[10] In 1880, the United States Congress, in conjunction with the War Department, reported the loss of life as 1,259. Although the patched boiler was not the cause of the disaster, it was certainly indicative that the Sultana had faulty boilers. Why should potential readers care? A BNSF Railway freight train traveling along the banks of the Mississippi River derailed near Ferryville, Wis., shortly after noon Thursday, the company said. The train derailed in Crawford County at about 12:15 p.m. Two of the train's three locomotives and an unknown number of cars . "All the boilers, four in number, burst simultaneously . Passengers were blown apart or scalded by the hot water. By the post-World War II era, screw-propellered, diesel-powered, flat-nosed towboats dotted the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi River Systems that once had hosted the Steamboat Age. Shewas a sidewheel Mississippi steamboat carrying nearly 2,000 releasedUnion prisoners-of-war back north at the end of the Civil War. 2), built in 1860 but coming downriver on her maiden voyage after being refurbished,[6] arrived at about 2:30 AM, a half hour after the explosion, and rescued scores of survivors. On May 19, 1865, less than a month after the disaster, Brigadier General William Hoffman, Commissary General of Prisoners who investigated the disaster, reported an overall loss of soldiers, passengers, and crew of 1,238. 3) The design of the boilers. The preliminary crest of 19.61 . The steamer registered 1,719 tons[2] and normally carried a crew of 85. Nathan Smith eased the coal-burning steamer downstream through a narrow bend 80 miles below St. Louis. 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. The Missouri History Museum displayed it from 1962 to 1996 and preserves it in storage. Sultana had tubular boilers filled with 24 horizontal five-inch flues. [4]:7985, While the Sultana burned, and the men on the steamboat were either already dead or fighting for their lives, the southbound steamer Bostona (No. FS: In the course of your story, you declare that It is now possible to write a work of historical nonfiction without ever leaving home. How do you actually feel about that? As the steamboat made her way north following the twists and turns of the river, she listed severely from side to side. The huge boats could carry many passengers and large amounts of freight. On the other hand, the Sultana was an American steamboat carrying almost 100 percent American passengers, including almost 2,000 recently released Union prisoners-of-war returning home to their families. "The Arabia sank. (The whole book is digitally available via the Library of Congress, on the Internet Archive.). 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. A Look Back The day the Golden Eagle steamboat sank in 1947. I think reporting was much more accurate, and less political, than it is today. When railroads started carrying freight across the country, the days of the steamboats were over. The ill-fated Sultana in Helena, Ark., just before it exploded on April 27, 1865, with about 2,500 people aboard. (Post-Dispatch). Explosion of the Oronoko, April 21, 1838, near Princeton, Mississippi. Experience showed that the rivers were briefly superior to rails as lines of communication. Although sediment settled in the bottom of even the flue boilers, it was never thought to be much of a hazard. "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. The most terrible steamboat disaster in history was probably the loss of the Sultana in 1865. Instead, Mason and his chief engineer, Nathan Wintringer, convinced the mechanic to make temporary repairs, hammering back the bulged boiler plate and riveting a patch of lesser thickness over the seam. 2, a stern-wheel steamboat. Capt. Hunter, Louis C. Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History. Plowing upriver from New Orleans, the Natchez was the first steamboat to arrive on the scene. 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.. He is currently a freelance writer living in Annapolis. And many of them were saved by local residents, like John Fogelman an ancestor of the city of Marion's current mayor, Frank Fogelman. When it got to Grand Tower Ill. catastrophe struck. A couple billed as "a genuine giant and giantess" arrive in St. Louis for a visit. William "Buck" Leyhe, who had sold Eagle Packet Co. the year before, waits for rescue on Grand Tower Island after the Golden Eagle sank. Late in April of 1865, the Mississippi stood at flood stage. Only six years before, it had foundered in the river near Chester, Ill., with one crew member lost. The Mississippi was not as dangerous. By August 1872 the count of steamboats under the Burlington Railroad Bridge was 147, while the 1,108 engines and trains crossed over that bridge during the same month. Then the captain did his best to steer around the dead trees, but sometimes they were hidden underwater. Or does it let would-be historians off the hook from paying their own dues for embarking on the composition of a piece of nonfiction? Louis.". Each fire-tube boiler was 18 feet (5.5m) long and 46 inches (120cm) in diameter and contained 24 five-inch (13cm) flues which ran from the firebox to the chimney.