Evidence like that may have led the government to downplay the Sultana tragedy, Potter says. Thousands of recently released Union prisoners of war who had been held in the Confederate prison camps at Cahaba and Andersonville had been brought to a small parole camp outside of Vicksburg to await release to the northern states. 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. (Lloyd Spainhower/Post-Dispatch), Capt. [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. At least thirty-nine passengers and crew members died in the accident. Introduced in 1848, they could generate twice as much steam per fuel load as conventional boilers. Both groups met as close to the April 27 anniversary date as possible, corresponded with each other, and shared the title National Sultana Survivors' Association. "At 2 a.m., one of the boilers exploded, resulting in two other boilers exploding," Potter says. The giant paddle wheel started turning faster. In the thirty years prior to the Civil War, several thousand lives were lost in steamboat calamities. Leyhe died in St. Louis in 1956 at age 83. Mrs. Lind's birthday cake was lost, but fellow evacuees serenaded her as morning sun warmed their island refuge. Explosion and Burning of the Steamboat Teche on the Mississippi River, May 5, 1825. 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. Using steam power, riverboats were developed during that time which could navigate in shallow waters as well as upriver against strong currents. 19th-century American steamboat that sank on the Mississippi River in 1865. On a landscape lacking roads but braided with bayous and rivers, travel via water was the only efficient means of transportation. 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. The current was calmer and the channel was deeper. But some of the most poignant stories involve Confederate soldiers rescuing their Union counterparts. The Capt. Steamboats traveled into Iowa border waters even before Iowa was legally open for settlement. In the early hours of April 27th, 1865, mere days after the end of the Civil War, the Sultana burst into flames along the Mississippi River. The Worst Marine Disaster in U. S. History. The Sultana Tragedy: Americas Greatest Maritime Disaster. Nathan Smith of Normandy, Mo., the pilot of the Golden Eagle when it sank on May 18, 1947, as he prepared to testify two days later at a Coast Guard hearing on the accident in downtown St. Louis. Capt. The Sultana tragedies seem to be classic examples of putting profit over safety. Maintaining a posted schedule was important in the competitive business of steamboat commerce. 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. They'd stay in a motel at night, but she loved to cook for the crew and the men from the Coast Guard. GES: Goods and materials were by far the most important and more profitable cargo to carry. This effect of careening could have been minimized by maintaining high water levels in the boilers. There is no apparent motive for him to have blown up the boat, especially while on board. Why should potential readers care? 2012 was additionally when the river was low sufficient to expose five steamboat wrecks along the Missouri River between St. Charles and Bridgeton. An engraving of the Sultana explosion, published in Harpers Weekly, May 20, 1865. Explosion of the Oronoko, April 21, 1838, near Princeton, Mississippi. William "Buck" Lehye, who sold the Golden Eagle one year before, and Mrs. Frank Lind, a lifelong fancier of steamboat travel. [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. Men in skiffs from both riverbanks rescued people clinging to debris. The steamer registered 1,719 tons[2] and normally carried a crew of 85. hide caption. 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. [4]:2728, Upon reaching Vicksburg, Mississippi, Mason was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch, the chief quartermaster at Vicksburg, with a proposal. [citation needed] The next year, only one man showed up. 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. This list may not reflect recent changes . "The paddle wheel fell off of one side, caused the boat to turn sideways; the other paddle wheel fell off.". 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. Passing boats and bystanders on both sides of the Mississippi helped pull survivors from the muddy water. A BNSF Railway freight train traveling along the banks of the Mississippi River derailed near Ferryville, Wis., shortly after noon Thursday, the company said. 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. 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 For several hours its crew and passengers provided aid before heading upriver, its decks covered with bodies of the dead and injured. The last northern survivor, Private Jordan Barr of the 15th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment, died on May 16, 1938, at age 93. 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. That day, he says, the water was moving very quickly and contained a lot of trees and other debris. (The whole book is digitally available via the Library of Congress, on the Internet Archive.). tragically sunk during the civil war the sultana accident took as many lives as the titanic but has garnered far . As a lawyer, Potter was well-equipped to investigate the mistakes and malfeasance that led to the Sultana disaster. The Mississippi was not as dangerous. Who Was John Wilkes Booth Before He Became Lincoln's Assassin. It was late April 1865 and more than 2,000 tired, sick, and injured men, wearing dirty and tattered clothes, filed down the bluff from Vicksburg to a steamboat waiting at the docks on the Mississippi River. Explosion of the Moselle, Near Cincinnati, Ohio, April 25, 1838.. 