- Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming revenue authority support from Spring Hill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas b Hagan.

- This is WQLN.

- All the Great lakes have their storms, but Lake Erie being a shallow lake, waves can go from shore to shore and then they bounce back.

But if the wind shifts direction, even the most experienced captains would've had a hard time navigating.

- Lake Erie is not just a big body of water, but a body of water that is littered with shipwrecks, stretching back for over 200 years.

- We don't have tides per se, in the Great Lakes, you know, but the winds and the waves and the weather really make it conducive to a lot of violent wave action.

There's a lot of shipwrecks, you know, in the Great Lakes attesting to the fact that, you know, these challenges were not only real but dangerous and life-threatening as well.

- The Great Lakes were incredibly important for the development of the American Midwest.

At that time, before there were railroads and before there were highways and cars and semi-truck, they only had two choices for how to move objects and people sending them via water is still the most energy efficient way to move any kind of cargo.

Sailing ship on the Great Lakes was hard work.

There is constantly something to do aboard ship, whether it would be standing watches lookout, securing hatches, working in the engine room as an oiler or a coal passer or a mechanic.

There was always something to do.

And then the sailors were constantly busy.

- And back in the 18 hundreds, you know, you didn't have reporting stations, you didn't have computers.

You only could see what you could see on the horizon.

You know, there was no communication where one ship could tell another ship.

You know, a ship in Cleveland could say, Hey, we got bad storm here.

No, you know, it's critical to find out, you know, how storms are going to go.

- The development of safety in the, in Great Lake Shipping was again, was written with the loss of ships and men - In the early years, those out on the lakes had little in the way of a rescue response if they found themselves in trouble.

This deadly combination has given Lake Erie the highest density of shipwrecks of anywhere in the world.

It is estimated that Lake Erie has claimed more than 2000 ships.

80% of these remain undiscovered or forever lost to these deceptive waters.

- I'm Ryan Cook.

I have been a Great Lakes diver since 2017.

History is something that is near and dear to my heart.

Maritime history.

Most of all, when I learned that I could go and experience the history of shipwreck diving, I knew I just had to dive in with both feet.

Pun intended.

It honestly, the shipwreck that made the greatest impression on me was the Dean Richmond.

I had been down on other shipwrecks and they were all amazing, but the Dean Richmond just took my breath away.

I was amazed.

It's immense and it's storied and the history is incredible.

- The Dean Richmond was built in 1864 in Cleveland at the Quala Martin Shipyard, right in the middle of the Civil War.

The ship was built.

She has two engines and she has two propellers, and she reached the maximum speed when she was first built of about 15 miles per hour.

But generally she went about 12 miles an hour.

She was designed to haul both cargo and passengers.

And at the time that she was constructed, she was considered state-of-the-art, and a lot of the newspapers on the Great Lakes wrote a lot of stories about her and just how luxurious her accommodations were.

- But despite being a luxury liner, she developed a reputation for being cursed with bad luck.

- I think where the the Bad Luck story comes from is essentially the name Dean Richmond.

There were several ships that actually had bad outcomes that had the name Dean Richmond.

In 1855, there was a schooner that was just launched and in its maiden season, sank in a gale.

That was the Dean Richmond.

In 1867, there was a paddle wheeler named the Dean Richmond that collided with another ship on the Hudson River.

And she sank, and admittedly she had her share of difficulties, you know, collisions running a ground engine trouble, things like that.

But I don't think she had any problems that were any worse than any other ship of that period.

- She had an eventful life.

About halfway through her life, she was sailing in the St. Clair River and she caught on fire and burned to the waterline and sank.

Now, normally you would think that that's the end of the ship, but this is the Great Lakes Ships burn and sink on a somewhat regular basis during this period.

And seeing as it is, they're often in shallow water where they could be raised, the ships can be put back into service.

So they raised the Dean Richmond.

A year later, they gave her a a rebuild, and she came out as a Dean Richmond that now would just carry cargo.

In 1893, she was carrying mostly flour and grains from the port of Toledo to the port of Buffalo.

So Toledo, of course, is in, at the western end of Ohio.

Buffalo is the port at the head of the lake in New York, and at one point was one of the busiest ports in the entire world.

- So since the ship was going back and forth, a round trip took about five days.

They did this 33 times in 1893.

So the crew could pretty well count on, you know, being home to see family, you know, every fifth day, - A familiar route with a familiar captain.

- You know, captain George Stoddard in 1893.

He was 55 years old, so he was actually at the, the peak ups career.

He was the first mate on the Dean Richmond in 1864 when she was launched.

- But no amount of experience could prepare the captain for his final voyage if the ship's reputation for being unlucky wasn't already problematic.

The ship left port on Friday the 13th.

The combination of the two proved too much ill fate.

