Eamonn Lynskey visits a Steamboat Museum in Kansas City, Missouri
On a recent visit to Kansas City, Missouri, I discovered a museum of a kind I had never seen before – and I am an inveterate museum visitor: a steamboat museum. Immediately, memories flooded back into my mind of Mark Twain’s book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that great sprawling all-American novel so full of the steamboat traffic of the Mississippi and so much a favourite with readers of my vintage. More precisely, this museum was dedicated to the memory of one steamboat in particular, the Arabia. Conscious of the limited time I had available to see the sights of the city, I was about to pass on, but Huck stood in my way, plucked at my sleeve, and I knew I had to go in. And I was so glad I did. I found myself in an Aladdin’s cave of wonders.
‘I was about to pass on, but Huck stood in my way, plucked at my sleeve, and I knew I had to go in. And I was so glad I did. I found myself in an Aladdin’s cave of wonders’. Mark Twain
Before we had roads, we had rivers – those great water highways, enablers of invasion and human settlements along their banks, rudimentary outposts that would eventually become our towns and cities. Huck Finn is the main character in the novel mentioned above, but an equally important character is the great Mississippi herself, on which steamboats daily churned their slow passage from St Louis up towards Ohio and back again, laden with goods for the freshly settled frontiers of what was to become the United States of America. Charles Dickens tells us that in 1842 he rode three different Mississippi steamboats down the Ohio River and on to St. Louis and back again. In his American Notes he observed that these vessels were ‘foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats [in Europe]. I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.’ Lacking any ‘boat-like gear,’ they looked as if they were built ‘to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountaintop.’
Many people’s knowledge of steamboats (mine included) would be derived from novels like the one mentioned above, and from the many films and musicals featuring them, like the famous 1951 film of the musical Showboat, starring Ava Gardner, Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, and the songs of the gifted composer Jerome Kern – plus lot and lots of glamour. Other films had a more Wild West slant, featuring the boats as excursion vessels for the well-off, with drinking saloons and gambling casinos in which disputes over cards or the roulette wheel often turned into gunfire. There is a germ of truth in these portrayals but, as this Kansas City Museum informed me, it is a very small germ indeed. ’The chief business of America is business,’ President Calvin Coolidge declared in 1925, but long before that the steamboat Arabia and others like it were putting this slogan into practice by carrying saleable merchandise up and down the rivers, including slaves in chains. Rather than romantic symbols of the Deep South, these were merchant vessels, plying the commercially navigable arteries of North America’s central river system.
The impressive entrance to the museum
From their first introduction in the early 19th century, steamboats, with their enormous paddle wheels powered by huge wood-burning boilers, transformed the movement of people and goods along the great river highways, a transport formerly limited to flatboats and keelboats borne by the current. By 1849, all of 572 steamboats were in operation, although they were so subject to the risks and hazards of the waterways that, out of that number, only a very few were more than five years old. The river gods seem not to have taken kindly to these new-fangles ploughing their waters and many a floating tree stump (known to fearful mariners as a ‘snag’) was thrust across the bow of many a steamboat to gore an enormous hole, thereby consigning the boat to the riverbed. Other dangers a steamboat captain had to keep in mind were hidden sandbars, collisions, fires, and boiler explosions. The last-named was quite common and often fatal to the crew. An early casualty of these dangers was The Missouri Packet, which was the first steamboat to sink into the Missouri River in 1820, the victim of a snag. Many others followed her fate, including the Arabia, which is the subject of the Kansas Steamboat Museum.
The Packet Arabia (to give the steamboat her proper title) had come into service in 1853. Her paddle wheels were 28 feet (8.5 m) across, and her steam boilers consumed approximately thirty cords of wood per day (one cord measures about 600-800 logs). She averaged 5 miles (8.0 km) per hour going upstream and continued to ply the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri rivers for the next three years until Sept 5, 1856 when she hit a large sycamore snag which holed her below the water line.
She sank quickly, but fortunately all persons on board managed to get off safely. Thereafter, she continued to sink into the muddy riverbed until, by next morning, she had almost entirely disappeared, leaving only the tops of her funnels and the pilot house still visible above the mud. These also shortly disappeared. It was well known that there was an extensive cargo on board and there was even a rumour that she was carrying a large consignment of whiskey. This latter gave rise to many attempts at salvage over the succeeding years, all of which were unsuccessful. The mud that had enveloped her proved too much of an obstacle and so, the Arabia was to remain in the embrace of the riverbed at the bottom of the Missouri until the first really serious effort to raise her was made in 1988.
In that year a group of self-proclaimed treasure hunters came together to form River Salvage Incorporated. It included, among others, the brothers David, Greg, and Bob Hawley, who owned a refrigeration repair business; restaurateur Jerry Mackey, and David Luttrell from the construction industry. Hard-nosed, self-made businessmen, in the best American tradition, their express aim was the recovery of Arabia’s cargo and, as finders, to sell it off at a profit – also in the best American tradition.
