On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank while traveling up the Mississippi River, killing an estimated 1,800 people.
The event remains the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history (the sinking of the Titanic killed 1,512 people). 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.
So on the 150th anniversary of the sinking, the city of Marion, Ark., is trying to make sure the Sultana will be remembered. The city has created a museum and is hosting events intended to bring attention to the tragedy.
Marion, across the river from Memphis, Tenn., is near the spot where the 260-foot side-wheeler came to rest. "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.
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 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.
"The boat had a legal carrying capacity of 376 passengers," he says, "and on its up-river trip it had over 2,500 aboard," in part because the government had agreed to pay $5 for each enlisted man and $10 for each officer who made the trip.
Today, Potter describes the scene from a park along the banks of the Mississippi, just north of Memphis. "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." That day, he says, the water was moving very quickly and contained a lot of trees and other debris. And it was very cold.
The Sultana made it only a few miles north of Memphis.
"At 2 a.m., one of the boilers exploded, resulting in two other boilers exploding," Potter says. "And the entire center of the boat erupted like a volcano."
Soldiers from Kentucky and Tennessee were among the first to die, he says, "because they'd been packed in next to the boilers.
"It was like a tremendous bomb going off in the middle of where these men were," Potter says. "And the shrapnel, the steam and the boiling water killed hundreds."
Fire, drowning and exposure would kill many hundreds more. But the story of the Sultana is about more than lost lives. It is also about a rescue effort that brought together people who had been at war just weeks earlier.