Cotopaxi was one of seventeen EFC Design 1060 4,200 DWT, 2,351 GRT steam-powered "Laker" type bulk carrier ships built for the USSB by the Great Lakes Engineering Works (GLEW), River Rouge Yard, Ecorse, Michigan, as hull number 209.

[5][6] The Design 1060 ships were propelled by one triple expansion engine of 1,350 indicated horsepower (1,010 kW) with steam power from two coal fired Scotch marine boilers.

[5] After arrival in Boston, on 22 December 1918, the ship was allocated to a USSB operator serving routes from U.S. ports to the East coast of South America.

[5] In 1920, the ship entered Havana Harbor, on a voyage from Charleston, South Carolina, with a cargo of coal and collided with the Ward Line tug Saturno.

[17][18][16] Cotopaxi was one of three of the seventeen Design 1060 ships built at the River Rouge Yard lost and initially listed as missing.

[1][6][19] Coverun (hull 221, ON 218005), after being renamed Mahukona, and then sold and operating as Santa Clara, under the Brazilian flag, was listed as missing southwest of Bermuda, February 1941, while on a voyage from Newport News to Rio de Janeiro.

[1][21] In the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cotopaxi is connected to the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, and is discovered in the Gobi Desert, presumably set there by extraterrestrial forces.