The Cold Ledger

One vessel at a time

The Cold Ledger is my endeavor and mine alone: histories of the ships the Great Lakes never gave back, researched slowly and told one vessel at a time — the build, the working life, the weather on the last day, and the people the lake kept.

New installments arrive Wednesdays and Saturdays. I write them the honest way: the sources on the table, the seams left showing, the toll stated as the toll — and where the record runs out, the unknown stays unknown. I won't invent a number, or a dog's name, to make an ending tidier.

The installments

• No. 1 — The Trinidad (1881): The Ship in a Bottle A grain-fleet canaller lost to a leak in 1881, found upright in 2023 with the dishes still stacked in her cabinets.
• No. 2 — The Niagara (1856): In Sight of Shore The palace steamer that burned within sight of shore — her toll sits somewhere between sixty and one hundred and seventy-five, and the record never settled it.
• No. 3 — The Gallinipper (1851): She Righted Herself Wisconsin's oldest known shipwreck — a schooner that capsized, righted herself, capsized again, and took no one with her.
• No. 4 — The Vernon (1887) Arrives Saturday, October 17, 2026.