The SS Cayuga took shape on the banks of the Cuyahoga River in 1889, the fourteenth steel vessel produced by the Globe Iron Works Company and the second of five identical sister ships. Named after Cayuga Creek in western New York, she was commissioned by Buffalo's Lehigh Valley Transit Company to carry package freight between Buffalo and Chicago, with regular stops in Milwaukee and Gladstone, Michigan. At 2,669 gross tons, powered by a triple expansion steam engine and twin Scotch marine boilers, she cost $250,000 to build. Cayuga was part of a transformation sweeping the Great Lakes: iron had arrived in the 1840s, but wooden ships held on until the 1880s thanks to cheap timber. By the time Cayuga launched, steel was the future, and she embodied it -- fast, capacious, and built to last. Or so her owners believed.

Cayuga seemed to attract trouble from her earliest days. On April 9, 1890, less than a year into her career, she left Buffalo harbor in tow of the tug S.W. Gee. A full gale was blowing. Clearing the breakwater, she became unmanageable, drifted onto a shoal, then smashed against rocks at the foot of Georgia Street. Life-saving crews could not reach her until the storm abated. Six tugs finally pulled her free, but the damage was extensive: keel plates buckled, every propeller blade snapped off, and the rudder shoe was gone. A year later, in November 1891, she collided with the wooden freighter Delaware off Cheboygan, Michigan. Each time, Cayuga was repaired and sent back to work. The lakes demanded resilience, and Cayuga delivered -- until the morning she met the Joseph L. Hurd.

On May 10, 1895, Captain George Graser steered Cayuga toward Buffalo carrying 35,000 bushels of oats, flour, and general merchandise. A thick fog had settled over the northern reaches of Lake Michigan near Ile Aux Galets. Somewhere in that gray murk, the wooden freighter Joseph L. Hurd, loaded with pine lumber from Duluth, was heading in the opposite direction. Both ships blew fog whistles, but wind twisted the sound. They spotted each other's lights briefly, then fog swallowed the view again. When the two vessels reemerged, they were on a collision course with almost no distance between them. Cayuga's engine reversed, but only slowed her. Joseph L. Hurd plowed into Cayuga's starboard hull, ripping it open. The lumber in Hurd's hold kept her afloat despite losing her bow. Cayuga rolled to port, righted herself, and sank in 25 minutes. The bulk freighter Manola rescued both crews. Only one life was lost: George Johnson, Hurd's cook, who fell overboard and drowned.

Finding and raising Cayuga became an obsession. The underwriters posted a $1,000 reward. Captain Cyrus Sinclair located the wreck in June 1895 by dragging an anchor from the tug George W. Cuyler. In September, Captain James Reid of Bay City signed a $100,000 contract to raise the ship. His plan was ambitious: eighteen cables threaded under the hull, eight steel pontoons inflated to lift her off the bottom, then a tow into Little Traverse Bay for patching. What followed was five years of catastrophe. Pontoons broke free and rocketed to the surface. Reid and his divers suffered severe decompression sickness. A derrick barge sank atop one diver, who allegedly never surfaced again. The barge itself later sank completely. A salvage tug caught fire. By 1900, Reid abandoned the effort, his company nearly bankrupt, having spent over $40,000 with nothing to show but recovered oats and broken equipment.

Cayuga lay forgotten until spring 1969, when divers John Steele and Gene Turner of Illinois rediscovered the wreck. She rests with a 35-degree port list southwest of Grays Reef Light, her stern intact, her bow broken away and lying on its side. The cabins are gone. Forward of the engine room, the hull has partially collapsed. But the hold still contains the remains of her cargo, along with two spare propeller blades. Four of Captain Reid's salvage pontoons remain attached to the hull, and the sunken derrick barge lies off her port side. When the wreck was first found, the air hose of the lost diver was reportedly still visible, poking out from beneath the barge. Today, Cayuga is protected within the Straits of Mackinac Shipwreck Preserve, part of an underwater museum where divers can visit a vessel that embodies both the ambition and the peril of Great Lakes shipping in the steel age.