Finding Environmental History in “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

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The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore, twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early

The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship’s bell rang
Could it be the north wind they’d been feeling?

If the title of this post hadn’t already given it away, you might have recognized these lines as the opening stanzas of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” This folk-rock ballad, released in 1976, commemorates the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank on November 10, 1975 in Lake Superior. 

That freighter is the Great Lakes’ most famous shipwreck. This notoriety stems from a number of factors: it was the largest ship on the Great Lakes when launched in 1958; the entire twenty-nine-man crew perished; why it sank is still shrouded in mystery. 

Another reason, perhaps the primary reason, this laker’s demise is so widely known: the popularity of the Canadian troubadour’s song. It might even be said this has become an anthem of the upper Great Lakes region on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. Go to any lakeside bar for a few hours, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear this song emanating from jukebox (or, more likely these days, streaming over the sound system). 

For a live recording the year of the song’s release, check out this video.

Since November 10, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of this nautical disaster, in this post I’m going to focus on those first two stanzas from Lightfoot’s haunting song. Breaking these down two lines at a time, I’ll explore some of the environmental history themes linked with the Edmund Fitzgerald – both the song and the ship. 

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitchee Gumee

Gitchee Gumee is a transliteration of “Gichigami,” the Chippewa (an Anishinaabe group who call themselves Ojibwe) word for Lake Superior, meaning “big sea” or “great water.” That appellation for this sweetwater sea was first popularized for settler audiences by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha and reintroduced to contemporary audiences by Lightfoot’s song. 

It’s hard to say whether Lightfoot’s mention of the Chippewa is meant to foreground the Indigenous history of the lake. These lines could be a nod toward that, but in some ways they might also mirror the type of histories so often written: a brief and paternalistic acknowledgement of the historical Indigenous presence before it quickly recedes out of view, replaced by more consequential white activities like mining and shipping. 

Recent research has done a better job of highlighting the Indigenous presence here. Nancy Langston’s Sustaining Lake Superior, for example, is explicitly focused on the environmental history of the largest of the Great Lakes. Langston looks at the impacts of different types of resource extraction – many of which were intertwined with the Edmund Fitzgerald and the industrial sectors it supported – on the lake. Langston chronicles the ecological damage but also stresses the resilience of Lake Superior and the Indigenous communities on its shores.

The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy

The choice of “her” rather than “its” in reference to Lake Superior is an interesting one. It is common for ships to be gendered female (as this one is in the last lines of the ballad), but what to make of referring to the lake as female? Is this meant to evoke her ruthless capriciousness, or portray her as something that needs to be “conquered” by masculine sailors? Or is it a way of personifying, or giving agency to, a natural feature? (As an aside, recently there have been efforts in Ohio and New York State to give other Great Lakes legal rights or personhood). 

The basis for stating that Superior “never gives up her dead” seems to be an acknowledgement of the lake’s cold temperature, which preserves bodies by inhibiting decomposition. That frigidness means that Lake Superior is less biologically productive than the other Great Lakes; the much, much smaller Lake Erie is actually a much more lucrative fishery, for instance.

Lake Superior’s temperature also makes it less hospitable to many nonnative species that have bedeviled the rest of the Great Lakes. Some of the most pernicious, such as zebra and quagga mussels, infiltrated the Great Lakes after the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway by hitching a ride in the ballast tanks of big ships like the Edmund Fitzgerald that came from overseas.

With a load of iron ore, twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty

The first large-scale mining of iron ore near Lake Superior occurred in Michigan’s upper peninsula in the mid-19thcentury. Soon other ore ranges around the lake were developed, and this resource became one of the main commercial cargos shipped on Lake Superior. Locks at the Soo were installed to facilitate transportation through the St. Marys River, in large part to send the ores to steel mills throughout the Great Lakes basin. By the end of the 19th century, the Mesabi Range at the western end of Lake Superior was recognized as the world’s most productive iron ore source, and the Soo locks were enlarged a number of times to handle the maritime traffic. 

After the more easily accessible iron ore had been mined out by the mid-20th century, the focus turned toward lower-grade taconite. To convert taconite into a usable form, it is pelletized – a process frequently done on Lake Superior’s shores. Indeed, when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down it was laden with 26,116 long tons of these pellets, which had been refined right at its disembarkation point at Superior, Wisconsin. Iron ore mining and processing led to all kinds of pollutants, many toxic, flowing into Lake Superior. 

That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early

November is renowned as the most dangerous month for Great Lakes freighters, many of which, including the Edmund Fitzgerald, were trying to fit in one more run before the shipping season closed. The storm that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald was reputedly a “bomb cyclone” with winds close to hurricane force: sustained speeds over 60 miles per hour and gusts up to 85 mph. Waves were 25-35 feet, and rogue waves may have been closer to 50 feet. 

As we know now, by the mid-1970s climate change was already messing with the weather of the Great Lakes region and making extreme weather events more likely and more intense. Moreover, just a few months before the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, an article was published by a geophysicist in Science that has been credited with popularizing the term “global warming.” 

Was this storm attributable to climate change? That would be too simplistic an assessment. Though the weather was extreme, it wasn’t out of the range of normal storms at that time of year. Not to mention that the ship may not have sunk if it wasn’t for a combination of the weather and human error (one of the leading theories is that the Edmund Fitzgerald struck a reef). 

The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin

To start its fateful journey, the Edmund Fitzgerald left Burlington Dock No. 1 (the largest iron ore dock in the world at the time) in mid-afternoon of November 9. Its cargo came from U.S. territory, its destination was in the United States, and the crew was American. But the ship sank in Canadian waters near the east end of Lake Superior.

