The Great American Steamboat Race

by Benton Rain Patterson

  They filled the main deck, they crowded the hurricane deck, they climbed and took over the roof of the texas deck, the mass of their bodies so heavy that William Rowberry, the Sultana’s first mate, directed a work party of deckhands to wedge stanchions between the boiler deck and the hurricane deck to prevent the sagging upper decks from collapsing.

  To sleep, the troops would have to lie down anywhere they could, on the steps of companionways, beside the engine room, most on the open decks, stretched out like pieces of cordwood beside one another. In the absence of restrooms, they would contort themselves over or under the boat’s rails to relieve themselves.

  William Butler, a cotton merchant from Springfield, Illinois, who from the deck of the Pauline Carroll watched the third trainload of troops board the Sultana, reported the troops’ reaction: “When about one third of the last party that came in had got on board, they made a stop, and the remainder swore they would not go on board. They said they were not going to be packed on the boat like damned hogs, that there was no room for them to lie down, or a place to attend to the calls of nature. There was much indignation felt among them, and among others who went about the boats. Some person on the wharf boat, an officer I presume, ordered them to move forward and they went on board.”8

  About nine o’clock in the evening on April 24 the Sultana at last backed away from the Vicksburg wharf and resumed its northward voyage, the men making the best they could of their miserable situation, which must have seemed but an extension of the horrors they had suffered in the prisoner-ofwar camps. Through two nights and two days they endured as the Sultana steamed northward toward home.

  About one o’clock in the morning of Thursday, April 27, 1865, having loaded aboard enough coal to get it to Cairo, the Sultana pulled away from the coaling station at Memphis and again headed upstream, into a particularly dark night and misting rain. All was quiet on the decks, in the saloon and in the staterooms, almost all of the passengers and most of the crew deep in slumber as the lights of Memphis receded and disappeared. About seven miles above Memphis the Sultana approached a group of marshy islands called Paddy’s Hen and Chicks. Ordinarily the river at this spot was three miles wide, but now, swollen with floodwaters, it was three times that width, its waters covering both banks.

  At one-forty-five the Sultana passed one of the Chicks, island No. 41, near the Arkansas side of the river. After that came Fogelman’s Landing. It was now two o’clock.

  Suddenly the Sultana erupted in a massive explosion, as if struck by a thunderous earthquake, shattering the vessel, blasting a chasm in the superstructure above the boilers, spraying deadly scalding steam over passengers, blowing parts of the upper decks to fragments and shooting them and passengers high into the night sky, toppling the two chimneys, hurling most of the pilothouse from its perch atop the texas, scattering debris and human bodies, many broken and dead, others still alive but gravely injured, into the cold, dark, surging river. Burning coals, blasted from the vessel’s fireboxes,

  The ill-fated steamer Sultana, victim of the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history, photographed at Helena, Arkansas, on April 26, 1865. Early the next morning, as it steamed northward from Memphis, crammed with Union soldiers recently released from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps, it exploded and burned, taking more lives than did the Titanic (Library of Congress).

  rose like fireworks into the air and rained back down on the wooden decks and superstructure, setting them alight. Within minutes the shattered Sultana was engulfed in flames.

  From everywhere came the cries, shouts, shrieks and panicked screams of desperate passengers, scalded, burned or critically injured, many trapped beneath wreckage, unable to save themselves or be saved. Soon many hundreds faced the horror of being burned alive or escaping the flames by jumping into the dark and deadly river. Nearly all who were able chose the river. The badly injured and the horribly scalded begged their fellow passengers to lift them and throw them overboard, which some did. The river within yards of the boat quickly became a seething mass of struggling humanity, individuals bobbing so tight together it became impossible for more escaping passengers to leap into the water without landing first on those who had jumped before them. Those unable to swim grasped at anything, anyone within reach, and many went down to their deaths in the frantic grip of each other.