0:12. On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank while traveling up the Mississippi River, killing an estimated 1,800 people. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Sign up to get updates about new releases and event invitations. 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. Aurora (1902) steam screw. On the Mississippi river, it was four to five years." "There were about 289 steamboats that sank or possibly more on the Missouri River in the mid-19th century," Rose said. ", Jerry Potter, lawyer and author of The Sultana Tragedy. In 1859 the Princess was a four-year-old state-of-the-art side-wheel paddleboat. 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 . Almost 1,200 people perished. 1, which tends to become brittle with prolonged heating and cooling. 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. Pages in category "Shipwrecks of the Mississippi River" The following 50 pages are in this category, out of 50 total. At least a hundred people survived their injuries. Among its owners on that day was Herman Pott, St. Louis boatbuilder. Fire broke out and began to consume the remains. 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. The city has created a museum and is hosting events intended to bring attention to 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. It was her 82nd birthday. William H. "Buck" Leyhe of St. Louis at the wheel of the Golden Eagle steamboat in April 1939. Iowa is the only state with four border rivers, the Mississippi, Missouri, Des Moines, and Big Sioux. The steam packet boat is one of the most enduring and iconic images from the glory days of the Steamboat Era. 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. These trips moved almost 5 million tons of lead down stream! Passengers were blown apart or scalded by the hot water. Throughout the war, Captain Hatch had shown incompetence as a quartermaster and competence as a thief, bilking the government out of thousands of dollars. In a seeming paradox of frontier boosterism, Lloyds book sold this terrible recent history of the Mississippi as a romantic feature of the area. It was easier to copy everything and not use some of it than to forget to copy something and need it later on. Long before Kanesville or Council Bluffs were settlements on the Missouri river, the steamboat the Western Engineer arrived in the area in 1819. Capt. Miller, of Vicksburg, who changed the name to Alice Miller and ran the boat on the Yazoo and Sunflower rivers. I think reporting was much more accurate, and less political, than it is today. On April 21, Sultana left New Orleans with about seventy cabin and deck passengers and a small amount of livestock. A crew member fished liquor bottles from the half-flooded bar. A freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in southwestern Wisconsin on Thursday, injuring four employees and sending two containers into the Mississippi River. Lead was a very important export from the Dubuque area. Some survivors were plucked from the tops of semi-submerged trees along the Arkansas shore. 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. "Somebody had came by and notified us. Recollections of a Rebel ReeferVol. [11] The official count by the United States Customs Service was 1,547. Irregular river depth, sandbars and snags made steamboat travel on the Missouri slow and dangerous. 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. An estimated 1,800 people died in the explosion and ensuing fire more than died in the sinking of the Titanic. 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. Near midnight, Sultana left Memphis, leaving behind about 200 men. The Slate Group LLC. Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading. The ship, which archaeologists. [7] Many died of drowning or hypothermia. A Hancock County native died Sunday evening from injuries she sustained in a boat crash on the Jourdan River, Coroner Jeff Hair confirmed to the Sun Herald. The Vault isSlates history blog. Explosion of the Oronoko, April 21, 1838, near Princeton, Mississippi. However, the Upper Rapids and Lower Rapids were serious obstacles to navigate. The crew threw more wood on the fire. Golden Eagle's pilot house was salvaged. Potter, Jerry. An aerial view of the striken Golden Eagle at Grand Tower Island in the Mississippi River on May 19, 1947. Library of Congress Most of its 91 passengers and crew were asleep. GES: I agree wholeheartedly. 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. Today, Potter describes the scene from a park along the banks of the Mississippi, just north of Memphis. (Post-Dispatch). Its dining room was graced with chandeliers and red carpet. 