A steamboat is a boat that is propelled primarily by steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels.Steamboats sometimes use the prefix designation SS, S.S. or S/S (for 'Screw Steamer') or PS (for 'Paddle Steamer'); however, these designations are most often used for steamships.. They'd stay in a motel at night, but she loved to cook for the crew and the men from the Coast Guard. Passing boats and bystanders on both sides of the Mississippi helped pull survivors from the muddy water. Is it a good thing? It was her 82nd birthday. [24]:193197, Despite the magnitude of the disaster, no one was ever formally held accountable. Blackened wooden deck planks and timbers were found about 32 feet (10m) under a soybean field on the Arkansas side, about 4 miles (6km) from Memphis. In 2012 and 2015, the river was low sufficient to additionally expose the USS Inaugural. Pages in category "Shipwrecks of the Mississippi River" The following 50 pages are in this category, out of 50 total. yet the tragedy got very few headlines. Yet Captain Mason of the Sultana, and Captain Reuben Hatch, the chief quartermaster at Vicksburg, saw no problem in crowding as many men as possible on board the boat, hoping to reap the biggest profit possible. I think reporting was much more accurate, and less political, than it is today. More and more government documents are coming online every day, so it is now quick and easy to make a search for needed information. The Nick Wall was a sternwheel river packet that struck a snag on the Mississippi River near Grand Lake (Chicot County) on December 18, 1870. Reuben Benton Hatch, an individual with a long history of corruption and incompetence, who kept his job through political connections: he was the younger brother of Illinois politician Ozias M. Hatch, an advisor and close friend of President Lincoln. In the early 1900s, the Mississippi River shifted about two miles to the east, leaving the wreck under about 15 feet of Arkansas soil. The huge boats could carry many passengers and large amounts of freight. The Sultana was launched from Cincinnati in 1863. This list may not reflect recent changes . The St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat, April 29, 1865, states that the "steamer Sultana left New Orleans on Friday evening the 21st, with about seventy cabin passengers, and about eighty five employees on the boat. Perhaps inspired by their northern comrades, a southern group of survivors, men from Tennessee and Kentucky, began meeting in 1889 around Knoxville, Tennessee. The Sultana tragedies seem to be classic examples of putting profit over safety. "It's clear that he had bribed an officer at Vicksburg to ensure that he would get a large load of prisoners," Potter says. ARCHERAt Galena, from St. Louis, Sept. 8, 1845; sunk by collision with steamer "Di Vernon", in chute between islands 521 and 522, five miles above mouth of Illinois River, Nov. 27, 1851; was cut in two, and sunk in three minutes, with a loss of forty-one lives. We turn the clock back to April of 1993 and present excerpts of the original reviews from Joe Pollack. In the early 1900s, the Mississippi River shifted about two miles to the east, leaving the wreck under about 15 feet of Arkansas soil. He was a passenger on its trip to Nashville, Tenn. (Post-Dispatch), Passengers pass time on Grand Tower Island until they were picked up by a passing towboat. Steamboats should not have been racing each other, but it happened all the time, and the public loved it! WASHINGTON -- If the U.S. Senate has its way, a 90-year-old steamboat will soon be able to return to the Mississippi River. That day, he says, the water was moving very quickly and contained a lot of trees and other debris. Constructed of wood in 1863 by the John Litherbury Boatyard [1] in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sultana was intended for the lower Mississippi cotton trade. "Lincoln had just been assassinated. An epilogue to Tennessee steamboating came in the 1970s with the return of the pleasure sternwheeler to the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee Rivers. The owners of the Effie Afton decided to take the railroad companies that had built the bridge to court. Eventually the Sultana turned so that the wind was pushing the flames toward the bow, where 25 soldiers remained. Cape Girardeau:Later renamed the River Queen, the vessel sank in 1968. Its dining room was graced with chandeliers and red carpet. Some 1,700 returning Union Veterans died. GRAND TOWER, ILL. It was the first trip of the season for the Golden Eagle, an antique steamboat with twin stacks, gingerbread woodwork and a splashing sternwheel. And the shrapnel, the steam and the boiling water killed hundreds. Steamboats on the Mississippi River The first steamboat on the Mississippi River along Iowa's border was the 109-ton Virginia, on its way to Fort Snelling (now Saint Paul, Minnesota) in May 1823. Today, though, the city of Marion, Ark., thinks people are ready to learn about the Sultana. All 25 soldiers were rescued, historians say, and the Fogelman home became a refuge for Sultana survivors. The train . In support of Louden's claim, what appeared to be a piece of an