- The Dean Richmond left port on Friday, October 13th.

In the afternoon, she was laden with flour, wheat, and zinc and lead ingots at the same time.

There's a category three hurricane that made landfall in Charleston, South Carolina.

Now as it turns out, this hurricane, instead of hugging the coast, actually went inland and made a direct target towards Buffalo - With no weather warning systems to alert the captain, the Dean Richmond, sailed straight into the heart of the storm.

- So she was on the lake experiencing 50 mile an hour winds and struggling to stay alive.

Several ships saw her, but none were able to render assistance because of the extreme conditions.

- And these were the last ships to ever see the Dean Richmond to float the storm of Friday the 13th.

October, 1893 would claim the ship and all the souls on board.

- There was also a woman named RTA Ellsworth.

She was the only woman on board the ship.

She was a single mother.

She lost her husband a few years before, and she was essentially raising four children on her own.

So she really needed this job.

- While the crew had no way of knowing what lay ahead modern analysis can give a clear outline of the storm they encountered.

- This is a weather map of that day.

This kind of hard to see, but they had Isobar lines of equal pressure.

They had temperatures, and they had the track of the hurricane itself, which was dubbed hurricane nine.

They were able to get a pretty good idea of where that hurricane was, and it made landfall here.

Now we have a little more modern depiction here.

So it started as hurricane nine hit South Carolina, moved north as a tropical storm.

It stayed that tropical storm force all the way until it got right to Pennsylvania.

We believe that the low was somewhere here.

And this is the rough circulation around the cyclone.

And assuming this is correct, and we believe it is, lake Erie was really in a very good spot for the maximum amount of winds.

- This hurricane affected ports all the way from Wisconsin, all to Nova Scotia.

- With this low, we have what's called cyclonic curvature.

Cyclonic coming from a cyclone.

- And in this particular storm, 10 ships went down - With that cyclonic curvature.

The physics and the dynamics of how the pressure systems moved, allowed the winds to really be strongest and most gusty right here in the central and eastern parts of the lake, - Six sunk, three ran aground and one broke up.

- So it makes perfect setup again for ships out at sea to be pummeled by these high winds.

- A pummeling that the Dean Richmond couldn't survive passing vessels caught on their own fight, gave eyewitness accounts.

One came from the ship William H. Stevens.

- And so she spotted the Dean Richmond laboring in some rough seas, looked like she had no ability to navigate, and she'd lost one of her smokestacks.

And the captain of the Stevens actually stated in the newspaper, he saw the second smokestack fall.

Right as he was watching the Dean Richmond, he also had to move on.

He couldn't stay.

He was unable to offer assistance.

And the last ship to see the Dean Richmond, was the mi show.

This ship was also bound for Buffalo.

This ship saw the Dean Richmond at around four o'clock in the afternoon and reported that both smokestacks were down.

The ship was totally incapable of steering and was totally at the mercy of, of the waves.

- In the days after, many people continued to cling onto the hope that it was simply disabled at sea, and it would limp in eventually, or perhaps it would, could be found by a passing ship and towed to port or rescued, or that it had put into another port that's they hadn't heard from yet and was still safe.

But two days after the ship's debris started to come ashore near Dunkirk.

And at that point they knew that the ship had been lost.

- 52 people died in this storm, 18 of which were from the Dean.

Richmond - Rumors surrounding the fate of the Dean Richmond started running rampant.

- Plus the newspapers themselves.

They're also embellishing, exaggerating, spreading stories that they haven't fact checked.

And that's how, you know, some of these myths get started or falsehoods and the newspapers sensationalized any aspect that they could regarding the fact that there was a woman on board and, and that, you know, she was, they'd left on October 13th, they had a woman on board.

What did you think was gonna happen?

You know, that's the kind of thing that papers would talk about.

October 15th, a resident of Dunkirk, New York got up and he wanted to go to the beaches near Dunkirk and see, you know, what the damage was from the storm.

And when he went to the beaches near Dunkirk, he actually saw massive amounts of debris and a body.

And this body was wearing a life jacket.

And these were pretty organized search parties.

They were set up to, you know, just keep looking through the wreckage.

And the wreckage was vast.

It actually went 10 miles to the east of Dunkirk and about five miles to the west of Dunkirk.

- Immediately, the local community spring into a spring into action, combing the areas area around where the debris had come ashore to see if they could find any survivors or at least recover the bodies.

And I'm afraid to say there were also many people who were there simply to take advantage of salvaging the flour that had floated as shore for their kitchen.

But that's people for you.

- In 2007, a Spanish woman was exposed after fraudulently claiming to be a survivor of the nine 11 attacks on New York City.

The tragedy of the Dean Richmond received similar attention.

- Shortly after the, the body of a dodge was found, there was a man walking along the beaches near Dunkirk, just the West Dunkirk, who seemed to be dazed.