This points to the fact that the Great Lakes are, aside of Lake Michigan, transborder waterbodies. That fact has played an enormous role in the governance and usage of these lakes and their connecting waters. Canada and the United States signed the Boundary Waters Treaty in 1909, which created the International Joint Commission. This commission was responsible for approving and regulating the different remedial works – canals, dams, hydroelectric stations – in the St. Marys River that affect the flow regime out of Lake Superior. 

In addition to the St. Marys River, the IJC coordinated many of the extensive hydraulic engineering interventions undertaken to facilitate navigation elsewhere in the Great Lakes basin. For boats such as the Edmund Fitzgerald to get to Lake Erie, they transited the St. Clair and Detroit connecting channels, both of which had been deepened, dredged, and altered since the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the Edmund Fitzgerald was originally launched in conjunction with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, which encompasses the Welland Canal as well as the replumbing of the eponymous river to allow big ships to sail through.

As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned

The Edmund Fitzgerald is the biggest boat to ever sink in the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Ship Museum estimates that a total of 6,000 lives and 30,000 vessels have been lost on these inland seas. There have been approximately three million shipwrecks worldwide over the course of human history; about three-quarters of this total are believed to have resulted from the two world wars of the twentieth century. 

Over time, the metal of modern shipwrecks corrodes, potentially releasing oil and other chemicals, depending on their cargo. Military vessels often have munitions which contain toxic pollutants such as mercury. Some military shipwrecks aren’t accidental either: many were deliberately sunk when they became obsolete.  

In 2010, the U.S. Congress gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) $1 million to undertake a study titled Remediation of Underwater Legacy Environmental Threats (RULET). The point was to identify wrecks in U.S. waters that posed a pollution threat. Completed in 2013, this survey identified 87 high-level risk wrecks. 

To use just one Great Lakes example, during the 1930s a barge sunk in Lake Erie carrying a reported 4,752 barrels of crude oil and benzol. This, and many other shipwrecks, were still slowly releasing pollutants into their host waters. In 2015, most of the potential pollutants were pumped out of this Lake Erie wreck by the Coast Guard. Congress then appropriated $1 million in 2020 so that NOAA could further review and prioritize potentially polluting shipwrecks.

Interestingly, wrecked ships can provide habitat for a diverse range of aquatic organisms. My colleague Lynne Heasley has written about these and other eco-industrial relationships in her book The Accidental Reef and other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes (and, in a nod to the subject of this post, has two cats named Eddie and Fitz). There is even an emerging subdiscipline of scientific study called shipwreck ecology.

Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland

When it sank, the Fitzgerald wasn’t headed for Cleveland, but for Zug Island (Detroit), and then to Toledo to lay up for the winter. Lightfoot was reportedly quite concerned with the accuracy of his song, and even later changed some of the lyrics for live shows. Given that the ship’s destination was widely reported in the press, this mistake about the port of call is curious. It appears that the use of Cleveland, rather than the correct destination, is attributable to the need for a rhyming couplet in this A-B-C-B rhyme scheme (i.e., the Ohio city rhymes with “seasoned”).

Cleveland is also a well-known steelmaking area. To be sure, for a long time the Great Lakes basin hosted the world’s greatest concentration of steelmaking centers, with such coal-burning facilities and allied industries peppered all along the lakeshores. This industry has been responsible or more than a century’s worth of dangerous chemicals and waste going into the Great Lakes. This pollution was one of the reasons that the U.S. and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements in the 1970s. 

And later that night when the ship’s bell rang
Could it be the north wind they’d been feeling?

Since a sudden north wind on Superior indicates an imminent storm, according to sailor lore, this line offers a foreboding transition marking the crew’s growing awareness that the weather was turning foul. It can serve here as a transition to some concluding remarks on the legacy of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

In response to the vessel’s sinking, a number of regulations and procedures were changed to prevent similar disasters. Indeed, there has been no major shipwreck on the Great Lakes since. After a great deal of persistence by relatives of the shipwreck’s victims, in the 21st Century the Canadian government made the resting place of the Edmund Fitzgerald a protected marine heritage site. This means it is not legally accessible for divers or explorers. 

A ceremony to remember the Edmund Fitzgerald happens every year at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, plus another private event for the crew’s families. Lightfoot regularly joined the surviving relatives for memorial activities. Unfortunately, the singer won’t be able to join in the 50th anniversary events since he passed away in 2023. Nevertheless, special anniversary ceremonies are planned for the Shipwreck Museum as well as the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo and the Mariners’ Church of Detroit, among others.

If you attend one these memorial events, or find yourself toasting the Edmund Fitzgerald in some lakeside shanty, you’re all but guaranteed to hear the poignant strains of Lightfoot’s iconic tune. 

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Daniel Macfarlane

Daniel is a Professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is an editor for The Otter-La loutre and is part of the NiCHE executive. A transnational environmental historian who focuses on Canadian-American border waters and energy issues, particularly in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, Daniel is the author or co-editor of six books on topics such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, border waters, IJC, and Niagara Falls. His book "Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations" was published in summer 2023. His newest book is "The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History" (September 2024). He is now working on a book about Lake Michigan, co-editing a book on the St. Clair River/Delta/Lake, and is planning to eventually write a book on the environmental history of the Great Lakes. Website: https://danielmacfarlane.wordpress.com Twitter: @Danny__Mac__

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