artillery shell was said to be recovered from the sunken wreck. ", 15th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, "Sultana: A Tragic Postscript to the Civil War", https://www.nationalboard.org/SiteDocuments/General%20Meeting/Jennings.pdf, "The Sultana Disaster (Coal Torpedo theory)", http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigation/civil-war-sabotage/, Sultana museum in Arkansas memorializes 1,169 people who died in river, "Surviving the Worst: The Wreck of the Sultana at the End of the American Civil War", "Blues in the Water, by King's German Legion", "Ardent Presents: Cory Branan "The Wreck of the Sultana", "Remember the Sultana | Film Threat - Part 2", Shipwrecks and maritime incidents in 1865, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sultana_(steamboat)&oldid=1152358259, Articles with incomplete citations from April 2022, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2022, Articles with unsourced statements from July 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Initially Capt. An estimated 1,800 people died in the explosion and ensuing fire more than died in the sinking of the Titanic. The crew threw more wood on the fire. And even before the Civil War, 30 steamboats had traveled to Des Moines before the Civil War. Burning of the Orline St. John, near Montgomery, Alabama, March 2, 1850. The Missouri was a dangerous river. At least thirty-nine passengers and crew members died in the accident. Investigation Tip: I then decided that since it had been 25 years since the publication of my first book, I needed to put out a new book on the Sultana. Soldiers from Kentucky and Tennessee were among the first to die, he says, "because they'd been packed in next to the boilers. The main channel now flows about 2 miles (3km) east of its 1865 position. [4]:62, Sultana spent two days traveling upriver, fighting against one of the worst spring floods in the river's history. Irregular river depth, sandbars and snags made steamboat travel on the Missouri slow and dangerous. . Long before Kanesville or Council Bluffs were settlements on the Missouri river, the steamboat the Western Engineer arrived in the area in 1819. The Hero and the Pavillion traveled the Des Moines River to Fort Des Moines in 1837. Dropping water levels could cause hot spots leading to metal fatigue, significantly increasing the risk of an explosion. Lead was a very important export from the Dubuque area. Subscribe now and never hit a limit. Explosion and Burning of the Steamboat Teche on the Mississippi River, May 5, 1825. A sister boat to the famous Natchez, the Princess had undergone a thorough retrofitting the previous summer and was said to be one of the fastest and most luxurious craft on the Mississippi River. Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,169 people in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history. "The wind blew the fire to the rear, burned that out," Frank Fogelman says. A tall mirror glistened behind the walnut bar. Leyhe died in 1956 in St. Louis at 83. At around 2:00AM on April 27, 1865, when Sultana was about seven miles (11km) north of Memphis, its patched boiler suddenly and violently exploded, killing 400-500 men instantly. A series of maritime disasters, occurred over the next 120 years before the Coast Guard assumed enforcement responsibility. I do not feel that it lets would-be historians off the hook as long as they go the extra mile and gather the basic facts, etc., through diligent leg work. Dead trees fell into the river and got stuck on the bottom. [4]:40, Although Hatch had suggested that Mason might get as many as 1,400 released Union prisoners, a mix-up with the parole camp books and suspicion of bribery from other steamboat captains caused the Union officer in charge of the loading, Captain George Augustus Williams, to place every man at the parole camp on board Sultana, believing the number to be less than 1,500. [10] In 1880, the United States Congress, in conjunction with the War Department, reported the loss of life as 1,259. The museum also features many artifacts from the Sultana Survivor's Association, as well as a fourteen-foot model replica of the boat. Bodies of victims continued to be found downriver for months, some as far as Vicksburg. The first steamboat on the Mississippi River along Iowas border was the 109-ton Virginia, on its way to Fort Snelling (now Saint Paul, Minnesota) in May 1823. But it was the last trace of St. Louis' own Eagle Packet Co., which Leyhe's father and uncle founded shortly before the Civil War, when the downtown levee was crowded with steamboats. Because Union forces had captured Memphis in 1862 and turned it into a supply and recuperation city, numerous local hospitals treated the roughly 760 survivors with the latest medical equipment and trained personnel. [citation needed]. An estimated 1,800 people died in the explosion and ensuing fire more than died in the sinking of the Titanic. Whenever possible, I tried to dispel that myth. In the thirty years prior to the Civil War, several thousand lives were lost in steamboat calamities. Leyhe's father and uncle established the Eagle Packet Co., and Leyhe began working on the Mississippi