Here's the song that Wes Asbury of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin knew that was sung to "Boil Them Cabbage Down".

LOST ON THE LADY ELGIN
(Sept. 8, 1860 the steamer Lady Elgin, carying a group of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's 3rd Ward Irish to Chicago to hear Stephen A. Douglas speak, was rammed (on the return voyage that night) by a lumber freighter. Half of its 600 passengers were lost off Evanston, Illinois. Many were saved by heroic Northwestern U. students.

Up from the poor man's cottage,
Forth from the mansion door,
Sweeping along the waters,
Echoing along the shore,
Caught by the morning breezes,
Borne on the evening gale,
Comes the voice of mourning,
A sad and solemn wail.

Chorus
Lost on the Lady Elgin,
And sleeping to wake no more,
It's sad for those 300,
Who failed to reach the shore.

Staunch was the noble steamer,
Noble the freight she bore,
Gayly she'd loosed her cables,
A few short hours before.
Grandly she swept the harbor,
Joyfully rang her bell,
Little thought we by morning,
Would toll so sad a knell.

Oh, 'tis the cry of children,
Weeping for parents gone,
Children who slept at evening,
But orphans awoke at dawn,
Sisters for brothers weeping,
Husbands for missing wives,
Such were the ties dissevered,
By those 300 lives.

Art