[3]. On November 19, 1840, The Burlington Hawkeye newspaper reported upwards of 100 flatboats had passed Burlington going downstream loaded with produce. 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 temporary museum it has created near City Hall includes pictures, personal items from soldiers, pieces of the Sultana, and a 14-foot replica of the boat. In the thirty years prior to the Civil War, several thousand lives were lost in steamboat calamities. The steamboat needed a lot of steam power to pull away from the shore. Click on links in the titles below to reach Lloyds descriptions of the accidents pictured. The report blamed quartermaster Capt. On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank while traveling up the Mississippi River, killing an estimated 1,800 people. Even amid the horrendous chaos, rescue efforts began immediately. The jagged limbs could rip open the bottom of a steamboat. A tall mirror glistened behind the walnut bar. Knowing that Mason needed money, Hatch suggested that he could guarantee Mason a full load of about 1,400 prisoners if Mason would agree to give him a kickback. [23], An episode of the PBS series History Detectives that aired on July 2, 2014, reviewed the known evidence, thoroughly disputed a theory of sabotage, and then focused on the question of why Sultana was allowed to be crowded to several times its normal capacity before departure. A passing towboat gave them a lift back to Grand Island, Ill., where they boarded buses for the trip home. "And the entire center of the boat erupted like a volcano.". The Wreck of the Sultana. Three civilian victims of the wreck of Sultana are interred at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. 5) was built in February 1863, but she was used extensively throughout the last two years of the Civil War to carry Union troops and supplies on the Cumberland and the Mississippi Rivers to aid in the collapse of the Confederacy. This list may not reflect recent changes . Frank Barton is the descendant of one of those Confederate soldiers, a man named Franklin Hardin Barton. 1820 1830 April 21, 1838 - Oronoko Most of the passengers were asleep at the time Killed almost everyone either instantly or later from wounds it caused 109 people died 1840 Was traveling to St. Louis when it hit a snag and had several planks torn from the bottom of the boat Unlike many of the nautical discoveries in. 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. Between 1823 and 1848, 365 boats made 7,645 trips. A U.S. Coast Guard vessel searches the waters near the east bank of the Mississippi River near the I-10 bridge, just before noon, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021, after a man fell from the American Queen . Crew members roused passengers and swung a gangplank onto land. [4]:33,3435,38,4041, While the paroled prisoners, primarily from the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia,[4]:226290 were brought from the parole camp to Sultana, a mechanic was brought down to work on the leaky boiler. The sediment tended to settle on the bottom of the boilers or clog between the flues and leave hotspots. On April 21, Sultana left New Orleans with about seventy cabin and deck passengers and a small amount of livestock. Captain Mason of Sultana, who was ultimately responsible for dangerously overloading his vessel and ordering the faulty repairs to her leaky boiler, had died in the disaster. Despite even less reliable water depth than the border rivers, interior Iowa rivers (those rivers that do not border the state) also saw considerable steamboat travel. Constructed of wood in 1863 by the John Litherbury Boatyard[1] in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sultana was intended for the lower Mississippi cotton trade. Explosion of the Moselle, Near Cincinnati, Ohio, April 25, 1838. 