River when he was 18. Flatboats and keelboats carried cargo down the river. Through the corruption of Captain Reuben Hatch, a Union officer at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the captain of the Sultana, James Cass Mason, those 2,000 ex-prisoners were crowded onto a boat with a legal carrying capacity of only 376 passengers. [5] About ten hours south of Vicksburg, one of Sultana's four boilers sprang a leak. Sultana had tubular boilers filled with 24 horizontal five-inch flues. Tubular boilers were discontinued from use on steamboats plying the Lower Mississippi after two more steamboats with tubular boilers exploded shortly after the Sultana explosion. I copied everything I could find, even though I may never use the material. GES: I began to dispel the myths and untruths surrounding the Sultana shortly after the Naval Institute Press published my first book in 1996. By that standard, the loss of the Golden Eagle was a minor event. Only six years before, it had foundered in the river near Chester, Ill., with one crew member lost. Capt. GES: The Sultana Disaster Museum is located in Marion because that is the closest city to the remains of the vessel. 2023 An interview with author Gene Eric Salecker. Writing about the scene after the explosion of the Louisiana (which blew up in the docks at New Orleans on Nov. 15, 1849), Lloyd wrote: The woodcut illustrations below, which ran small in the book, reveal a repetitive motif when looked at in a larger format: bodies thrown in the air, depicted in flight at the moment of explosion. Its sister craft included the Spread Eagle and the Bald Eagle. No one was ever held accountable for the tragedy. Poster 17" x 22". Built in New Albany, Indiana, in 1832, the steamboat Heroine plied the Ohio and Mississippi from its launch in that year until in 1838 a navigation disaster left it beneath the waters of the Red River. During the 1850s, traffic soared. [4]:12 On the morning of April 15, she was tied up at Cairo, Illinois, when word reached the city that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had been shot in Washington, D.C. 19th-century American steamboat that sank on the Mississippi River in 1865. Lavish meals were served four times a day in a great central hall, and surviving menus list such gourmet delicacies as broiled pompano and stuffed crabs. There is no apparent motive for him to have blown up the boat, especially while on board. Throughout the war, Captain Hatch had shown incompetence as a quartermaster and competence as a thief, bilking the government out of thousands of dollars. It didn't run for several years during World War II because wartime supply restrictions blocked needed upgrades to the boilers. Her four boilers were interconnected and mounted side-by-side so that if the boat tipped sideways, water would tend to run out of the highest boiler. All contents Potter says he went to the library to learn more and wondered, "Why haven't I ever heard of this?" Shewas a sidewheel Mississippi steamboat carrying nearly 2,000 releasedUnion prisoners-of-war back north at the end of the Civil War. In 1857, The Nebraska City Advertiser newspaper listed 46 steamboats traveling the Missouri, with 12 more being built. The steamboat has been submerged in the water of the Missouri river ever since. While the Titanic caused more deaths, the great ocean liner was a British vessel and carried people from several different countries. One of the most horrific accidents occurred in 1838, when the Moselle, a fast and nearly new Ohio River steamboat, exploded off Cincinnati. Hunter, Louis C. Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History. All rights reserved. When steamboats went out to investigate the wreck, they reported on what was found. The stops were reversed on the downstream journey as passengers, mail, and tons of freight including four-hundred-pound bales of cotton were loaded and unloaded. The steamboat sank shortly after it struck submerged rocks at 2:20 a.m. All 91 passengers and crew members reached the island by gangplank, and were rescued later that day by a towboat. Then the traveler could go upstairs and eat at the main tables with the first-class passengers. [4]:197202 Captain George Williams, who had placed the men on board, was a regular Army officer, and the military refused to go after one of their own. A couple billed as "a genuine giant and giantess" arrive in St. Louis for a visit. Then, as time went on, I noticed that the numbers of people supposedly on board the Sultana when she exploded, and the number of people that died on board the Sultana, kept going up and up and up. It was reported that the steamer was insured for $8,000. Cost $8 for poster plus $3.50 postage (U.S.). In later years the steamboats pushed huge rafts of logs from the forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota to sawmills farther down the river. In a seeming paradox of frontier boosterism, Lloyds book sold this terrible recent history of the Mississippi as a romantic feature of the area. The name stuck. "The paddle wheel fell off of one side, caused the boat to turn sideways; the other paddle wheel fell off.". The Montana was a Mississippi and Missouri