  The exact total number of the Sultana’s victims remains uncertain, because the number of military passengers aboard is in dispute, as is the number of survivors. Many — perhaps three hundred or more — who were admitted to hospitals and were initially counted as survivors died of their burns or injuries within days after being hospitalized. The estimates of the total number of victims, military and civilian, range from 1,238 (the estimate of Brigadier General William Hoffman, who conducted an inquiry immediately following the disaster) to 1,547 (the estimate made by the U.S. Customs Department at Memphis) to 1,800 or more (calculated from the varied estimates of the number of survivors, which ranged from fewer than 500 to around 800).9 The likelihood is that the higher estimates of victims are more accurate.

  The boat itself, “a massive ball of fire,” as an eyewitness on shore described it, drifted downriver and became lodged against one of the Chick islands near Fogelman’s Landing, just above Mound City, Arkansas. There it sank, its charred remains eventually buried beneath the river’s sediment. In the years since, the river, as if abhorring any reminder of the disaster, shifted its course three miles to the east of Mound City, and the Sultana’s grave is now unknown, lying somewhere in an Arkansas farm field.

  The cause of the explosion is likewise unknown. An investigation, ordered by Major General Cadwallader C. Washburn, commander of the U.S. Army’s District of West Tennessee, yielded an official report, made public on May 2, 1865, that declared the cause was insufficient water in the boilers. General Dana, commander of the Army’s Department of Mississippi, the man who had ordered the released prisoners sent home as soon as possible, also held an investigation, which, like Washburn’s, had more to do with the overloading of military passengers aboard the Sultana than it did with the circumstances of the explosion. On April 30, the U.S. secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, ordered the commissary general of prisoners, Brigadier General William Hoffman, to conduct an additional investigation. Hoffman’s report concluded that there was not enough evidence to establish the cause of the explosion, but that the evidence did suggest that insufficient water in the boilers was the cause.

  And there, insofar as the Army was concerned, the matter rested. Claims that Confederate saboteurs had placed explosives aboard the Sultana were apparently never seriously considered by the investigators. There is no mention of such in the testimony given to the investigators, and nothing in the investigators’ inquiries indicates sabotage was even suspected.

  The relevant civilian authority, J.J. Witzig, the supervising inspector of steamboats for the area that included St. Louis, faulted the patch riveted onto the leaking boiler and put the blame for allowing it on the Sultana’s chief engineer, Nathan Wintringer. Witzig, however, conceded that the tubular boilers were part of the problem.

  In the end, no one was held accountable for the Sultana disaster. The guilt was eventually assigned to the design of the boilers. After the Walter R. Carter, equipped with tubular boilers like the Sultana’s, blew up later in 1865, killing eighteen people, and the Missouri, similarly equipped, exploded the next year, killing seven, the offending boilers were removed from all steamers traveling south of Cairo.

  PART FOUR. THE OUTCOME

  • 12• On to Cairo

  Before reaching Vicksburg late Friday afternoon, Tom Leathers was pleased to see that the Natchez, fiercely striving to catch up, was gaining, though slightly, on the Robert E. Lee. Checking his watch, he estimated that, except for the head start the Lee had got at New Orleans, the Natchez was running only about eight minutes behind, a lead that was not at all insurmountable. But he had lost more time at the Vicksburg wharf, putting off passengers and t
heir baggage and taking on fuel. That done, he had steamed off again, renewing his hot pursuit, but with more time to make up.

  In the early evening, just above the mouth of the Yazoo River, as the Natchez approached Buckhorn Landing at Milliken’s Bend, Leathers’s chief engineer, Andy Pauley, discovered that the pump that drew river water into the boat’s boilers had suddenly quit and could not be restarted. He diagnosed the problem as a broken valve. There was nothing to do but head the Natchez into shore, tie up to a tree on the riverbank, shut down the engines, remove the valve and fix it. Pauley made the repairs, but consumed thirty-four precious minutes in the process. Then he started up the engines again, and the Natchez carefully backed out into midstream and resumed its urgent run, its captain fuming in frustration.

