You've read 1 out of 5 free articles of Naval History this month. However, Courtenay's great-great-grandson, Joseph Thatcher, who wrote a book on Courtenay and the coal torpedo, denies that a coal torpedo was used in the Sultana disaster. 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. Publisher James T. Lloyds 1856 book Lloyds Steamboat Directory, and Disasters on the Western Waters, is illustrated by 32 woodcuts of explosions, fires, and foundering ships, chronicling a decades-long history of steamboat mayhem. Louis.". FS: Tell us why the Sultana Disaster Museum is located in Marion, Arkansas. After some time, the weakened twin smokestacks fell; the starboard smokestack fell backward into the blasted hole, and the port smokestack fell forward onto the crowded forward section of the upper deck, hitting the ship's bell as it fell. During the gold rush to Montana in the 1860s, steamboats traveled far up the Missouri to early mining towns. [citation needed] The next year, only one man showed up. Almost all were Union soldiers who had survived the . Potter says he went to the library to learn more and wondered, "Why haven't I ever heard of this?" No one seemed to question the danger of a steamboat race until there was an accident or . Most were Union soldiers, newly released from Confederate prison camps. The city of Vicksburg was ravaged by the American Civil War, and so were the men who were about to board the steamboat Sultana. Cost $8 for poster plus $3.50 postage (U.S.). The Eclipse was a steamboat that struck a snag on the Mississippi River near Osceola (Mississippi County) on September 12, 1925; a deckhand and a passenger lost their lives in the accident. A sunken casino boat has been uncovered in the Mississippi as severe drought pushes water levels in the Memphis section of the river to record lows. Even after the Sultana disaster, steamboat captains continued to accept profit over safety, as shown by boats that exploded when crammed full of recent immigrants moving westward. Under reduced pressure, the steamboat limped into Vicksburg to get the boiler repaired and to pick up her promised load of prisoners. The fires still going against the empty boiler created hot spots. [19][20] Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay, the inventor of the coal torpedo, was a former resident of St. Louis and was involved in similar acts of sabotage against Union shipping interests. Pages in category "Shipwrecks of the Mississippi River" The following 50 pages are in this category, out of 50 total. He/she ate the same fare as the roustabouts and hands unless he/she bought a dinner ticket. Also, many people chose to pay for only deck passage, which restricted the traveler to the lowest (main) deck. In his book River of Dark Dreams, historian Walter Johnson writes that the table of contents of Lloyds bestseller was sort of a nightmare poem of alphabetized Americana: a catalog of 97 major and hundreds of minor boat disasters. [4]:24 On April 26, Sultana stopped at Helena, Arkansas, where photographer Thomas W. Bankes took a picture of the grossly overcrowded vessel. When railroads started carrying freight across the country, the days of the steamboats were over. [18] Louden, a former Confederate agent and saboteur who operated in and around St. Louis, had been responsible for the burning of the steamboat Ruth. Eventually the Sultana turned so that the wind was pushing the flames toward the bow, where 25 soldiers remained. Experience showed that the rivers were briefly superior to rails as lines of communication. These trips moved almost 5 million tons of lead down stream! 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. Smith shouted at 2:20 a.m., suddenly unable to turn the steering wheel. A female fan exclaimed what a lovely shade of Cardinal in reference to the trim on the new uniforms. In 1859 the Princess was a four-year-old state-of-the-art side-wheel paddleboat. Johnson points out that steamboat explosions, caused by faulty boilers, were the nineteenth centurys first confrontation with industrialized mayhem, and Lloyds prose seemed almost to revel in these horrors. Although they knew that the water above Cairo was cleaner, the only problem they thought they faced by the dirtier lower Mississippi water was that they had to clean their boilers more often. 