They tended to report what others thought these findings meant, but they very rarely added their own input, one way or another. Most were Union soldiers, newly released from Confederate prison camps. 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. The main channel now flows about 2 miles (3km) east of its 1865 position. Some survivors were plucked from the tops of semi-submerged trees along the Arkansas shore. . Hunter, Louis C. Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History. A look back at today in history as seen through our archives. 2. It was part of the museum's River Room. Cardinals latest, deflating loss compounds concerns, Man shot, killed near Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis, What was Andrew Knizner thinking? An epilogue to Tennessee steamboating came in the 1970s with the return of the pleasure sternwheeler to the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee Rivers. 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. However, Sultana was a coal-burning boat and not a wood-burner. Investigation Tip: All rights reserved. Now, 129 years later, kayakers like Edinger are getting an up-close look at the vessel. "Lincoln had just been assassinated. Miller, of Vicksburg, who changed the name to Alice Miller and ran the boat on the Yazoo and Sunflower rivers. 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. The Sultana should be remembered because what happened to her need not have happened. Probably the most interesting of the wrecks are Vessel No. At 0200 on 27 April 1865, when the boat was seven miles above Memphis, her boilers exploded. The crew threw more wood on the fire. This led to many accidents and groundings. 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. You've read 1 out of 5 free articles of Naval History this month. Poster 17" x 22". Many bodies were never recovered. The Sultana was launched from Cincinnati in 1863. Explosion of the Oronoko, April 21, 1838, near Princeton, Mississippi. And many of them were saved by local residents, like John Fogelman an ancestor of the city of Marion's current mayor, Frank Fogelman. 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? This list may not reflect recent changes . Fire, drowning and exposure would kill many hundreds more. 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. An estimated 1,800 people died in the explosion and ensuing fire more than died in the sinking of the Titanic. 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. It happened near Memphis, Tennessee, almost in the very heart of the United States, and yet very few people have ever heard about it. 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 The museum also features many artifacts from the Sultana Survivor's Association, as well as a fourteen-foot model replica of the boat. Sign up to get updates about new releases and event invitations. [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. Salecker, historical consultant for the Sultana Disaster Museum in Marion, Arkansas, recently participated in an author q&a with former Naval History editor-in-chief Fred Schultz to discuss the book: FS: After having read your exhaustive story of the various iterations of the steamboat Sultana, I couldnt help but compare her fate to the loss of the Titanic, which, as Im sure you know, has received much more attention from historians. and Mrs. M.V. By that standard, the loss of the Golden Eagle was a minor event. However, the explosion of her boilers just above Memphis on 27 April 1865 put a terrible end to that endeavor. The last northern survivor, Private Jordan Barr of the 15th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment, died on May 16, 1938, at age 93. 3) The design of the boilers. 0:04. A BNSF Railway freight train traveling along the banks of the Mississippi River derailed near Ferryville, Wis., shortly after noon Thursday, the company said. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1992. And, in fact, when the boats used the regular flue boilers, the sediment in the water was not too much of a problem. That day, he says, the water was moving very quickly and contained a lot of trees and other debris. [4]:72 Sultana subsequently arrived at Memphis, Tennessee, around 7:00 PM, and the crew began unloading 120 tons (109 tonnes) of sugar from the hold. But perhaps the best explanation is that after years of bloody conflict, the nation was simply tired of hearing about war and death. While the Titanic caused more deaths, the great ocean liner was a British vessel and carried people from several different countries. 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. 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 . Bodies of victims continued to be found downriver for months, some as far as Vicksburg. A crew member fished liquor bottles from the half-flooded bar. 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. [citation needed], By the mid-1920s, only a handful of survivors could attend the reunions. The flaming hull drifted onto a shoreline sandbar and grounded. It was the last wooden-hulled passenger boat to travel the Mississippi. Burning of the Orline St. John, near Montgomery, Alabama, March 2, 1850. 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. Late in April of 1865, the Mississippi stood at flood stage. We turn the clock back to April of 1993 and present excerpts of the original reviews from Joe Pollack. He ordered the engines reversed, but the drifting boat smacked into submerged rocks near Grand Tower Island, opening a gash on its port (left) side. Many Sultana survivors ended up on the Arkansas side of the river, which was under Confederate control during the war. Dead trees fell into the river and got stuck on the bottom. The story of the Sultana isn't well-known even among people who live along the Mississippi. The owners of the Effie Afton decided to take the railroad companies that had built the bridge to court. [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. You have permission to edit this article. Among other St. Louisans along for the ride was Capt. And the shrapnel, the steam and the boiling water killed hundreds. As the steamboat made her way north following the twists and turns of the river, she listed severely from side to side. 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 vessel was heading from St . It was easier to copy everything and not use some of it than to forget to copy something and need it later on. In 2015, after I retired, I decided to look at all the known lists to discover who was actually on the Sultana and how many lived and died. 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. 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 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." 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. 2012 was additionally when the river was low sufficient to expose five steamboat wrecks along the Missouri River between St. Charles and Bridgeton. [4]:164 Other vessels joined the rescue, including the steamers Silver Spray, Jenny Lind, and Pocahontas, the navy ironclad USS Essex and the sidewheel gunboat USSTyler. 