Frances Baker, Detroit’s fearless wreck diver in the early 1900s (as profiled in 1905)
Quick Profile
- Name: Miss Frances Baker
- Home: Detroit, Michigan
- Era: Turn-of-the-century Great Lakes wrecking & salvage (profile published June 1905)
- Known for: Professional wreck diving in an era when the trade was overwhelmingly male
- Noted earnings: The article claims she accumulated nearly $25,000 in about three years of work
- Signature salvage: Recovery of copper valued around $50,000 from the wreck of the W. H. Stevens in ~80 feet of water (Lake Erie)
A Great Lakes Profession Few Dared Enter
At the start of the 20th century, Great Lakes shipping was booming—and so were losses. Storms, collisions, groundings, fire, and structural failures sent ships and barges to the bottom across Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and beyond. For wrecking companies, the lakebed wasn’t just a graveyard; it was a worksite. Cargo still had value. Machinery could be recovered. Sometimes a vessel could even be raised.
But the work required a special breed: wreck divers—people willing to walk into cold darkness wearing heavy lead and canvas, breathing air forced down a hose, depending completely on surface crews and equipment that could fail.
Into that world stepped Frances Baker: “pretty,” “well educated,” and—by the article’s telling—only twenty years old, already known as one of the most capable divers on the Lakes. The feature makes a point of the contradiction: she’s presented as both unexpected and inevitable—a young woman entering a profession that was considered too brutal, too technical, and too dangerous for almost anyone, let alone a girl.
Apprenticed to the Wrecking Life
The story roots Frances Baker’s path in family and environment. She is described as the daughter of Captain H. W. Baker, a highly regarded Great Lakes wrecking captain and “captain of divers.” Wrecking in that era wasn’t a desk job; it was a traveling industry—boats outfitted for lifting, pumping, towing, and supporting divers. A diver’s effectiveness depended on the entire crew and the discipline of the operation.
In the article’s version of events, Frances didn’t drift into the trade—she chose it. She went out on wrecking trips with her father and learned the equipment, the routines, and the realities of salvage work: the waiting, the storms, the broken gear, and the hard calls made on the water. The piece emphasizes that she didn’t merely “tag along”—she studied the work deeply enough to become useful, then indispensable.
First Descent: The Lake Huron Ring
The feature’s central “origin story” moment is a salvage job involving a large wooden barge in Lake Huron, described as lying deep and partially embedded, around 50 feet below the surface. One of the owners—who had been aboard when the barge went down—mentions a personal item he would dearly like returned: a diamond ring left in his cabin.
Frances volunteers to retrieve it herself.
This is where the article becomes vivid: she descends a ladder into the water in full gear and experiences the first shock of the underwater world—pressure, the unnatural buoyancy, and the psychological effect of being enclosed in a helmet and suit while darkness closes in. The text describes her reaching the bottom, seeing the shadow of the wreck looming, and moving toward it under the limited pool of light carried with her.
Inside the wreck, the story highlights the body’s rebellion: pain, nosebleed, and the overpowering sensation of pressure and compressed air. Yet she forces herself onward, reaches the cabin, finds the described stand, and locates a small box containing the ring. On the return, she stumbles and falls—another moment meant to underline how easily panic could turn fatal—but she regains control and returns to the surface exhausted.
Her reward is symbolic and practical: she is presented with the recovered diamond ring, and the article frames it as the moment she “proved” she could live and work under the surface—therefore she could be paid as a professional diver.
The Pay—and the Price—of Underwater Work
Curwood’s piece stresses two realities of the trade:
- A capable diver was economically valuable.
The article suggests that someone who can reliably work underwater is worth premium daily pay to a wrecking company (it gives a broad range, reflecting the variability of danger and skill). - The body has limits—and the water enforces them.
The narrative points to warning signs like bleeding and crushing head pressure and implies that staying down too long can turn a manageable situation into “quick death.” This is early-era diving, long before modern scuba training standards, redundant systems, and widespread decompression theory in recreational form. It’s not just risky; it’s unforgiving.
In other words, Frances Baker’s story isn’t presented as a stunt. It’s presented as competence under conditions that punished mistakes.
The Treasure Ship: Copper from the W. H. Stevens (Lake Erie)
The most “headline” salvage in the article is the recovery of a cargo of copper from the W. H. Stevens, described as having gone down in Lake Erie under about 80 feet of water. The feature repeatedly returns to the scale of this recovery: about $50,000 worth of copper (in the article’s telling).
What’s especially interesting is how the wreck is found. The story describes a methodical search: working a large area, dragging, probing, and sounding until they locate the wreck site. When the gear and readings finally confirm it, Frances goes down first and identifies the wreck—recognizing, in the article, the timbers of a ship that had burned.
Then comes the hard part: not discovery, but extraction. The story describes about ten days of hoisting and recovery work and says Frances’s share from that job alone was about $5,000—a fortune for the era, and a number clearly chosen by the magazine to demonstrate that this is not “a girl with a curiosity,” but a professional doing high-value industrial work.
Not Always Treasure: The Missing Sailor
One of the darker episodes described is not about cargo but about a missing man. A vessel has gone down (the article places this on Lake Huron) and one seaman is unaccounted for. Divers search without success; Frances volunteers.
The account is grim: she enters the wreck and searches by the harsh cone of her light, expecting to find the body in the hold—only to discover the space empty. She continues, moving through the wreck until, turning toward an exit, the light catches something that makes her recoil: the missing sailor’s body floating within the structure, caught among the beams overhead—“face staring down,” as the magazine describes it.
This passage serves a purpose beyond drama. It illustrates what salvage divers were asked to do: not only lift cargo and clear hazards, but sometimes work inside spaces where death is present and close, in a place where you cannot simply bolt for the surface without consequences.
Why This Story Mattered in 1905
Curwood’s article is clearly written as a marvel—a combination of adventure, technology, and social surprise. The repeated emphasis that Frances is young, educated, and female is not incidental. In 1905, a woman in heavy-dive gear on the Great Lakes wrecking circuit was a startling image—and the magazine leans into that.
But behind the spectacle is a more important thread: competence.
Frances Baker is portrayed as someone who learned the machinery, learned the seamanship, learned the discipline of the wrecking crew, and then proved herself in the only way that mattered in that trade: doing the work underwater when it counted.
That—more than the ring, and more even than the copper—explains why she became “known from Duluth to Buffalo” in the article’s telling. A wrecking outfit survives on reputation. A diver who can be relied upon becomes part of the company’s identity.
A Modern Note for Wreck Divers and Wreck Researchers
Read today, the story sits at an interesting crossroads:
- It’s an early 20th-century magazine feature, so it likely polishes events for drama and inspiration.
- Yet it also preserves real operational details: depth, recovery methods, the physical strain, and the kinds of tasks a Great Lakes wrecking crew faced.
For modern wreck divers—especially those who follow a “look but don’t touch” ethic—this is also a reminder that many wrecks we now treat as heritage sites were once treated as workplaces and resource targets. Wrecking and salvage shaped which wrecks survived, which were stripped, and which were altered forever.
Frances Baker’s story belongs to that earlier phase: the era when the lakebed was still considered a place you worked, not just a place you visited.
Source
J. Oliver Curwood, “The Girl Diver of the Great Lakes,” Woman’s Home Companion, June 1905. (PDF scan provided)