April 11, 2004

Boater finds long lost Missouri River steamboat

This sharp treacherous bend in the river channel borders historic Goat Island, a  3½-mile-long spit of sand and cottonwoods. Goat Island, in Cedar County Nebraska, lies midway within a

	1892 Missouri River Commission map shows North Alabama Bend, named after a steamboat wreck that occurred at that location.

59-mile stretch of the river between Gavins Point Dam and Ponca Neb. 

In 1978, Congress declared that stretch a national recreational river. It also was indicated, but not named, on a map drawn by William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804. That map showed campsites above and below the island on Aug. 25 and 26, 1804. Clark wrote in his journal that this was the area where Pvt. George Shannon was lost for 16 days after being sent out to look for horses that had wandered away from their encampment. 

In the Annual Report of the Missouri River Commission for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1897, Captain Hiram M. Chittenden published a compilation showing the loss of 295 steamboats on the Missouri River from the beginning of steam navigation to the date of the report. Of these, 20 were lost within the boundaries of the present state of South Dakota. Historians believe there may be 7-12 shipwrecks in the river between Yankton, S.D. and Sioux City. The old towns of St. James and St. Helena Nebraska, located near Goat Island, were common locations where many riverboats moored to take on wood fuel in large quanitities.

The harvest of vast numbers of cottonwood trees located near the river's edge created some of the underwater stumps that snagged and tore through the hulls of many sternwheelers. The tenure of these steamboats, most carrying supplies, miners and homesteaders steaming to and from the gold camps in Montana and Westward, didn't last long. The average lifespan of a steamboat on this run was only about four or five years. After that they were either torn up to build a more modern boat, or had hit a snag and sunk, burned or blew up due to boiler explosions. The river channel has shifted vastly along it's flood plain leaving scores of remains of steamboats that once navigated the river during the glorious days of riverboat travel.

Clint Pinkelman, a hog and grain farmer who lives about 10 miles from Goat Island in Hartington Nebraska, was out for the first time this spring in his 18 ft. Jon boat on March 12. He decided it

	Not just another day on the river! - A relic of an era long ago surfaces through the mud.

was a nice day and drove his boat to Brookey Bottom landing, then launched his boat and headed up river. 

After making way several miles he cut the engine and floated, letting the lazy current take his boat down river. The ebb and flow pulled his boat into an obstacle protruding above the water. In fact, there were a LOT of them. An astonished Pinkelman first thought what he saw were parts of an old wooden bridge. He said, "I looked at it a little better and soon figured out it was something that sunk and the low water in the river had exposed it."

Pinkelman said he could see about one fourth of what he surmised was a big boat - it had to be an old steamboat! He estimated the length to be approximately 160 to 170 feet long with a 
32 to 35 foot beam, based on what could be seen above the water. He immediately used his cell phone to contact his parents to let them know what he'd found. The following Sunday, Pinkelman returned to the site with relatives and took pictures.

Pinkelman said the purported steamboat appeared to be in its original wreck location because it looked like the stump of a huge cottonwood tree was embedded upward through an area that might be the bow of the boat. "It looked like it hit the big snag in the river, went down and never moved again," he said. Following the incident, he did some research on the internet, and determined that there was a good chance it was the wreck of the North Alabama, a 220-ton vessel that sank near that location on Oct. 27, 1870. 

The North Alabama was mastered by possibly the greatest steamboatman ever, Captain Grant Marsh. Captain Marsh's eternal fame came to him in 1876 when his steamer FAR WEST brought

	Captain Grant Marsh (1883-1916)

the wounded soldiers down from the Little Big Horn River with the news of General Custer's bloody defeat. His reputation came from a lifetime of unequaled skill as a steamboat pilot. 

Marsh served as mate on steamboats in the Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee and lower Missouri River trade and witnessed the great St. Louis "ice gorge" of 1856. In 1866, he received his first command on the LUELLA, a legendary upper Missouri River steamboat. He piloted the LUELLA down river with a cargo of 2 1/2 tons of Confederate Gulch gold dust. Valued at $1,250,000 it was the richest cargo ever to go down the Missouri.

Marsh surveyed the Yellowstone River for the Army in 1874. Then two years later he steamed and warped up the uncharted Big Horn River to re-supply and rescue the survivors of the battle of the Little Big Horn. From 1882 to 1901, Grant Marsh worked the lower Mississippi with Samuel Clemens (aka: Mark Twain) aboard the steamboat A. B. CHAMBERS. Marsh returned to the upper Missouri River as pilot for the Benton Packet Company in 1902. Captain Grant Marsh served on more than 22 vessels in his long and illustrious career.

The all-time peak of river traffic was in 1879, with 47 boats carrying 9,444 tons up the river. In the 1880s, traffic began to drop as the newly-built railroads cut into the market. But before it was

	Drought conditions along the lower Missouri River valley during the past year caused the river level to drop. As a result, at least 5-6 lost steamboats have emerged along the river banks.

over, steamboats brought more than 160,000 tons of freight up river, returned with 35,000 tons, and transported far more than 40,000 passengers shown in the commerce tables.

It was recorded that in late 1869 Captain Marsh successfully steamed the NORTH ALABAMA northward up the icy river , risking ice entrapment to deliver supplies to forts in Southand North Dakoka. In 1871, he joined other investors in forming the Colson Packet Line, whose major contractor was the military.

The North Alabama bend in the river is named for Captain Marsh's boat that sank there. The river channel had shifted a lot during the big 1881 flood. Previous attempts by researchers from the University of South Dakota using ground penetrating sonar equipment during the summer of 1998 had turned up no trace of the buried vessel. 

Pinkelman contacted the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. The following Saturday morning, Pinkleman and his father took three steamboat wreck researchers from the university up

	On April 1, 1865 the 161-foot BERTRAND struck a snag less than a mile from the village of DeSoto, Nebraska Territory. The wreck site is now part of the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge. The BERTRAND was one of more than 400 steamboats wrecked on the Missouri during the riverboat era.

river to the wreck site. They determined that in In a couple of  days the cold murky water had risen about a foot, obscuring some lower sections of the once-exposed hull structure. A GPS (Global Positioning) was used to record location information, photographs were taken and measurements were recorded. A piece of metal fitting was also found nearby that may be a mechanical part of the boat. This information will be used together with further research to be conducted in order to record an authorized identification of the vessel. The university experts said 
they are certain the boat is from the late 1800's and was once a double-rudder paddle-wheel steamboat. Over the years local boaters have discovered many pieces and relics, including old iron bracing used for paddlewheels.

The Dakota Herald Supplement covering the ice gorge on the Missouri during the early thaw of 1881 reports that at 4:00 PM on Sunday, March 28 the whole channel was one solid mass of heaving, groaning, grinding cakes of ice." All the steamboats at Yankton were either shoved inland or destroyed during the next days as the ice intermittently dammed the channel and broke up. As mentioned, the flood of 1881 drastically altered the river's course below the city where many wrecks presumably lay covered in silt in various presumed locations all the way down to Vermillion and beyond. One notable wrecked steamboat, the EVENING STAR, must have remained near the shifted channel since she resurfaced at the turn of the century when an article in the Vermillion Plain Talk reported that her decks rose above the water after being submerged for nearly 40 years.