  Then came a new misfortune. In the darkness of Friday night the speeding vessel, despite the reputation of its pilots, lost the channel and ran into shallow water near the shore off island No. 93 and grounded on the river bottom. Only after more anxious minutes were the pilot and the engineers able to dislodge the boat by reversing its huge paddle wheels. It then returned to the safety of the main channel, where it straightened up in deeper water and re-entered the race.

  Under way again, the Natchez passed the steamer Frank Pargoud, which was headed downstream. Leathers had heard reports that Cannon had arranged to have the Robert E. Lee refueled from the speedy Pargoud rather than tying

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  the Lee up to burdensome barges to take on fuel. The passing of the Pargoud, whose crew failed to answer the Natchez’s hail, a sign that something was not quite right, silently told the enraged Leathers that the reports were true.

  The Frank Pargoud maneuver was indeed Cannon’s latest trick. The Pargoud was owned by John W. Tobin, Cannon’s long-time and wealthy friend who was aboard the Lee, giving Cannon moral support and expert advice as well as enjoying the history-making ride. The Pargoud’s usual run was between New Orleans and Greenville, carrying passengers and freight. But on the night of Friday, July 1, 1870, it had no passengers, no lights beaming from its stateroom windows, and the only freight it bore was one hundred cords of knotty pine wood, oozing thick, sticky sap that would make it burn bright and hot, just the fuel needed for a racing steamboat. By prior arrangement, Tobin’s boat had stood idling in mid-stream just below Greenville, waiting for the Robert E. Lee. When the Lee had appeared, between two and three o’clock in the morning, the Pargoud, its bow pointed upstream, had steamed up alongside the swiftly moving Lee as it passed. Lines had gone out, lashing the boats together, and the two steamers had raced side by side while brave and hardy roustabouts walked gangplanks laid between the boats, carrying armloads of firewood from the main deck of the Pargoud to the main deck of the Lee.

  While the two boats were tied together, with planks between them, Governor Warmoth and Doctor Smyth, both with other matters doubtlessly on their minds, had seized the opportunity to disembark from the Lee and had made their way across the gangplank to the Frank Pargoud to return to New Orleans. When the transfer of wood and the two passengers was completed, the Frank Pargoud had cast off the lines that bound it to the Robert E. Lee, and its captain had let his boat fall behind the Lee, then had made a big Uturn in the river and headed back downstream, a dangerous night’s work efficiently done. Meanwhile the refueled Robert E. Lee continued on through the darkness, rushing toward Helena and Memphis.

  The St. Louis Republican reporter aboard the Natchez cried foul, as did fellow passengers who had bet on the Natchez and learned about the Frank Pargoud incident by way of the public announcement Captain Leathers made to those still awake at that late hour. They protested that Cannon and the Lee had disqualified themselves by using the Frank Pargoud as a sort of power booster while it took on its load of fuel. “The Lee won all her bets up to the time when the Pargoud improperly and unfairly aided her by making use of her own propelling power while transferring a heavy lot of pine fuel,” the reporter wrote. “The propelling power being thus divided, from another boat, loses the race for the Lee and all bets, notwithstanding she was in the lead. Hurrah for the Natchez!”1

  Having become a Natchez partisan, the reporter declared his confidence in the boat’s ultimate victory and the righteousness of its cause. “Everything goes lovely just now,” he wrote, “and the goose hangs a trifle high; but Capt. Leathers has a fearfully long reach, and aside from the question of the bets (which the Lee has forfeited) the Natchez has a good show to make the best time. We are making a fair, open business trip, although not attempting to do much business. But we are not making a run for a race, but to try and see what can be done in the way of fast work on a regular trip.”2 When he wrote that, the Robert E. Lee was twelve miles ahead.

  Unable to resist the chance to make a buck, Leathers slowed down at Greenville and pulled up to the wharf to take on passengers, only to discover there were no passengers waiting to come aboard. He quickly hauled his lines back in and left, after losing another ten minutes. While at the wharf, though, he had learned from someone on shore that the Lee was an hour ahead of him.

  About ten o’clock Friday morning the Natchez reached the mouth of the Arkansas River, passing the site of the washed-away town of Napoleon. At White River, at eight minutes past ten, the Natchez slowed again, this time to tie up to and tow a barge from which it took on three hundred boxes of coal and received the somewhat good news that the Robert E. Lee was fifty minutes ahead. The Natchez, now two-thirds the way between Greenville and Helena, had gained ten minutes since leaving Greenville.

  When the Natchez was in sight of Helena, the hopeful reporter aboard wrote : “The Natchez will undoubtedly set a mark that will be the goal of other boats for years to come. If we had put her through without landing, taking our fuel from steamers with full head on, and for the sole purpose of racing, we could have made Helena at least an hour ago, which is the opinion of every man on board. Helena is now in sight. We will not stop, but I will send this ashore by a skiff, if possible.”3

  At Hardin Point the Natchez received a warm welcome from the steamer Mollie Able, which stopped and swung sideways in the river, so that its bow pointed toward the Natchez, and it saluted Leathers and his crew with a blast from its whistle. The Natchez signaled its acknowledgment with a blast from its own whistle.

  Continuing to keep track of the race was the New Orleans Picayune, which on page one on Saturday printed a dispatch telegraphed to it when the two steamers had passed Helena:

  H ELENA, ARK., July 2 — The Lee passed here at 4:30 [P.M.], the Natchez at 5:24. Lee 54 minutes ahead. All her window blinds were down and some plank off her wheelhouse, and she seemed to be driving through the water. Neither boat landed here. A party went out to the Natchez in a small steamer. On their return reported that the Natchez claims to have broken her pump and laid up for 30 minutes last night.

  The Lee’s time from New Orleans to this place is 47 hours 36 minutes — the fastest time on record. The Natchez says her time to this place is one hour and a half faster than her last trip. The Lee cheered with her whistle when she passed, and was answered by two steamers lying at the wharf and the multitude of people on the shore. Those who think the Natchez laid up 30 minutes last night are still betting on her.4

  The Natchez was showing how fast it could run, breaking all of its previous speed records so far. But it was still trailing the Robert E. Lee.

  At Memphis the excitement and the crowd waiting at the river’s edge to see the racers were equally huge. The crowd’s anxiety was heightened by a breakdown in the telegraph line below Memphis, the eager spectators not knowing where the boats were or when to expect them at Memphis. A news reporter in Memphis described the situation:

  All coming from the [Memphis telegraph] office were eagerly questioned, but no news could be gained, as the operator at Helena reported the boats not in sight at 3:45 [P.M.]. With every moment’s delay the excitement increased. At one time it seemed probable that the curiosity of the populace would not be gratifi
ed till the boats arrived at this place [Memphis], for the telegraph line between Helena and Madison was blown down by a sudden storm at 4 o’clock this afternoon. When this news was bulletined, a verbal cry of disappointment arose, and murmurs that some ruse was being practiced found many believers. But fortunately the telegraph operators were equal to the emergency. Repair men were immediately sent out from different stations, and by 7 P.M. the line was again in order, and the news came that the Lee had passed Helena at 4:30 and the Natchez at 5:24....

  The curiosity of the people to see the boats as they pass is intense. Many have been on the bluff [on the river] all the afternoon, and since dark the crowd has increased till the whole bluff is now covered, and still people are coming in from all parts of the city.

  Great preparations are being made for the reception of the boats. Tar barrels are placed ready to be fired as they approach, and a battery of artillery is in position ready to thunder forth a salute in honor of the victor. All seem wild with anticipation. Men, women and children are striving for favorable positions to witness the race, and all seem animated with an intense desire to gain a good look at the boats as they pass the city.5