River stern-wheel steamboat, one of three "mega-steamboats" built in 1879 during the steamboat era on the Missouri. It seemed that profit was the driving factor for most steamboat owners and captains. Fire broke out and began to consume the remains. In his book recently published by the Naval Institute Press, Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana: The Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, author Gene Eric Salecker sheds new light on the Sultanas tragic fate. 2012 was additionally when the river was low sufficient to expose five steamboat wrecks along the Missouri River between St. Charles and Bridgeton. (Post-Dispatch), The Golden Eagle heads downstream at St. Louis on May 14, 1940. Persac, Marie Adrien (Artist). As to whether it is a good thing or not, yes, I believe that it is a good thing to do so much research and get so much information from the internet. New York: Dover Maritime, 1994. Sometimes the boilers exploded. These trips moved almost 5 million tons of lead down stream! "It's pretty exciting. But the story of the Sultana is about more than lost lives. The current was calmer and the channel was deeper. Lawmakers voted 85-12 Monday to approve legislation that would exempt . This led to many accidents and groundings. The Tricky Missouri River and the Steamboat Bertrand, The First Bridge Over the Mississippi and the Effie Afton, Majestic Riverboat Reigned on the Mississippi, Simulated travel guide describing travel conditions in Iowa from 1830 to 1879, Personal accounts from a steamboat captain describing life on the Mississippi transporting lumber, Article describes the history of steamboats in Iowa City in the 1800s, Transcribed official records, newspaper clippings, historical accounts and diary entries about life on the Mississippi River, Transcribed official records, newspaper clippings, historical accounts and diary entries about life on the Missouri River, Audio story about the last riverboat gambling cruise of the Mississippi Belle II in 2007, Ginalie Swaim Ed., Steaming Up the River,. Fire, drowning and exposure would kill many hundreds more. In the 1840s, The Ripple was the first steamboat to the capital in Iowa City. Almost 1,200 people perished. In Malta Bend, Missouri, there's one that sank loaded down with expensive and rare trading . Introduced in 1848, they could generate twice as much steam per fuel load as conventional boilers. Under the command of Captain James Cass Mason of St. Louis, Sultana left St. Louis on April 13, 1865, bound for New Orleans. Among those killed were Louisiana state representatives H. J. Huard and Charles Bannister. Preston Lodwick, then a consortium including Capt. Steamboats traveled into Iowa border waters even before Iowa was legally open for settlement. The Princess was about six miles below Baton Rouge at Conrads Point when a teenage boy watching the boat glide along from a distance noted, A great column of white smoke suddenly went up from her and she burst into flames. The explosion was cataclysmic as all four huge boilers burst at once. And, in fact, when the boats used the regular flue boilers, the sediment in the water was not too much of a problem. (Lloyd Spainhower/Post-Dispatch), Capt. GES: Readers should care about the Sultana since it was the greatest maritime disaster in American history. [4]:2728, Upon reaching Vicksburg, Mississippi, Mason was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch, the chief quartermaster at Vicksburg, with a proposal. FS: Given the mistrust of any reporting from the press in some parts of our society today, how reliable would you say the reporting on these disasters was back in its day? He/she ate the same fare as the roustabouts and hands unless he/she bought a dinner ticket. The Golden Eagle was bound for Nashville, Tenn., from its St. Louis home via the Ohio and Cumberland rivers. "At 2 a.m., one of the boilers exploded, resulting in two other boilers exploding," Potter says. Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device. It was a standard fare, no matter who you were. Steamboats carried plows and seed to new farmers settling in Nebraska in the 1850s and 1860s. (Post-Dispatch). St. Louis' biggest party ran for seven months and was such a success it even made money. Send to: Patrick Rash. On the three-hundred-mile upriver leg, it made stops at Donaldsonville, Plaquemine, Baton Rouge, Port Hudson, Bayou Sara, Red River Landing, Fort Adams, Natchez, Waterproof, Rodney, St. Joseph, Grand Gulf, and Warrenton, before arriving at Vicksburg. When was it going to stop and where were the numbers going to end? Featured in the museum are a few relics from Sultana such as shaker plates from the boat's furnace, furnace bricks, a few pieces of wood, and some small metal pieces. In 1859 the Princess was a four-year-old state-of-the-art side-wheel paddleboat. Badger State (1844) steam paddle. [33] The museum is only temporary until enough funds can be raised to build a permanent museum. 