Why Are There So Many Shipwrecks in the Great Lakes?

No one knows exactly how many shipwrecks lie at the bottom of the Great Lakes. Estimates range between 4,000 and 10,000, but only a fraction of those sunken vessels have been found.

When the 23-year-old British journalist and author Rudyard Kipling visited the United States in 1889, he was disturbed by the unabashed greed of Gilded Age Chicago and downright terrified by Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world by area.

“There is a quiet horror about the Great Lakes which grows as one revisits them,” Kipling wrote. “Fresh water has no right or call to dip over the horizon, pulling down and pushing up the hulls of big steamers... Lake Superior... engulfs and wrecks and drives ashore, like a fully accredited ocean—a hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent.”

For hundreds of years, the Great Lakes served as maritime “superhighways” for transporting lumber, ore, goods and people across the expanding United States.

“It’s really kind of mind-boggling when you realize just how busy the Great Lakes were, as a commercial and industrial waterway from about 1865 to the early part of the 20th century,” says John Jensen, a professor of maritime history at the University of West Florida. “In terms of raw movement of ships and the speed of things, it was probably the busiest waterway in the world.”

But the vast inland waters could turn deadly in rough weather, especially during the “November Gales,” the infamous early-winter storms that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975. During the Second Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, economic pressures combined with unpredictable weather resulted in collisions, capsizes and fires that claimed countless lives on the Great Lakes.

When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, it transformed the Great Lakes into major shipping lanes connecting large eastern cities to the vast resources of the frontier. By the mid- to late-19th century, commodities like lumber and iron ore drove heavy shipping traffic on the Great Lakes.

In Wisconsin, which borders both Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, a 19th-century lumber boom drew schooners and steamers from far and wide to cash in on high shipping rates. Not all of them were in great condition, explains Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society.

“We had a lot of sketchy vessels coming here,” Thomsen says. “If there was a decrepit schooner sitting out on Lake Erie, it was moved to Wisconsin and quickly patched up. The idea was that the lumber itself would buoy up the ship enough to prevent it from sinking, which was not the case, especially with green lumber.”

As commodities and goods sailed east across the Great Lakes, people moved west. Railroads were still making inroads in the Midwest, so steam-powered ships were the most efficient way to transport passengers to Great Lakes cities like Detroit, Chicago and Green Bay. In 1833, tens of thousands of people traveled by steamship from Buffalo to Chicago, including scores of immigrants.

From the end of the Civil War through the early 20th century, the Great Lakes were swarmed with ships carrying the cargo and workers that fueled America’s growth. Thomsen says that on Lake Michigan alone there were 2,000 sailing ships registered at local ports by the early 1900s.

“[In the Great Lakes region], you’ve got all this metal, you’ve got wood, it’s the breadbasket of the country at the time in terms of farming, and so it’s all concentrated in that place,” says Jensen, author of Stories from the Wreckage: A Great Lakes Maritime History Inspired by Shipwrecks. “The Great Lakes region was essential to the growth of American influence, military power and economic might. And the ships were what made it all work.”

To someone like Rudyard Kipling standing on the shore of Lake Superior, the Great Lakes looked as big as oceans, but Jensen says they would have felt a lot smaller to 19th-century ship captains trying to navigate the busy and unpredictable waterways.

“The Great Lakes have a lot of shoreline and can be pretty narrow, relatively speaking,” says Jensen. “If you’re in a large-sized, wind-powered vessel, there are plenty of places where you can get in trouble with that wind.”

Thomsen calls them “ship traps”—sections of the Great Lakes where ships had to navigate narrow passageways through islands and rocky shoals. A sudden gale could smash the ship up against the rocks, or two ships could collide in dense fog. Both were common occurrences on the Great Lakes.

“Any place that you see a lighthouse today is there for a reason,” Thomsen says. “It’s because there were collisions happening in those treacherous waters.”

One notorious ship trap is a treacherous stretch of shoreline near Thunder Bay, Michigan, on Lake Huron. Known as “Shipwreck Alley,” nearly 100 shipwrecks have been discovered in the waters there, now home to the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Navigating the Great Lakes was difficult enough on a clear, calm day, but the single greatest threat to mariners on these waters were storms. The Great Lakes are large enough to have their own weather systems and can produce powerful cyclonic storms with hurricane-strength winds. The worst of those storms strike in November, when lake waters are still warm from the summer and cold air presses down from Canada.