Before the dig, they had to deal with the fact that the wreck was no longer at the bottom of the Missouri. During the previous 132 years the river, seemingly conscious that efforts would be made to undo her dastardly work, had shifted her path, and left the Arabia to languish beneath an adjacent cornfield. Negotiations with the land owner to excavate the land proved successful, but the consortium had to agree to have the work done by the spring seeding time of the following February 1989. Arabia or not, farmers are hard-nosed too, so a difficult task was not made any easier by a tight schedule. Work began in earnest at the beginning of November 1987. The projected financial outlay was initially estimated at $50,000 but by the time the project was finished it had cost nearly one million dollars.
These treasure hunters shared a wide variety of expertise and ingenuity, which was underpinned by a boundless enthusiasm to get the job done. By employing the most cutting edge and sophisticated salvage methods available at the time, the mud was cleared and the Arabia was exposed on November 26, 1988. That was the easy part. The work to salvage its cargo then commenced and four days later that cargo began to appear. And what a cargo it was!
I am not very partial to exclamation marks but I will defend the one above. On December 5, a wooden crate filled with elegant porcelain ware was unearthed. The mud had been such an effective preserver that the yellow packing straw was still visible. As the rest of the freight began to emerge, its astounding variety became apparent. Fine crockery, ranging from everyday household plate to sets of delicate china. Every kind of cutlery and cooking utensils imaginable. Builders’ tools, axe heads, spades, shovels, carpenters’ tools. Ladies’ and gents’ apparel for indoor and outdoor wear. All types of furniture. Barrels, buckets, ladders, ropes. Guns and ammunition. Over 4000 pairs of boots and shoes. Hundreds of hats of various styles, and jars of (astonishingly still edible) preserved apples. River Salvage Inc. had discovered a veritable cornucopia of items ranging from those as small as penknives to those as large as sewing machines; an enormous and varied quantity of goods heading for the General Stores of the new towns upriver – all the wherewithal necessary for the great expansion into an America territory rapidly leaving behind its rudimentary ‘log cabin’ reputation and anxious to acquire all the hallmarks of sophisticated 19th century culture. Many pieces of the boat itself, including the boilers, one engine, and the anchor, were salvaged as well, and are on display. The huge jagged tree stump, with which the boat collided, is also here, looking like a ferocious animal that would wreak havoc all over again if it managed to escape from its glass cage.
In short, Arabia proved to be a time capsule of 1850s America. As with the dry desert air that protected the tomb treasures of Tutankhamun; and as with the waters of the bogs of Denmark’s Jutland that preserved the bodies of the Iron Age men and women which Seamus Heaney told us about, it was the mud of the Missouri riverbed that kindly preserved the Arabia’s cargo, a cargo made wonderful – as with King Tut and the bog people – by a passage of time that made their time stand still and allows us to step out of our busy present and into their silent, but eloquent, past.
The work of preservation started immediately after salvage, and is still ongoing (2024). It will probably take another 10 years or more because restoration is a lengthy and difficult process. Extensive and careful drying and cleaning procedures are required and even a small nail can take over an hour of work. Other items like shoes and boots may take up to three months of treatment. Interest in Arabia’s cargo, which claims to be the largest single collection of pre-American Civil War artifacts in the world, is world-wide and restoration expertise is forthcoming from many sources, among them the Mary Rose Trust in England and the Canadian Conservation Institute.
Some of the treasures and artefacts recovered from the sunken steamboat, the Packet Arabia
The result of the many months of hard work so far is the vast number of objects currently on display in the Museum. Such is the pristine condition of the exhibits after their treatment that I had to remind myself time and again that these items were not the imagined reproductions or simulations often seen elsewhere in museums, but are the actual day-to-day objects of that time in all their glorious reality. And although there are thousands of artifacts on display in their huge glass cabinets, according to the museum there are still (as at 2024) another 60 tons of cargo yet to be treated. Part of the museum is given over to an explanation of this work and in the small theatre, audiovisuals recount the history of the Arabia’s sinking and excavation, and the processes of its cargo’s restoration.
As mentioned, the original intention of the salvage consortium was to sell the recovered cargo of the Arabia which, with its historical associations and genuine quality, once dried and cleaned, would have realised a handsome profit. However, having realised the importance of the objects to the historical record of their country, the partners opted instead to fund a museum to house and display the objects, thereby adding to the knowledge of the birth of their nation, and proving that business is not entirely always the preoccupation of American businessmen. Hard-nosed they might be, but not always hard-hearted. They concluded that the Arabia’s cargo was not really their property but the property of the American people, a treasure trove that gives a unique insight into those stirring times of expansion in pre-civil war America.
Dave Hawley now remains the sole owner of the museum which is located in the historic City Market area of Kansas City. However, it may be that Arabia’s voyage from that cornfield may not yet be over. The museum’s lease expires in 2026 and will not be renewed. There are plans to move it to St. Charles County, in the eastern part of the state, but wherever it finally ends up, and if you happen to be anywhere near it, make sure you visit. It will be an unforgettable experience.
