The Minnie A. Caine was a four-masted wooden schooner built by Seattle shipbuilding the Moran Brothers in 1900. One of the schooner's initial short-term co-owners, Elmer Caine, named her after his wife, Minnie. From 1900 to 1926, the schooner was operated out of San Francisco by Charles Nelson Co., one of the largest transporters of lumber in the United States at the time. The schooner transported lumber across the Pacific Ocean from the Pacific Northwest to ports in Australia and Americas, but after 1920, her scope of operations became limited to the West Coast lumber trade. By 1926, the company could no longer run a sailing ship profitably, and the Minnie A. Caine was moored in a marine boneyard in California.