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. Contains photos of War Eagle and steamer Reindeer. The broken wood caught fire and turned the remaining superstructure into a raging inferno. In the 1820s, steamboats on the Mississippi carried lead from Julien Dubuque's lead mines near Dubuque. Passing boats and bystanders on both sides of the Mississippi helped pull survivors from the muddy water. Send to: Patrick Rash. "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. In 2012 and 2015, the river was low sufficient to additionally expose the USS Inaugural. Captain Frederic Speed, a Union officer who sent the 1,953 paroled prisoners into Vicksburg from the parole camp, was charged with grossly overcrowding Sultana and found guilty. Between 1823 and 1848, 365 boats made 7,645 trips. 2, a stern-wheel steamboat. 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. (Post-Dispatch), The Golden Eagle moored on the St. Louis riverfront in May 1946. [9] In February 1867, the Bureau of Military Justice placed the death toll at 1,100. MALTA BEND, Mo. The Mississippi River has changed course several times since the disaster, leaving the wreck under dry land and far from today's river. "The paddle wheel fell off of one side, caused the boat to turn sideways; the other paddle wheel fell off.". Since the US government was paying steamboat captains a dividend to carry the prisoners back north, Captain Hatch and the captain of the Sultana worked out a deal whereby Hatch would guarantee a large load of ex-prisoners for the Sultana in exchange for a kickback of the government funds from Captain Mason. 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. During her time in port, and while the repairs were being made, Sultana took on the paroled prisoners. Many of the paroled prisoners had been weakened by their incarceration and associated illnesses but had managed to gain some strength while waiting at the parole camp to be officially released. But there were many other reasons the event didn't get much attention at the time. 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. You can see the wreck in low water just north of the Eads Bridge. hide caption. Newspaper accounts indicate that the residents of Memphis had sympathy for the victims despite the ongoing Union occupation. The Missouri History Museum displayed it from 1962 to 1996 and preserves it in storage. 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. It just hurts my heart. It seemed that profit was the driving factor for most steamboat owners and captains. Persac, Marie Adrien (Artist). Whole groups went down together. 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. Nathan Smith eased the coal-burning steamer downstream through a narrow bend 80 miles below St. Louis. ", Ancestry.com, Texas Death Certificates, 19031980, Jennings, Pat "What Happened to the Sultana? 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. Poster: Shows location of 31 steamboat sinkings on Mississippi River between Trempealeau, WI and Victory, WI (many boats were recovered and refitted). On May 19, 1947, the Golden Eagle left St. Louis on the Mississippi River and headed for Nashville. 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. Men in skiffs from both riverbanks rescued people clinging to debris. [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. But, no, the ice cream cone wasn't invented there. The ill-fated Sultana in Helena, Ark., just before it exploded on April 27, 1865, with about 2,500 people aboard. 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. Newspaper accounts suggest John Fogelman and his sons spotted the burning Sultana as the remains of the paddle-wheeler drifted downriver. Almost all were Union soldiers who had survived the . And it was very cold. The name stuck. Today, though, the city of Marion, Ark., thinks people are ready to learn about the Sultana. (The whole book is digitally available via the Library of Congress, on the Internet Archive.). 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? An outfield in flux. The huge boats could carry many passengers and large amounts of freight. The Hayne was sold in 1908 to C.J. The Wreck of the Sultana. Although brought up on courts-martial charges, Hatch managed to get letters of recommendation from no less reputable personages than President Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant. Only six years before, it had foundered in the river near Chester, Ill., with one crew member lost. 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. 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 . from 1993-2005. Barrett was a veteran of the MexicanAmerican War and had been captured at the Battle of Franklin. Publisher James T. Lloyd's 1856 book Lloyd's Steamboat Directory, and Disasters on the Western Waters, is illustrated by 32 woodcuts of explosions, fires, and foundering ships, chronicling a. When steamboats went out to investigate the wreck, they reported on what was found. 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. The few steamboats still gliding along the rivers today are usually carrying tourists on short trips. Irregular river depth, sandbars and snags made steamboat travel on the Missouri slow and dangerous. Steamboats collided or caught on fire. In Malta Bend, Missouri, there's one that sank loaded down with expensive and rare trading . 2) The use of the sediment-laden Mississippi River water to feed the boilers. 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. [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. Further back, the collapsing decks formed a slope that led down into the exposed furnace boxes. There is no apparent motive for him to have blown up the boat, especially while on board. In 1857, The Nebraska City Advertiser newspaper listed 46 steamboats traveling the Missouri, with 12 more being built. "It won't move!" Although the patched boiler was not the cause of the disaster, it was certainly indicative that the Sultana had faulty boilers. Lead was a very important export from the Dubuque area. Steamboat Princess Disaster On February 27, 1859, the Steamboat Princess exploded on the Mississippi River killing between 70 and 200 passengers and crew. Lena Kent, a . He was company president for many years and sold the company in 1946. 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. Given as the "John Lithoberry Shipyard" on Ohio Historical Marker 1831 (1999) on the Ohio River at Sawyer Point. "It's clear that he had bribed an officer at Vicksburg to ensure that he would get a large load of prisoners," Potter says. [12] In 1880, the War Department placed the number of survivors at 931, but the most recent research places the number at 961. I gave only short shrift to the coal-torpedo sabotage theory. 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 Lake Geneva. The exact death toll is unknown, although the most recent evidence indicates that 1,169 died. Mason quickly agreed to Hatch's offer, hoping to gain much money through this deal. The ill-fated Sultana in Helena, Ark., just before it exploded on April 27, 1865, with about 2,500 people aboard. 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? On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank while traveling up the Mississippi River, killing an estimated 1,800 people. [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. Unlike many of the nautical discoveries in. 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]. 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. All contents "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. 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. [4]:146147,168176, Passengers who survived the initial explosion had to risk their lives in the icy spring runoff of the Mississippi or burn with the boat.
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