As the steamboat made her way north following the twists and turns of the river, she listed severely from side to side. 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. You've read 1 out of 5 free articles of Naval History this month. Shipwreck found in Mississippi River near Grand Tower, Ill. - KFVS12 Train derails in Wisconsin, sends 2 cars into river | AP News It was the last wooden-hulled passenger boat to travel the Mississippi. 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. Sultana launched on January 3, 1863, the fifth steamboat to bear the name. An estimated 1,800 people died in the explosion and ensuing fire more than died in the sinking of the Titanic. 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. By the time the repairs would have been completed, the prisoners would have been sent home on other boats. 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 . He has conducted interviews with some 75 high-profile people, including historians, government officials, combat veterans, journalists, explorers, and Hollywood stars. Click on links in the titles below to reach Lloyds descriptions of the accidents pictured. It went upward at a 45-degree angle, tearing through the crowded decks above and completely destroying the pilothouse, instantly killing Captain Mason. GES: I agree wholeheartedly. Then the traveler could go upstairs and eat at the main tables with the first-class passengers. On April 21, Sultana left New Orleans with about seventy cabin and deck passengers and a small amount of livestock. 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. Barrels of flour were emptied on the ground, and the terribly burned victims were rolled in it and placed in the shade. Many Sultana survivors ended up on the Arkansas side of the river, which was under Confederate control during the war. The sternwheel paddleboat that would later be named the Eclipse was built in 1901 at St. Joseph, Missouri, for Captain A. Stewart for service on the Missouri River, and was christened the City of St. Joseph . The vessel was heading from St . Its sister craft included the Spread Eagle and the Bald Eagle. The Hayne was sold in 1908 to C.J. It was her 82nd birthday. 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 Morgan, James Morris. Steamboat Princess Disaster On February 27, 1859, the Steamboat Princess exploded on the Mississippi River killing between 70 and 200 passengers and crew. Its clientele were among societys elite in the Lower Mississippi Valley. [4]:2728, Upon reaching Vicksburg, Mississippi, Mason was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch, the chief quartermaster at Vicksburg, with a proposal. Aunt Letty (1855) steam paddle. 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. An estimated four hundred people were on board the Princess when it pulled out into the current of the river after 9 a.m. Because the boat was late, high boiler pressure had been maintained during the stop, and second engineer Peter Hersey was reported to have declared that he would make it to New Orleans on time if he had to blow her up. As a portent of the looming catastrophe, the Mississippi River was veiled in a dense fog. 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. Persac, Marie Adrien (Artist). By eliminating the manpower required to row or paddle, often against powerful currents, steamboats fueled an exponential growth in trade and development. 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. Designed to carry both freight and passengers, packet boats ranging from palatial Mississippi River sidewheelers to the smaller steamers common on rivers like the Cumberland or the Tennessee played a central role in the development of the inland rivers economy. The current was calmer and the channel was deeper. The last Iowa steamboat to carry goods was the coal fired sternwheeler the Loan Star in 1967. The ill-fated Sultana in Helena, Ark., just before it exploded on April 27, 1865, with about 2,500 people aboard. Everyone escaped to the muddy, isolated safety of Grand Tower Island. Eventually, the group settled on meeting in the Toledo, Ohio area. Then, once some laws were passed, they were generally ignored. 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 . In writing my first few books I literally had to go to the U.S., state, and military archives to do my research. The power of the boilers came with risk - the water levels in the fire tubes had to be carefully maintained at all times. A crew member fished liquor bottles from the half-flooded bar. hide caption. Between 1823 and 1848, 365 boats made 7,645 trips. Bridges, shipwrecks, islands, and secret spots on the Mississippi River [17], In 1888, a St. Louis resident named William Streetor claimed that his former business partner, Robert Louden, made a confession of having sabotaged Sultana by the use of a coal torpedo while they were drinking in a saloon. The fires still going against the empty boiler created hot spots. Constructed of wood in 1863 by the John Litherbury Boatyard [1] in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sultana was intended for the lower Mississippi cotton trade. Most of its 91 passengers and crew were asleep. Since then, he says, studying the Sultana has become an obsession. 