2) The use of the sediment-laden Mississippi River water to feed the boilers. Lena Kent, a . (You can unsubscribe anytime), Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, Steamboat Princess. Among other St. Louisans along for the ride was Capt. The owners of the Effie Afton decided to take the railroad companies that had built the bridge to court. ", 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. "The war had just ended a few weeks before," he says. In Malta Bend, Missouri, there's one that sank loaded down with expensive and rare trading . Group, a Graham Holdings Company. The Hero and the Pavillion traveled the Des Moines River to Fort Des Moines in 1837. No one seemed to question the danger of a steamboat race until there was an accident or . The vessel measured 260 feet (79m) long, with a 42 feet (13m) width at the beam, displaced 1,719 short tons (1,559t), and had a 7-foot (2.1m) draft. The Hayne was sold in 1908 to C.J. Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device. [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. BNSF Railway says two of three locomotives and "an unknown number of cars carrying freights of all kinds" derailed onto the banks of the Mississippi River around 12:15 p.m. Crews are now working . Some 1,700 returning Union Veterans died. In 1929, only two men attended the southern reunion. Poster: Shows location of 31 steamboat sinkings on Mississippi River between Trempealeau, WI and Victory, WI (many boats were recovered and refitted). (Post-Dispatch), Ruth Ferris, assistant curator at the Missouri Historical Society (now the History Museum), displays the steering wheel in the Golden Eagle pilot house as it went on display in the museum on May 2, 1962. The Golden Eagle's new St. Louis-based owners left it to the river's mercy. The steamboat has been submerged in the water of the Missouri river ever since. Potter says he went to the library to learn more and wondered, "Why haven't I ever heard of this?" Given as the "John Lithoberry Shipyard" on Ohio Historical Marker 1831 (1999) on the Ohio River at Sawyer Point. The violent explosion flung some deck passengers into the water and blew a gaping 2530 foot hole in the steamer. The Sultana made it only a few miles north of Memphis. Bates, both eight-footers, arrive a, On April 18, 1949, at Verhagen Hall at St. Louis University a priest just back from a year of study at Harvard completed an exorcism after hea. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. 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. Most were Union soldiers, newly released from Confederate prison camps. Of this group, there were only 31 deaths between April 28 and June 28. Is it a good thing? Sometimes the boilers exploded. Non-subscribers can read five free Naval History articles per month. Explosion of the Moselle, Near Cincinnati, Ohio, April 25, 1838.. Explosion and Burning of the Steamboat Teche on the Mississippi River, May 5, 1825. Everyone escaped to the muddy, isolated safety of Grand Tower Island. Dead trees fell into the river and got stuck on the bottom. And the shrapnel, the steam and the boiling water killed hundreds. Golden Eagle's pilot house was salvaged. 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. 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. Its sister craft included the Spread Eagle and the Bald Eagle. 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. 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. Passing boats and bystanders on both sides of the Mississippi helped pull survivors from the muddy water. No one was ever held accountable for the tragedy. Immediately, Captain Mason grabbed an armload of Cairo newspapers and headed south to spread the news, knowing that telegraphic communication with the southern states had been almost totally cut off because of the recently-ended American Civil War. At some places, the river overflowed the banks and spread out three miles wide. Send to: Patrick Rash. The rest can be gotten through the internet, which can be a positive thingif done correctly. That meant another expensive trip and more time. (Post-Dispatch), Retired Capt. Throughout the war, Captain Hatch had shown incompetence as a quartermaster and competence as a thief, bilking the government out of thousands of dollars. FS: What was the role played by the last Sultana in the Civil War, and how significant was that role? The city of Marion is the closest city to the wreck site and is also the home to a number of descendants of people who aided in the rescue of the Sultana victims. "It won't move!" Iowa is the only state with four border rivers, the Mississippi, Missouri, Des Moines, and Big Sioux. Soldiers from Kentucky and Tennessee were among the first to die, he says, "because they'd been packed in next to the boilers. There were 10 passengers on board. Constructed of wood in 1863 by the John Litherbury Boatyard [1] in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sultana was intended for the lower Mississippi cotton trade. At 0200 on 27 April 1865, when the boat was seven miles above Memphis, her boilers exploded. Wolf River. What is the allure to your