In a time before satellites and 10-day weather forecasts, sailors often had little warning that a “November Gale” was about to strike. Jensen, an experienced sailor, says that the weather on the Great Lakes can turn on a dime.

“In a matter of 30 minutes, you can go from flat, calm water to wind that’s powerful enough to roll over sailboats and blow dumpsters down the streets of Chicago,” Jensen says.

One of the deadliest storms in Great Lakes history was the Great Storm of 1913, also known as the “White Hurricane.” For five days in November, two colliding low-pressure systems raged over the Great Lakes, generating 90-mph winds and waves as tall as 35 feet.

At least 12 large ships sunk in the 1913 storm, which was made even deadlier by whiteout conditions that made navigation impossible. Thirty more vessels were driven ashore and crippled against the rocks. More than 250 people died in the White Hurricane, making it one of the deadliest and most destructive natural disaster in Great Lakes history.

While nature certainly played a role in the sheer volume of Great Lakes shipwrecks, so did human greed.

Economic incentives drove many shipowners and captains to be on the water in November, when the deadliest storms were most likely to strike the Great Lakes. As the weather worsened, shipping rates increased to the point that shipowners and crews could earn three times as much money for a late-season run. Jensen calls it the “one more voyage” strategy.

“There’s a tremendous demand to get stuff to market, because each ‘last voyage’ you make is gravy,” Jensen says. “With the deteriorating weather conditions, however, it’s kind of the perfect storm of economy and wind.”

One shipowner who swore by the “one more voyage” strategy was the oil, steel and shipping magnate James Corrigan. Corrigan, who Jensen calls “the poster child for the Gilded Age heartless capitalist,” squeezed every last cent out of his vessels, no matter the risks to cargo and crew.

One of Corrigan’s ill-fated ships was the Lucerne, a schooner that tried to take one more shipment of iron ore across Lake Superior in November 1886. The Lucerne was in open water when a powerful winter storm blew in. Unable to find a safe harbor in rough seas and blinding snow, the captain dropped anchor a few miles from shore in hopes of riding it out.

“The sailors tried with all their might to keep the boat afloat, but it kept taking on water, and they were burning everything to stay warm,” Jensen says. The next morning, the lighthouse keeper at Chequamegon Bay saw three masts sticking out of the water. “He went out there with a hatchet and had to cut three bodies out of the masts, because they were frozen to death in the rigging.”

The entire 10-man crew of the Lucerne perished in the storm, and the wreck is remarkably preserved in just 20 feet of water. Because Corrigan insured his cargo aggressively, he didn’t lose much money with the tragic shipwreck. Corrigan continued to make dangerous wagers, sinking two more ships in the process—the Niagara and the James Couch.

Some estimates put the total number of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes as high as 10,000, but Jensen thinks a more conservative number is between 4,000 or 5,000. In Wisconsin, where maritime archaeologists like Thomsen have been working for decades, there are more than 780 confirmed shipwrecks.

Here are three of the most famous shipwrecks on the Great Lakes:

The “Christmas Tree Ship” (1912) was the popular name for the Rouse Simmons, a schooner that carried thousands of freshly cut Christmas trees across Lake Michigan to Chicago every holiday season. Captain Herman Schuenemann earned the nickname “Captain Santa” for delivering holiday cheer to the city and giving away trees to poor families. In November 1912, the Rouse Simmons was caught in a winter storm and disappeared without a trace. The wreckage of the Christmas Tree Ship was discovered in 1971. All 16 people aboard perished.

The Lady Elgin (1860) was an elegantly appointed passenger steamer operating out of Chicago. Known as the “Queen of the Lakes” for her speed and comfort, the Lady Elgin was carrying around 400 passengers on September 8, 1860, when it collided with the lumber schooner Augusta. The Lady Elgin sank within 30 minutes, but dozens of passengers were able to cling to broken fragments of the ship. Tragically, most of them died when they were dashed against the rocks in heavy surf in plain sight of their rescuers. Between 350 and 380 passengers died, making it one of the worst disasters in Chicago history.

The Edmund Fitzgerald (1975) was proof that a November gale on the Great Lakes could sink even the largest and sturdiest steel-hulled vessels. Captain Ernest M. McSorley knew there was a storm blowing in on Lake Superior, but the veteran seaman had sailed through worse. The exact cause of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is still debated, but it was either damage to the hull or the sheer size of the waves that washed over the ship. Twenty-nine men perished in the disaster, which was immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”