FRANKFORT, MI - It was 138 years ago this fall that a schooner hauling iron ore met a violent end in a sudden squall in northern Lake Michigan. The wreck still litters the lake's bottom near Frankfort - and sparked a haunting mystery that continues to be part of Great Lakes lore: a woman who died lashed to the sinking ship's mast.

Boaters have floated over the waterlogged timbers off shore. They're all that remain of the J. Hazard Hartzell. That, and a U.S. Life Saving Service annual report that goes into great detail about the 1880 wreck and its controversial rescue effort.

The story itself is that of an extraordinary effort. Townspeople and surfmen from the nearby Life Saving Station worked together under grueling conditions for more than 12 hours to save the seven men aboard. But the only woman on the ship - a cook named Lydia Dale from Toledo - remained frustratingly out of reach.

One sailor after another reached the safety of the beach that horrible day, only to tell rescuers that the woman was already dead. But was it true?

A movie has been made about the Hartzell. At least one book has been loosely based on the wreck.

But to truly understand what it was like out there in that vicious squall - a day that became known as the Big Blow because it sent other ships under the waves - one only has to read the harrowing account penned in that annual government report. The level of detail is amazing. And if that writer didn't go on to author adventure novels, it was a loss for readers everywhere.

We're drawing from that historical account here to tell the Hartzell's story, and show you why the mystery of Lydia Dale persists.

An Easy Trip, Then a Violent Squall

The J. H. Hartzell left L'Anse in Lake Superior, at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula on Monday, Oct. 11. She was loaded with 495 tons of iron ore, bound for the Frankfort Furnace Company and the harbor of that namesake town fronting Lake Michigan.

Five days later, graced with fair winds, the schooner arrived just off the town's coast around 3 a.m. Captain William A. Jones later told people he decided to anchor off-shore and wait until daylight to enter Frankfort's harbor.

Around 6 a.m., the winds suddenly shifted and a hard gale began to blow. A mix of hail, snow and rain began to whip across the lake. Waves pounded the boat.

When the squall kicked in, Capt. Jones and his crew of six men let both anchors go and tried to turn the Hartzell away from the wind, "but in the growing fury of the wind and sea, the vessel would not obey her helm and began to drift in."

The schooner ran hard aground on a sand bar about 300 yards from shore, in the area near what is now known as the Elberta Bluffs. In front of the crew at the edge of the roiling lake rose a towering, forested bluff several hundred feet high, according to the U.S. Life Saving Service's description of the incident.

"The seas at once crashed over her, and the awful staving and rending usual in such cases began. The yawl was carried away, the deck cabin wrenched asunder and scattered to the breakers, and the vessel began to founder. In a couple of hours, all that remained for her crew was to take to the rigging."

As this life-and-death drama increased with each battering wave, the cook Lydia Dale was described by the crew as being seriously ill. When the crew climbed 50 feet up, it took four men to boost the heavyset woman up into the cross-trees of the ship's foremast where planks nailed across it created a platform. She was wrapped in blankets. Her head lay on a sailor's knees for support. Like the rest of the crew, she was covered in wet canvas cut from the gaff-topsail.

Forty feet below their perch, the captain clung to the ladder-like ropes of the schooner's ratlines.

It was about this time - around 8 a.m. - that a fisherman's boy who lived near Frankfort's south pier told his father he'd seen a boat having trouble in the gale.

The boy's father ran to nearby South Frankfort (now called Elberta) with about 20 other citizens. They built a big fire on the beach and used driftwood to spell out "Life Boat Coming" on the bluff's bare sand. From their perch in the foremast, the Hartzell's crew signaled that they understood.

Meanwhile, a lone rider on horseback set out for the Point Betsie Life Saving Station, which sat about 10 miles north of Frankfort. It was there that a group of surfmen had a Lyle Gun, a breeches buoy and other equipment needed for the rescue.

But getting all that equipment over the rugged trails and hills to reach a beach two towns away was no small feat. It took a couple sweat-stained hours. Townspeople used axes and handspikes to clear the underbrush that led to the bluffs where the equipment then had to be hauled carefully down a mountain of shifting sand.

"Even with the impediments removed, so precipitous was the activity that it took the unified effort of 27 brawny men, by actual count, and a span of stout horses, to gain the summit, only about 20 feet being made at a time."

By the time they reached the shoreline where the half-sunk schooner was visible through a blowing curtain of sleet, a group of 50 to 60 fishermen, farmers and townspeople had gathered to help the surfmen start the rescue.