So a reporter from Buffalo went up to him and asked him who he was, and he said that he was actually a crew member from the Dean Richmond.

And so, you know, the reporter being reporter, he started asking him questions about, well, can you tell me what happened to the Dean Richmond?

And so he gave a very detailed account about how the Dean Richmond had run into this massive storm, lost the ability to steer, lost its smokestacks.

So he was very accurate actually, in some parts of the wreck itself.

But then he started to say some things that were a little more questionable.

He said that the captain had a lot on his mind because his wife and his children were on board.

Now, of course, as it turns out, she wasn't on the ship.

She actually contacted the morgue to say that she was gonna come down and, and pick up her husband's body, so that that myth quickly got crushed.

But unfortunately, this story made it into a lot of newspapers and was like the sensational story of the wreck, because it was a first person account - Interest also lay in her cargo.

- She was a treasure ship.

And a treasure ship meant that everyone who had the ability to try to find her, wanted to find her and salvage.

The gold practices in those days were to treat sunken ships not as historical time capsules or, or graves or anything else.

Rather, they were simply viewed as undersea junkyards with things that could be dug up and brought back to the surface reuse.

- Despite her value, the Dean Richmond remained lost to Lake Erie.

She remained this way for more than 90 years.

- Gary AK is one of the foremost side scan sonar operators in the world.

He found over 28 ships in the Great Lakes.

He found, of course, the Dean Richmond.

And when he found it, the salvage mentality was still in effect.

He blew a small hole in it, which is not great, but at least he didn't blow it completely up.

- She had come to rest upside down five miles off the shore of Northeast Pennsylvania, 11 miles from the safety of Pres Kyle Bay, 16 years later and another storm left, one of the most elusive wrecks on the Great Lakes, the Marquette and Bessemer.

Number two, the second ship of the Marquette and Bessemer dock navigation company, a ferry boat designed to carry train cars and passengers across Lake Erie.

Built in 1905 - In that era, from like 1905 to you know, 1920, they're replacing wooden ships with steel ships.

The ship itself was an open cargo deck with four rails on it.

And what you did is you just rolled the, the, the rail stock right into the, the cargo bay.

It also had passenger cabins.

And the crewmen were probably a typical ordinary lot different people, different walks of life.

They, they seemed like a good group.

The first mate was actually the captain's brother, John McLeod.

He had a captain's license as well.

Robert McLeod, the captain, is probably the, the best known character.

Every account I've ever read about him, it talks about what a gentleman and what an accomplished sailor.

He was incredibly highly regarded man, and he'd been on the lakes his entire life.

And that was true of a lot of the officers.

- Shipping on the Great Lakes has often been something that a family would engage in.

There were many examples of families who were simply born to the sea - And for the many born to the sea.

So too many are lost.

- I'm Patrick McLeod.

I'm I descendant of John McLeod, who was first made like a Marquette best member too.

John started sailing when he was 11 years old, and Robert was a 12-year-old when he started sailing.

They grew up in the Great Lakes.

They grew up in Con Cardia, Ontario, where their family settled from Scotland.

They lived there, you know, with their family.

And then over time there, they had family members who did sail the lakes.

So they were very, they're obviously very interested in lakes - And just what makes the Marquette and Bessemer number two so infamous.

- Oh yeah, that's an easy one.

It's like I said, everyone loves a mystery.

- It's an amazing story because you talk about a huge ship.

That thing could sit on the bottom of a lake and barely be underwater In most places in the lake side, scan sonar should see this thing, but it's just gone.

- The Marquette and Bessemer number two spent its days on the lake ferrying rail cars full of coal mined in Pittsburgh to Port Stanley in Canada.

- Well, one of the attractive things about being on this ship was to raise the family.

You could have a home, - It would've been almost like a nine to five job.

Obviously it's 10 hours plus, but everyone would load up the ship with the coal cars, you know, 32 ish crew members.

They would just, they would travel five hours across to, you know, a calm sea, hopefully, when Lake Erie can be very calm at times.

And they'd go home for dinner at night.

And it was, it was just a factory nine five type job.

- But this wasn't a factory, it was Lake Erie.

And Lake Erie can be punishing crewman.

John Wirtz knew this.

- John had misgivings about the car ferry.

Gortz wrote his family a week before the trip.

The ferry is a dangerous craft, unstable and rough water.

I'm going to leave the ferry and seek other employment.

- The - Next trip will be my last.

- The ship had no stern gate, leaving it vulnerable in harsh weather.

Stormy waters a month earlier had nearly sunk her, causing Captain McLeod to demand the company make alterations.

They agreed to install stern gates during the winter break.

On December 7th, 1909, a ship docked at Kanye at Harbor broke free of its moorings, delaying the daily departure of the Marquette.

