The history of a Lake Superior tragedy is simple. One more trip from Duluth may mean thousands of dollars. The season is late--too late. But freight rates are high. No risk, no gain, argues the ship-owner, as he sends his vessel from port. Those are days of anxiety for captain, crew, and owner. In a few hours the clear sky may give place to banks of snow clouds. The air turns bitter cold. Darkness falls in the middle of the afternoon. The snow descends in dense clouds. It is far worse than the blackest night, for it shuts out the lights along the treacherous shores as completely as a wall of mountains. Upon the captain alone now depends the safety of the ship, for the Government’s attempts to aid him are futile. Perhaps his vessel is safely making her course miles from the coast. Or it may be that it is driving steadily toward its doom upon the dreaded Pictured Rocks. It was in this way that the steamer _Superior_ was lost with all on board, and in the same way the _Western Reserve_ beat herself to pieces within sight of the Big Sable light. And Superior has a harder fate in store for many of those who take the last ill-fated trip of the season. Sailors dread it more than the tragedy of dense snowstorms, when they run upon the rocks, for even there hope does not die; they dread it more than the fierce, sledge-hammer wash of Erie in a storm; more than the fearful dash for port in Lake Michigan, where ports are few; and this fate is the fate of “the little ice devils”--those masses of ice which freeze upon a ship until she is weighted beyond control. In these days of late navigation--days of fierce battles with snow, ice, and wind, days of death and destruction as they are never known upon the salt seas--is material for a generation of writers; unnumbered stories of true mystery, true romance, and true tragedy, which, if fed to the nation in popular form, would be of immeasurable value to lovers of the literature of adventure. Into what a fascinating tale of mystery, for example, might the loss of the _Queen of the West_ be turned! And, yet, here is a case where truth is in reality stranger than fiction, and possibly an editor might “turn down” the tale as too improbable. Recently I chronicled a true romance of the Lakes. I had dates, names of ships, names of people, and even court records to prove the absolute verity of my story, which was related in the form of fiction. I sent it to several editors who had published other stories of mine, and one after another they returned it, saying that while my proofs were conclusive, the story was so unusual in some of its situations that their readers would consider the tale as a gross exaggeration of anything that might occur on the Great Lakes!