0:04. For two years, she ran a regular route between St. Louis and New Orleans and was frequently commissioned to carry troops during the American Civil War. The Mississippi River has changed course several times since the disaster, leaving the wreck under dry land and far from today's river. The Hayne was sold in 1908 to C.J. 2 As rapidly as the number of steamboats increased, they could not keep pace with demand. Although designed with a capacity of only 376 passengers, she was carrying 2,130 when three of the boat's four boilers exploded and caused it to sink near Memphis, Tennessee. "He served in the 23rd Arkansas Cavalry, and he was tasked with, among other things, raiding ships going up and down the river," Frank Barton says. On his trips up and down the river, Odis often took his wife, Rosa, along. Trees along the river bank were almost completely covered until only the very tops of the trees were visible above the swirling, powerful water. However, the explosion of her boilers just above Memphis on 27 April 1865 put a terrible end to that endeavor. [32], In 1982, a local archaeological expedition, led by Memphis attorney Jerry O. Potter, uncovered what was believed to be the wreckage of Sultana. By that standard, the loss of the Golden Eagle was a minor event. The Worst Marine Disaster in U. S. History. I gave only short shrift to the coal-torpedo sabotage theory. The Missouri History Museum had it on display from 1962 to 1996, and preserves it in storage. The location of the explosion, from the top rear of the boilers and far away from the fireboxes, tends to indicate that Louden's claim of sabotage of an exploding coal torpedo in the firebox was pure bravado. from 1993-2005. You've read 1 out of 5 free articles of Naval History this month. Fortunately, the sturdy railings around the twin openings of the main stairway prevented the upper deck from crushing down completely onto the middle deck. Yet, shortly after my 1996 book came out, a cabal of people sprang up touting the sabotage theory once again. Many of the stories that the newspapers got from survivors were not always correct (one man said that there were people from every state in the Union on boardnot so), but they were reporting what they were told. [15][full citation needed], The official cause of the Sultana disaster was determined to be the mismanagement of water levels in the boilers, exacerbated by the fact that the vessel was severely overloaded and top-heavy. [citation needed], By the mid-1920s, only a handful of survivors could attend the reunions. However, the Upper Rapids and Lower Rapids were serious obstacles to navigate. Beneath Tennessee River, Steamboat Wreckage Presents Mystery Once the driving force of the southeast Tennessee city's economic growth, Chattanooga's riverfront is home to just the 10th shipwreck recorded in state history - a boat whose story time forgot. The most recent investigation into the cause of the disaster by Pat Jennings, principal engineer of Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, which came into existence in 1866 because of the Sultana explosion, determined that three main factors led to the disaster: 1) The type of metal used in the construction of the boilers Charcoal Hammered No. The Sultana made it only a few miles north of Memphis. Because of a trick of fate, the story of the Sultana is virtually unknown. William "Buck" Lehye, who sold the Golden Eagle one year before, and Mrs. Frank Lind, a lifelong fancier of steamboat travel. After the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana, in July 1863 and the opening of the Mississippi, the Sultana was used to bring cotton from parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas that were now under Union control up north so that it could be sent to Eastern manufacturers that had been starving for the raw material. "The river is at flood stage," he says as we watch a barge struggle to move up river, "very similar to what it was on April 27, 1865." Crew members roused passengers and swung a gangplank onto land. By Lieutenant Commander Ralph P. Dillon, U. S. Naval Reserve. Terrific Explosion of the Steamboat Ben Franklin, at Mobile, Alabama, March 13, 1836. Freight and cargo were much more profitablealthough the movement of animals could be a backbreaking, smelly proposition! James Cass Mason, King's German Legion "Blues in the Water" tells a stylized version of the, This page was last edited on 29 April 2023, at 19:15. She also carried a crew of 85. The Sultana sank in the Mississippi River near Marion, and over the years, the wreck was eventually covered with silt. Evidence like that may have led the government to downplay the Sultana tragedy, Potter says. The boilers exploded off Cairo, killing at least 1443 men, a loss of life never exceeded on the rivers, and rarely at sea. Non-subscribers can read five free Naval History articles per month. The men located around the twin openings quickly crawled under the wreckage and down the main stairs. In his book, he builds a strong case against the boat's captain and co-owner, J. Cass Mason. He died in 1871, having escaped justice because of his numerous highly placed patronsincluding two presidents. web oct 10 2017 it was the steamboat sultana on the mississippi river and it could have been prevented in 1865 the civil war was winding down and the .
Request Location Snapchat Disappeared, Massachusetts Wildfires, Articles S