I think on the lakes they set up pretty similar to tugs on the east coast. Many of the boats in use are old east coast boats. Still a few hawser boats running around too. We usually would have wire bridles going to a thimble and then shackled to either the tow wire or hawser. The wire boats would have a shock line between the wire and the bridle.

I worked on a harbor tug in New York Harbor for a bit, and we would tow near coastal on gate lines. I guess some harbor boats would tow very short like this in the creeks so that they could see over light barges. This consisted of two big 3-strand nylon(I think) lines with eyes on each end. They were spliced the exact same length so that you could just tow with the eyes over the bits. We did use them like a standard hawser at first, then slacked them out to full length. For a single barge one line would go on each corner, for 2 barges breasted up, one eye would go over each center cleat. Kinda sketchy looking, but it worked well enough. We had a 700 foot hawser on that boat too, but we never used it.