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. As for the Sultana disaster itself, it was clearly a case of putting profit over safety. That meant another expensive trip and more time. "The war had just ended a few weeks before," he says. [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. The steamboat business always had been a risky affair. The boat and its entire cargo was a total loss. The early morning of May 18, 1947, was dark but quiet, the Mississippi River 10 feet below flood stage. [citation needed]. In 1859, the Blackhawk made 29 round trips between Cedar Rapids and Waterloo on the Cedar River. The steamboat has been submerged in the water of the Missouri river ever since. Subscribe now and never hit a limit. The Princess ran weekly round trips from New Orleans to Vicksburg, Mississippi and back, departing the New Orleans wharf promptly at 5 p.m. every Tuesday. 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]. When it got to Grand Tower Ill. catastrophe struck. On March 26, 1915, while the Alice Miller was laid up at Vicksburg, fire broke out in the kitchen, and the boat was destroyed. 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. You have permission to edit this article. He died in 1871, having escaped justice because of his numerous highly placed patronsincluding two presidents. [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. Paskoff, Paul F. Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy, 18211860. Bodies of victims continued to be found downriver for months, some as far as Vicksburg. Freight and cargo were much more profitablealthough the movement of animals could be a backbreaking, smelly proposition! GES: The dirty river water of the lower Mississippi was not really thought of as a problem by the steamboat captains or engineers. Considered one of them was the biggest vessel ever to sail via the world. yet the tragedy got very few headlines. [4]:7479. 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. In the 1820s, steamboats on the Mississippi carried lead from Julien Dubuque's lead mines near Dubuque. As shown in my book, when steam navigation of American waterways first began, there were very little, if any, laws for safety. At 0200 on 27 April 1865, when the boat was seven miles above Memphis, her boilers exploded. Is it a good thing? "It was like a tremendous bomb going off in the middle of where these men were. ", Ancestry.com, Texas Death Certificates, 19031980, Jennings, Pat "What Happened to the Sultana? [33] The museum is only temporary until enough funds can be raised to build a permanent museum. 2. Preston Lodwick, then a consortium including Capt. The exact death toll is unknown, although the most recent evidence indicates that 1,169 died. Constructed of wood in 1863 by the John Litherbury Boatyard [1] in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sultana was intended for the lower Mississippi cotton trade. Constructed of wood in 1863 by the John Litherbury Boatyard[1] in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sultana was intended for the lower Mississippi cotton trade. Perhaps inspired by their northern comrades, a southern group of survivors, men from Tennessee and Kentucky, began meeting in 1889 around Knoxville, Tennessee. On the decks the passengers cheered as the boat headed up the river. The lure of huge profits led steamboats to travel in unsafe river conditions and at unsafe speeds. 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. The Sultana story is one of greed and corruption, as well as pathos and sadness. The ill-fated Sultana in Helena, Ark., just before it exploded on April 27, 1865, with about 2,500 people aboard. GES: I think the reporting of the Sultana disaster in April and May 1865 was pretty accurate. You've read 1 out of 5 free articles of Naval History this month. Late in April of 1865, the Mississippi stood at flood stage. Newspaper accounts suggest John Fogelman and his sons spotted the burning Sultana as the remains of the paddle-wheeler drifted downriver. [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 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. St. Louis' biggest party ran for seven months and was such a success it even made money. "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. ", 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. He is currently a freelance writer living in Annapolis. [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. There was no manifest to record the names of passengers aboard the Princess at the time of the disaster. GES: I am a bit ambivalent about that. Leyhe died in 1956 in St. Louis at 83. 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 . 2 likes, 0 comments - BHYHA (@bhyhapodcast) on Instagram: "On this day in 1865.The steamboat Sultana explodes on the Mississippi River near Memphis, killi." BHYHA on Instagram: "On this day in 1865.The steamboat Sultana explodes on the Mississippi River near Memphis, killing 1,700 passengers including many discharged Union soldiers. 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. Terrific Explosion of the Steamboat Ben Franklin, at Mobile, Alabama, March 13, 1836. by Kelby Ouchley Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection Steamboat Princess. 1 was no longer used to manufacture boilers after 1879. Click on links in the titles below to reach Lloyds descriptions of the accidents pictured. 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. 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. 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. Steamboats carried plows and seed to new farmers settling in Nebraska in the 1850s and 1860s. 3) The design of the boilers. One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00, Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00, 64 Parishes 2023. By the time the repairs would have been completed, the prisoners would have been sent home on other boats. 