Em, Bessemer number two, and her crew, Albert Weiss, the ship's sole passenger further delayed the departure by arriving, just as the crew were casting off with winds of 50 miles per hour.

The weather was already turning, - The weather was already getting bad, leaving the harbor.

And he, he called out the men working on the signal, oh, you know, get that thing working.

I, I may need it when I get back in.

And the problem with these harbors is they were narrow.

So in rough weather with a ship with a higher freeboard getting in was a problem.

- The kind of movement that ship would have, it was a cork on the water.

And that day it was 16 cars of coal, three cars of steel, one car of castings, and then had to have some steel beams on the ship as well, which was only around 980 tons when the ship on average ran between 14 and 1500 tons of coal.

So it would've been a little bit higher in the water that day as well.

- In the proceeding hours, the winds turned into a fierce storm with freezing temperatures.

- They left a little bit late, but even then, the temperatures was starting to drop.

Within 24 hours, it dropped from 40 degrees to zero degrees - With an exposed stern.

She traveled north deeper into the growing storm.

- Captain traveled all the way across the lake to Port Stanley.

- Unfortunately, it was not able to enter the harbor.

And that was seen by people with, with great credit.

He - Turned away to port.

Some think that when he turned to port, he went back out into the middle of the lake trying to make it to Cleveland.

That would make sense running into the weather.

- But in the following hours, witnesses on both sides of the lake reported both hearing and seeing the ship, seeking the safety of a harbor Reports that if true would've defied her Crosslake journey.

Time - Eyewitness testimony is one of the worst testimonies to have.

- The brain naturally supplies some inaccuracies simply because it's the, the way the a human brain works.

- And after the storm passed, people across the lake looked out eagerly awaiting her return.

- The earliest reported wreckage that I could find was the WB Davi that encountered a large wreckage field off Long point.

- And with that, the search got underway.

Families continued clinging to the hope that Lake Erie would return their loved ones unscathed.

- There were fishing tugs looking for this ship all over the place, looking for survivors.

- The ship may have been lost, but her four life rafts could have been just enough to save the crew from the freezing waters.

Five days later, a raft is spotted by Captain Driscoll of the tugboat, Commodore Perry, 15 miles north of Erie.

- It was probably launched very quickly because the men, for the most part, did not have proper winter gear.

- And you have nine men on the boat.

One was wearing a green, the rest of 'em were not.

The rest of 'em were basically wearing cold.

They would've worn the ship on the different duties.

They were wearing their of the coveralls.

- They couldn't board the boat.

They wound up towing it in.

- They had survived the sinking, but had been left exposed to the harsh cold.

- There - Were no survivors.

- The bodies were primarily frozen in an upright position.

There's one report that they were trying to huddle over.

One of the smaller crewmen trying to protect it.

- A steam line from the USS Wolverine thaw the bodies free of the raft.

As crowds watched on, - There's a brother and fathers and sons of the community.

They were friends and neighbors.

Everyone knew them.

And so then when they saw that boat come in, it was devastation for the community.

They knew at that point it was all lost.

- One of the more poignant pieces was a young man named Earl Ball, or D Ball.

As he's listed in the obituaries, his mother wrote a very heartfelt letter to the people of cognac.

- If you ever find my son, please let me know.

- A request that Lake Erie refused to grant.

Of the 33 reported onboard, 14 bodies were recovered.

- And then the, the mystery is in just the diversity of the wreckage, you had bodies turning up in other locations.

- It was five months before the first body was found.

When - John, my great-grandfather found in Niagara, - The Marquette and Bessemer dock and navigation company quickly constructed a replacement ship by the same name.

On the day of the official launch, the body of Captain Robert McLeod was found on Long Point.

- And then you had some human remains that weren't identifiable showing up on the Ohio Shore.

So you got, you got stuff coming from everywhere.

- It was everywhere.

But you're looking at this tempest of a lake that would spew the everything everywhere.

But in most cases, everything was found West of Long Point.

We wanna know where it's at.

I mean, where it's as important, but why it, what happened?

You know, this is as a mystery that needs to be solved.

You know, any mystery should be solved.

But this one, particularly 'cause it's so personal, you know, to be able to put a, to put a period on that sentence and say, now we know, you know, we know what they did.

We know how they tried.

I hope it's on the Canadian side because Canadian, Canadian protective acts against ship rating is quite a bit better, stronger than American.

And I think that's really important to me, that my family, that it stays respected as a grave site.

- The full sea rolls in thunders, in glory and in glee, oh, bury me.

Not in the senseless earth, but in the living sea.

I bury me where it surges a thousand miles from shore.

And in its brotherly unrest I'll range Forevermore Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, the Community Assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority support from Spring Hill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas b Hagen.

- We question and learn.