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. The Worst Marine Disaster in U. S. History. Train derails in Wisconsin, plunging 2 containers into the Mississippi To the left are the smokestacks of the Union Electric Co. plant at Cahokia. The Sultana was on its way from Vicksburg, Miss., to St. Louis when the explosion occurred, says Jerry Potter, a Memphis lawyer and author of The Sultana Tragedy. Eclipse [Steamboat] - Encyclopedia of Arkansas The boat was 260 feet long and had an authorized capacity of 376 passengers and crew. The giant paddle wheel started turning faster. SS Sultana:The steamboat was bound for St. Louis in April 1865 when the boilers failed right above Memphis, 13 days after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Bad storms hit the river in the summer. After a few Union gunboats filled up their bunkers but refused to pay, the farmer supposedly hollowed out a log, filled it with gunpowder, and then left the lethal log on his woodpile. 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 . 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. She then went a short distance upriver to take on a new load of coal from some coal barges and then, at about 1:00 AM, started north again. What the reader needs to know is that Captain Hatch, who had been corrupt throughout the war, would not have been there if not for some influential friends and relatives in the government, including President Abraham Lincoln. FERRYVILLE - A train derailed along the Mississippi River Thursday afternoon in southwest Wisconsin, leaving several cars overturned and jumbled along the bluff and two cars floating . Historian Ann Fabian writes that Lloyd even peddle[d] his book to the travelers who might soon wind up on the lists of the dead, who bought it and read it to pass the time on their own steamboat voyages. 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. Sultana (steamboat) - Wikipedia The most terrible steamboat disaster in history was probably the loss of the Sultana in 1865. [4]:198,200,202, Monuments and historical markers to Sultana and her victims have been erected at Memphis, Tennessee;[25] Muncie, Indiana;[26] Marion, Arkansas;[27] Vicksburg, Mississippi;[28] Cincinnati, Ohio;[29] Knoxville, Tennessee;[30] Hillsdale, Michigan[31] and Mansfield, Ohio. 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. The men were packed into every available space as all cabin spaces were already filled with civilian passengers; the overflow was so severe that in some places, the decks began to creak and sag and had to be supported with heavy wooden beams. Steamboat Disasters These trips moved almost 5 million tons of lead down stream! 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. Smith shouted at 2:20 a.m., suddenly unable to turn the steering wheel. Survivors panicked and raced for the safety of the water, but in their weakened condition, they soon ran out of strength and began to cling to each other. 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. At 0200 on 27 April 1865, when the boat was seven miles above Memphis, her boilers exploded. The Sultana was launched from Cincinnati in 1863. FS: Which cargo would you say was more important and most profitablethe goods and materials or the obviously wealthy patrons who were there just for a glamorous boat ride? [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. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. "Somebody had came by and notified us. This list may not reflect recent changes . 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. In the 1820s, steamboats on the Mississippi carried lead from Julien Dubuque's lead mines near Dubuque. [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. DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) People living along the Mississippi River watched warily Sunday as water levels rose in southeast Iowa and northwest Illinois, awaiting spring crests as floodwaters began . However, as I said, a person still needs to go to a resource location such as a museum archive to get the basic facts. Steamboats of the Mississippi - Wikipedia FS: What was the role played by the last Sultana in the Civil War, and how significant was that role? 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. 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. [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. The Golden Eagle's new St. Louis-based owners left it to the river's mercy. But there were many other reasons the event didn't get much attention at the time. [21], Two years earlier, in May 1886, came a claim that 2nd Lt. James Worthington Barrett, an ex-prisoner and passenger on the steamboat, had caused the explosion. In the thirty years prior to the Civil War, several thousand lives were lost in steamboat calamities. Paskoff, Paul F. Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy, 18211860. The lure of huge profits led steamboats to travel in unsafe river conditions and at unsafe speeds. 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 city has created a museum and is hosting events intended to bring attention to the tragedy. Some 1,700 returning Union Veterans died. BNSF train derails in Wisconsin near De Soto along Mississippi River Steamboat - Wikipedia 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. BNSF freight train derails along Mississippi River in Wisconsin Although the patched boiler was not the cause of the disaster, it was certainly indicative that the Sultana had faulty boilers. The name stuck. Newspaper accounts suggest John Fogelman and his sons spotted the burning Sultana as the remains of the paddle-wheeler drifted downriver. The collision startled Marga Sachse, a passenger from St. Louis, who said she "felt a jar, and the ship lurched.". They'd stay in a motel at night, but she loved to cook for the crew and the men from the Coast Guard. He was injured on Sultana and was honorably discharged in May 1865. The current on the Missouri was fast, and the channelthe deepest part of the rivershifted from place to place. Fire broke out and began to consume the remains. And even before the Civil War, 30 steamboats had traveled to Des Moines before the Civil War. Most were Union soldiers, newly released from Confederate prison camps. Subscribe now and never hit a limit. Investigation Tip: 1, which tends to become brittle with prolonged heating and cooling. Passengers were blown apart or scalded by the hot water. The report blamed quartermaster Capt. What is the connection? ", 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. "It's pretty exciting. 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. Poster 17" x 22". By Commander Robert Frank Bennett, U. S. Coast Guard. On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank while traveling up the Mississippi River, killing an estimated 1,800 people. Trees along the river bank were almost completely covered until only the very tops of the trees were visible above the swirling, powerful water. . All Rights Reserved. FS: In writing this book and having devoted much of your lifetime to telling the true stories of the vessels named Sultana, when did your aim to dispel myths and legends take over your outlook? William H. "Buck" Leyhe of St. Louis at the wheel of the Golden Eagle steamboat in April 1939. More passengers boarded at Baton Rouge including a number of politicians fresh from the state legislative session that had just ended early for the holiday. Effie Afton Hits the Bridge. On May 6, 1856 a steamboat named Effie Afton crashed into the bridge, destroying the steamboat as well as part of the bridge. 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. The boilers exploded off Cairo, killing at least 1443 men, a loss of life never exceeded on the rivers, and rarely at sea. Heroine (steamboat) | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture "A few weeks earlier, he might have been attacking the Sultana if it had come in.". Sign up to get updates about new releases and event invitations. MADISON, Wis. (AP) A freight train derailed along the Mississippi River in southwestern Wisconsin Thursday, possibly injuring one crew member and sending two cars into the water, officials said. Sometimes captains accidentally ran their boats up onto the sandbars. The May 9, 1989 the Des Moines Register newspaper listed 40 known sunken steamboats from the southwest corner of Iowa north just over 100 miles to Sioux City. An estimated 1,800 people died, but few today have heard of this disaster. The Sultana made it only a few miles north of Memphis. In 1929, only two men attended the southern reunion. [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. 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 Shipwreck That Led Confederate Veterans To Risk All For Union - NPR In his book, he builds a strong case against the boat's captain and co-owner, J. Cass Mason. In later years the steamboats pushed huge rafts of logs from the forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota to sawmills farther down the river. That is a sunken ship almost every 3 miles! An aerial view of the striken Golden Eagle at Grand Tower Island in the Mississippi River on May 19, 1947. Now, through the use of the internet, people can search hundred, perhaps thousands, of newspapers, from the United States as well as from around the world. The forward part of the upper deck collapsed onto the middle deck, killing and trapping many in the wreckage. There were 10 passengers on board. 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. Now, 129 years later, kayakers like Edinger are getting an up-close look at the vessel. PDF Download Free Sinking The Sultana A Civil War Story Of Imprison Pdf BNSF said in a statement that two of . The Mississippi was not as dangerous. From 1817 to 1871, about 5,600 people died on Mississippi River wrecks of all sorts, including burst boilers, collisions and fires.