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. 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? What is the allure to your treatment of the Sultana stories? 2) The use of the sediment-laden Mississippi River water to feed the boilers. 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. "They had survived war," O'Neal says. A year later, when the U.S. government established the Memphis National Cemetery[4]:206 on the northeast side of the city, the bodies were moved there. Most river travel was between the years of 1846 and 1866. In the early 1900s, the Mississippi River shifted about two miles to the east, leaving the wreck under about 15 feet of Arkansas soil. (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. Send to: Patrick Rash. By that standard, the loss of the Golden Eagle was a minor event. However, as I said, a person still needs to go to a resource location such as a museum archive to get the basic facts. Bad storms hit the river in the summer. The boat was loaded with passengers, mostly from Mississippi and Louisiana, headed to New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras. Savannah Davis, 23, died from blunt . 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. A passing towboat gave them a lift back to Grand Island, Ill., where they boarded buses for the trip home. The boat was 260 feet long and had an authorized capacity of 376 passengers and crew. On May 19, 1947, the Golden Eagle left St. Louis on the Mississippi River and headed for Nashville. FS: Tell us why the Sultana Disaster Museum is located in Marion, Arkansas. 2 As rapidly as the number of steamboats increased, they could not keep pace with demand. Concussion swept away the infrastructure, and the upper cabins, state rooms, and hurricane deck collapsed inward. 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. An outfield in flux. 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. When steamboats went out to investigate the wreck, they reported on what was found. Most of Sultana's officers, including Captain Mason, were among those who perished.[8]. In the end, no one was ever held accountable for what remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history. In 2012 and 2015, the river was low sufficient to additionally expose the USS Inaugural. The jagged limbs could rip open the bottom of a steamboat. "It's pretty exciting. He was a passenger aboard the Golden Eagle, the company's last steamboat, when it sank near Tower Island in the Mississippi River on May 18, 1947. They tended to report what others thought these findings meant, but they very rarely added their own input, one way or another. 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. 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. During her time in port, and while the repairs were being made, Sultana took on the paroled prisoners. [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. [5] About ten hours south of Vicksburg, one of Sultana's four boilers sprang a leak. 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. The official inquiry found that the boilers exploded because of the combined effects of careening, low water levels, and the faulty repair made a few days earlier.[16]. The Sultana should be remembered because what happened to her need not have happened. [4]:24 On April 26, Sultana stopped at Helena, Arkansas, where photographer Thomas W. Bankes took a picture of the grossly overcrowded vessel. That is a sunken ship almost every 3 miles! Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. The Hayne was sold in 1908 to C.J. 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 . Wolf River. Sultana had tubular boilers filled with 24 horizontal five-inch flues. The owners of the Effie Afton decided to take the railroad companies that had built the bridge to court. 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. Although the mechanic wanted to cut out and replace a ruptured seam, Mason knew such a job would take a few days and cost him his precious load of prisoners. The Sultana sank in the Mississippi River near Marion, and over the years, the wreck was eventually covered with silt. Cape Girardeau:Later renamed the River Queen, the vessel sank in 1968. By eliminating the manpower required to row or paddle, often against powerful currents, steamboats fueled an exponential growth in trade and development. 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.. 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. The massive steam explosion came from the top rear of the boilers. The boilers exploded off Cairo, killing at least 1443 men, a loss of life never exceeded on the rivers, and rarely at sea. I gave only short shrift to the coal-torpedo sabotage theory. Example: Yes, I would like to receive emails from 64 Parishes. 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. Lloyd, James T. Lloyds Steamboat Directory and Disasters on the Western Waters. It happened near Memphis, Tennessee, almost in the very heart of the United States, and yet very few people have ever heard about it. [32], In 1982, a local archaeological expedition, led by Memphis attorney Jerry O. Potter, uncovered what was believed to be the wreckage of Sultana. "It was like a tremendous bomb going off in the middle of where these men were," Potter says.
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