.