A Lyle Gun was a common piece of life-saving equipment.

A Gun, Some Breeches and a Surf Car

The rescue cart was unloaded. The Lyle Gun - a common rescue piece during that era - was planted and made ready to fire. It looked like a miniature cannon. Propelled by the force of black powder, the gun was designed to shoot a light line across the vessel so the crew could grab it and create a connection between the boat and the rescuers on land.

In the Hartzell's case, it took two tries to get the line secured to the sinking schooner. To the line rescuers attached a breeches buoy - essentially a life ring hooked to a pair of canvas shorts.

The ship's first mate put himself in the breeches and was pulled to land. It was a perilous 17-minute journey, witnesses reported. "A citizen ... gave him a draught of brandy. This seemed to revive him, and presently he said, 'Save the others.' "

Before being led into town, the first mate told the rescuers the woman on the boat did not want to come ashore in the breeches buoy.

So the surfmen then hauled out the "surf car," which was a tube-like metal pod with a hatch that closed. It was sent out to the ship using the rope system so the crew could climb in a few at a time, shut the hatch and be hauled to shore.

In its first trip, it carried two crewmen back. "Upon being interrogated about the woman, the two men appear to have given evasive answers, to the general effect that she would come ashore in the the next trip of the car."

But in its second trip, the surf car carried back the second mate and captain.

"In the beginning of the creeping darkness, the car arrived from the sea and was torn open by a dozen eager hands. The crowd was confident that the woman would be brought this time, and were stupefied when only the two men appeared."

"There was an instant burst of fierce interrogation, to which the captain and mate appear, like their predecessors, to have rendered equivocal answers." They said the woman was "the same as dead," and that she'd be brought to shore on the next trip.

That response, witnesses later said, drew "sullen, angry murmurs from the crowd."

The dents in the battered surf car were hammered out and it was put on the rope out for its third and final trip.

A breeches buoy.

A Roar From the Crowd: "Where is the Woman?"

The rescuers waited a long time before giving the signal to haul the car back in, wanting to give the two remaining crew plenty of time to load the cook inside of it. When finally it became so dark they could hardly see it, they gave the order to pull in the car.

"A frenzy of activity at once fell upon the hillside. The common consciousness that the woman was at last coming in the car with the remainder of the men on the wreck, and that the tremendous hardship and effort of many hours were about to bear fruit gave a furious alertness to the cordons of obscure figures on the ghostly front of the bluff and the rope of the life car was slid swiftly through the darkness."

A dozen men went into the surf to haul out the car. When they opened the hatch, the last two men were inside. But not Lydia Dale.

"Where's the woman?" came the shouts from the crowd on the beach. Some even reached inside the metal pod with their hands to feel if anyone had been left inside. "They haven't brought the woman."

"The dark air resounded with a roar of curses, and amidst the din men were heard yelling that they never would have laid hands to the hauling lines if they had known that the woman was to be left upon the wreck to perish."

The last sailors to be rescued told the crowd the woman was dead, describing her as "stiff as a board."

Too dark to attempt another trip out, the Life Saving Station team decided they'd assess the wreck again in the daylight.

"It is, and doubtless will always be, an open question: in what condition the hapless woman was left upon that mast," the Life Saving Service report said.

Already Dead, or Impossible to Help?

By dawn the next day, the schooner's mast was gone. And with it, any evidence of Lydia Dale's fate. Talk in town was sharply divided about how that piece of the rescue had been handled.

Some believed she'd died long before help arrived, and there was nothing more that could have been done.

But that talk was silenced 17 days later when the cook's body washed ashore. The coroner determined Lydia Dale had died of drowning, "leaving it to be inferred that she was left upon the wreck alive, and perished upon the subsequent fall of the mast into the sea."

The Hartzell's sailors were not there for the inquest. They'd already left town.

The official summary of the incident report focuses on the seven men saved by the heroic efforts of the townspeople and the men of the nearby Life Saving Station.

But it leaves readers with the question of Lydia Dale's horrific last moments:

"It remains, and will doubtless always remain, a mystery whether, as the coroner's jury substantially found, the poor woman was needlessly sacrificed, whether she was abandoned in her insensibility because her companions felt the impossibility of lowering her to the car."

Sunset along the Elberta Bluffs, where the Hartzell ran aground and wrecked.

Want to learn more about Frankfort and its smaller sibling, Elberta? Check out these stories before you plan your next trip: