How a Champagne-Laden Steamship Ended Up in a Kansas Cornfield | Hacker News Reader

How a Champagne-Laden Steamship Ended Up in a Kansas Cornfield

atlasobscura.com

91 pointsbenbreen16 comments

If you're in Kansas City, the wreck museum is a great place to visit. The amount of goods retrieved from the wreck of the Great White Arabia is just astounding and serves as a window into the trading goods of the early American frontier. It's a true time-capsule of the 1850's.

Seconded! The Arabia museum is incredibly fascinating and interesting to anyone remotely interested in learning, or history. It's an incredibly rare and accurate view into the world at that time. Really fascinating. The wife and I have been there several times.

Previous post and discussion about the same ship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11006254

> The plan was to bring the banks closer together, and by narrowing the width of the river, speed up the current, making boat passage much faster.

Probably a stupid question, but what about the people who want to travel upstream?

I imagine that a narrower river would be deeper and with a better channel, removing or at least lessening the danger of snags such as the one that sank the Arabia.

But if the split of upstream/downstream traffic was roughly 50:50, the time you gained going downstream you'd cancel out on the return journey.

The excavation of the Malta near the Missouri River east of Kansas City started this spring. The exploration group has a blog [0], but it hasn't been updated since March. A newspaper article from April has more details [1].

The Arabia museum really is surprisingly interesting, serving not just as a time-capsule of the frontier period, but also revealing a lot about what it was like to embark on a westward journey across the continent before the railroads were completed.

(The two most-traveled trails of settlement, the Oregon and California trails, as well as the busiest overland mercantile route, the Santa Fe trail, all began in and around Kansas City, where the Missouri River turns to the north, and is consequently as far west as you could get by steamboat. Passengers and goods disembarked there before provisioning wagon trains for the overland journey, and most of the Arabia's goods were intended for sale to would-be settlers of the American west coast.)

If you're ever in KC, check it out. And if you haven't had your fill of history museums, hop on the streetcar line down to the Liberty Memorial and National World War I Museum [3], which is the best in the country on that subject and will host the national centennial commemorations over the next few years.

0. http://www.moexplorer.com

1. http://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/the-steamboat-m...

3. https://www.theworldwar.org

One has to wonder whether the diversion of this river is the origin of a scifi trope. Ships being found far from any water is today a common image to suggest that someone/thing has lifted and moved the ship. But just after the diversion of this river, many wrecks would have been left high and dry in the middle of fields, an odd sight.

I toured the Arabia museum last month. According to a map there, there were about 249 such steamship wrecks between St Louis and just upstream of Kansas City. The average steamship lasted just 5 years in service.

There were a lot of wrecks.

So the boat sinks, and settles on the muddy bottom. Then the engineers narrow the width of the river so that the bottom is no longer in the river. How did the land level rise to bury the boat? Can't quite picture that.

Excellent occupational niche by the way!

The water flowing around the ship's hull washes the sediment out from around the bottom of it, and the ship continues to sink down into the pit that creates. Eventually the ship sinks far enough that it quits impeding the river, and the silt carried from upstream fills the hole back in.

Thanks - so the boat is actually buried before the change in river route, and it was the change in route that made the boat more accessible (and dry). I've got it now.

Here's a walk through of the museum on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3W7L2vS0kY

I wonder if you could make a worthwhile VR experience out of this museum

make it a "shopping trip" to an old store, virtual time travel :)

visited the museum a few years ago. We watched a film and when it was over, the father archeologist who discovered the steamboat and unearthed it was there to greet us. Really amazing museum. Behind a few booths you can watch them still cleaning and documenting items found in the wreckage decades later.

I was hoping for a story about a tornado accompanied by Wizard of Oz puns.

An interesting story nonetheless.

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