3) The design of the boilers. He was injured on Sultana and was honorably discharged in May 1865. It was not until the U.S. government began to crack down and either enact, or enforce, the laws, that safety became an overriding factor in steamboat travel. This list may not reflect recent changes . Students tour the pilot house of the Golden Eagle on display at the U.S. Army Engineers base at the foot of Arsenal Street on Jan. 4, 1948. Unlike many of the nautical discoveries in. Highlights of the Mississippi River Cruise: Round-trip from New Orleans Length: Five days Price: Starts at $2,405 per person Enjoy a complimentary overnight in New Orleans before embarking on. Tucson: Fireship Press, 2009. "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. An estimated 1,800 people died, but few today have heard of this disaster. Poster 17" x 22". (Post-Dispatch), Retired Capt. It was just weeks after the Civil War ended, Potter explains, and the vessel was packed with Union soldiers who'd been released from Confederate prison camps. After days in flood stage, the Mississippi River appeared to be at crest in Lansing, Iowa Friday evening as the river has spent hours below the max daily crest. Crew members roused passengers and swung a gangplank onto land. (Post-Dispatch), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crews dismantle the wreck of the Golden Eagle on May 28, 1947, to eliminate its hazard to river navigation. Preston Lodwick, then a consortium including Capt. They'd stay in a motel at night, but she loved to cook for the crew and the men from the Coast Guard. Barges still carry some goods on the river, but trains and trucks carry most of the freight in America. "They had survived prison in one of the most hideous places the South had. Most river travel was between the years of 1846 and 1866. Steamboat Princess Disaster On February 27, 1859, the Steamboat Princess exploded on the Mississippi River killing between 70 and 200 passengers and crew. (The whole book is digitally available via the Library of Congress, on the Internet Archive.). What is the allure to your treatment of the Sultana stories? [4]:2931, Leaving Vicksburg, Sultana traveled downriver to New Orleans, continuing to spread the news of Lincoln's assassination. Last chance! While researching those numbers, I ran across other myths and legends that were incorrect or misleading, while at the same time verifying many of the stories. The remains of a ship on the banks of the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 17, 2022, after recently being revealed due to the low water level. [22], In 1903, another person reported that Sultana had been sabotaged by a Tennessee farmer who lived along the river and cut wood for passing steamboats. The Sultana was a 260-foot-long wooden steamboat, built in Cincinnati in 1863, which regularly transported passengers and freight between St. Louis and New Orleans on the Mississippi River.. On April 23, 1865, the vessel docked in Vicksburg to address . "We feel like we're a part of this Civil War story, but we're the conclusion that no one heard," says Lisa O'Neal, a Marion resident and member of the Sultana Historic Preservation Society. Today, though, the city of Marion, Ark., thinks people are ready to learn about the Sultana. Lead was a very important export from the Dubuque area. How do you feel about that? An epilogue to Tennessee steamboating came in the 1970s with the return of the pleasure sternwheeler to the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee Rivers. But what the museum really has to offer is a powerful story of soldiers who died just days away from seeing their families and loved ones. Burning of the Orline St. John, near Montgomery, Alabama, March 2, 1850. I copied everything I could find, even though I may never use the material. 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. Golden Eagle's pilot house was salvaged. April 27, 2023. The earliest steamboat disaster in Arkansas waters may have been the Car of Commerce, which suffered a boiler explosion north of Osceola (Mississippi County) on the Mississippi River in 1828, killing twenty-one people, while the deadliest was the loss of the Sultana near Marion (Crittenden County) on April 27, 1865, in which as many as 1,800 were Barrett was a veteran of the MexicanAmerican War and had been captured at the Battle of Franklin. Most of its 91 passengers and crew were asleep. This effect of careening could have been minimized by maintaining high water levels in the boilers. It is also about a rescue effort that brought together people who had been at war just weeks earlier. The Sultanas tubular boilers, however, were harder to clean and could form pockets of sediment that could insulate a section of the tubes from the surrounding water and lead to overheating of the tubes. And the boat was filled with enlisted men primarily men who really hadn't made a mark in history or a mark in life." The disaster of the Princess near Baton Rouge in 1859 was a tragically typical example. [4]:202 Captain Hatch, who had concocted a bribe with Captain Mason to crowd as many men onto Sultana as possible, had quickly quit the service to avoid a court-martial. Given as the "John Lithoberry Shipyard" on Ohio Historical Marker 1831 (1999) on the Ohio River at Sawyer Point. Why should potential readers care? It happened near Memphis, Tennessee, almost in the very heart of the United States, and yet very few people have ever heard about it. As a lawyer, Potter was well-equipped to investigate the mistakes and malfeasance that led to the Sultana disaster. The last of the southern survivors, and last overall survivor, was Private Charles M. Eldridge of the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry Regiment, who died at his home at age 96 on September 8, 1941, more than 76 years after the disaster. Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device. Steamboats and flatboats brought thousands of early settlers to the new land of Iowa. The steamboat business always had been a risky affair. Daniel Jackson / May 29, 2021 The steamboat has been submerged in the water of the Missouri river ever since. The lure of huge profits led steamboats to travel in unsafe river conditions and at unsafe speeds. Plowing upriver from New Orleans, the Natchez was the first steamboat to arrive on the scene. I had learned so much more, and collected so many more first-person accounts from the people on board, from the rescuers, and from the people involved, that I knew I had to write a new tell-all book that would dispel, as well as verify, all of the stories, rumors, and myths surrounding the disaster. An interview with author Gene Eric Salecker. The sediment tended to settle on the bottom of the boilers or clog between the flues and leave hotspots. [citation needed]. It was a standard fare, no matter who you were. By 1857, St. Paul had become a bustling port, with over 1,000 steamboat arrivals each year by some 62 to 99 boats. It was the last wooden-hulled passenger boat to travel the Mississippi. A USS Abeona Andy Gibson (steamboat) USS Antelope (1861) USS Arizona (1858) B USC&GS Baton Rouge (1875) USS Black Hawk (1848) C USS Cincinnati (1861) City-class ironclad CSS Colonel Lovell "He told the captain and the chief engineer the boiler was not safe, but the engineer said he would have a complete repair job done when the boat made it to St. MALTA BEND, Mo. The Directorypadded out the bloody prose of the disaster descriptions and the repetitive awfulness of the illustrations with current business and travel information about the Mississippi Valley. The disaster was overshadowed in the press by events surrounding the end of the Civil War, including the killing of President Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth just the day before. 2 As rapidly as the number of steamboats increased, they could not keep pace with demand. Steamboats played a major role in the 19th-century development of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, allowing practical large-scale transport of passengers and freight both up- and down-river. Yet few know the story of the Sultana's demise, or the ensuing rescue effort that included Confederate soldiers saving Union soldiers they might have shot just weeks earlier. Her two side-mounted paddle wheels were driven by four fire-tube boilers. But perhaps the best explanation is that after years of bloody conflict, the nation was simply tired of hearing about war and death. "It won't move!" Introduced in 1848, they could generate twice as much steam per fuel load as conventional boilers. In a seeming paradox of frontier boosterism, Lloyds book sold this terrible recent history of the Mississippi as a romantic feature of the area. 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. While wealthy patrons might buy drinks all night at the bar, the bar was usually privately owned, with just a share of the profits going to the steamboat captain and/or owner. Most of Sultana's officers, including Captain Mason, were among those who perished.[8]. Among those killed were Louisiana state representatives H. J. Huard and Charles Bannister. And many of them were saved by local residents, like John Fogelman an ancestor of the city of Marion's current mayor, Frank Fogelman. Fire, drowning and exposure would kill many hundreds more. 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. On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank while traveling up the Mississippi River, killing an estimated 1,800 people. Subscribe with this special offer to keep reading, (renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax). GES: I think the reporting of the Sultana disaster in April and May 1865 was pretty accurate. The event remains the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history (the sinking of the Titanic killed 1,512 people). Barrels of flour were emptied on the ground, and the terribly burned victims were rolled in it and placed in the shade. Sign up to get updates about new releases and event invitations. However, the explosion of her boilers just above Memphis on 27 April 1865 put a terrible end to that endeavor. The letters reside in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. After the disaster, Reuben Benton Hatch refused three separate subpoenas to appear before Captain Speed's trial and give testimony. However, as I said, a person still needs to go to a resource location such as a museum archive to get the basic facts. A series of maritime disasters, occurred over the next 120 years before the Coast Guard assumed enforcement responsibility. Jan. 3, 1844 Steamboat wreck kills as many as 70 on the Mississippi at St. Louis By Tim O'Neil St. Louis Post-Dispatch Jan 3, 2023 0 1 of 2 Steamboats and freight wagons crowd the St. Louis. The steamer registered 1,719 tons[2] and normally carried a crew of 85.
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