treatment of the Sultana stories? Look for details such as clothing, technologies or buildings in old photographs to learn more about the past. Fire broke out and began to consume the remains. [4]:2728, Upon reaching Vicksburg, Mississippi, Mason was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch, the chief quartermaster at Vicksburg, with a proposal. "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. [12] In 1880, the War Department placed the number of survivors at 931, but the most recent research places the number at 961. Explosion of the Steamboat Constitution, May 4, 1817, Point Coupee, Louisiana. However, the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army overturned the guilty verdict because Speed had been at the parole camp all day and had not personally placed a single soldier on board Sultana. The men located around the twin openings quickly crawled under the wreckage and down the main stairs. And finally, at the end of the war, the Sultana would have played a significant role in transporting former Union prisoners-of-war back to the North. "It was like a tremendous bomb going off in the middle of where these men were. GES: I am a bit ambivalent about that. WASHINGTON -- If the U.S. Senate has its way, a 90-year-old steamboat will soon be able to return to the Mississippi River. Aurora (1902) steam screw. 2023 The train . That is a sunken ship almost every 3 miles! Freight and cargo were much more profitablealthough the movement of animals could be a backbreaking, smelly proposition! They'd stay in a motel at night, but she loved to cook for the crew and the men from the Coast Guard. The exact number of steamboat accidents in Iowa Rivers is not known. It seemed that profit was the driving factor for most steamboat owners and captains. An estimated 1,800 people died in the explosion and ensuing fire more than died in the sinking of the Titanic. Explosion and Burning of the Steamboat Teche on the Mississippi River, May 5, 1825., Explosion of the Helen McGregor, At Memphis, Tennessee, February 24, 1830., Terrific Explosion of the Steamboat Ben Franklin, at Mobile, Alabama, March 13, 1836.. It was part of the museum's River Room. The Sultana story is one of greed and corruption, as well as pathos and sadness. Preston Lodwick, then a consortium including Capt. A crew member fished liquor bottles from the half-flooded bar. Lawmakers voted 85-12 Monday to approve legislation that would exempt . 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 Sultana's captain and its chief engineer also allowed a mechanic to make a quick and inadequate repair to a damaged boiler, Potter says. Bodies of victims continued to be found downriver for months, some as far as Vicksburg. GES: I think the reporting of the Sultana disaster in April and May 1865 was pretty accurate. 1, which tends to become brittle with prolonged heating and cooling. And, in fact, when the boats used the regular flue boilers, the sediment in the water was not too much of a problem. Mason quickly agreed to Hatch's offer, hoping to gain much money through this deal. By that standard, the loss of the Golden Eagle was a minor event. How do you feel about that? He/she ate the same fare as the roustabouts and hands unless he/she bought a dinner ticket. A train derailment in southwestern Wisconsin on Thursday sent two derailed containers into the Mississippi River, and at least four employees were injured, according to officials. Instead of taking two or three days, the temporary repair took only one. Throughout the 1800s, steamboat travel on Iowas rivers has impacted the states development and growth. "I understand that the Fogelmans were able to put together some logs to make a raft and go out and take people off the boat as it drifted back this way," Fogelman says. In writing my first few books I literally had to go to the U.S., state, and military archives to do my research. [33] The museum is only temporary until enough funds can be raised to build a permanent museum. The Corp of Engineers in a report issued July 3, 1934 listed 36 types of steamboat wrecks on the Missouri River alone. "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. An epilogue to Tennessee steamboating came in the 1970s with the return of the pleasure sternwheeler to the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee Rivers. Barrels of flour were emptied on the ground, and the terribly burned victims were rolled in it and placed in the shade. MALTA BEND, Mo. Smith shouted at 2:20 a.m., suddenly unable to turn the steering wheel. Daniel Jackson / May 29, 2021 One wall is decorated with the names of every soldier, crewmember, and passenger on the boat on April 27, 1865.
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