In the autumn of 1988, in a cornfield in Kansas, half a mile from the nearest river, a family from Missouri dug a hole 45 ft deep.
At the bottom of it, they found a steamboat.
Not the bones of one, not a few rotten timbers and a rusted boiler, a steamboat.
Her hull, her engine, her paddle wheel.
And packed into her hold, in wooden crates and barrels, exactly as they had been stowed on the day she went down, around 200 tons of cargo.
Boots and shoes and clothing, dishes still nested in straw, tools, hardware, trade beads, buttons by the tens of thousands, bottles of perfume, jars of food sealed with the food still inside them.
Some of it, the men who opened those jars would later say, still had its flavor.
She had been lying there for 132 years.
Her name was the Arabia.
She was a side-wheel steamboat, 171 ft long, and on the 5th of September, 1856, she was steaming up the Missouri River, carrying passengers and supplies to the frontier towns of the West, when she struck a submerged tree near Parkville, Missouri, and sank in a matter of minutes.
Every person on board survived.
The only life lost that day was a mule tied up on deck and forgotten in the rush.
The river swallowed her.
By the next morning, little more than her smokestacks and her pilot house showed above the water.
Within days, those were gone, too.
For the next 40 years, people tried to reach her and failed.
And then, the Missouri River, which never stays in one place for long, slowly moved away from her.
It shifted its channel, year by year, until the place where the Arabia went down was no longer a river at all.
It was dry land.
And then, it was a farm.
And then, for generations, it was a cornfield where the wheat and the corn grew every summer over a steamboat full of frontier goods that almost everyone had forgotten.
Almost everyone.
This is a true story.
Every part of it is real.
>> >> It is the story of the steamboat Arabia, of the river that sank her and then buried her, of the frontier she was carrying her cargo to, and of the family who spent a freezing winter digging her out of the mud, racing the water and the spring planting to open a time capsule that had been sealed since the year before Abraham Lincoln was elected president.
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Now, let’s go to the river.
The people who lived along it called it the Big Muddy.
The Missouri is the longest river in North America.
It rises in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and flows more than 2,000 mi east and south across the Great Plains through what are now the Dakotas and Nebraska and Iowa and Kansas and Missouri until it joins the Mississippi just above St.
Louis.
In the middle of the 19th century, before the railroads crossed the plains, it was the great highway into the American West.
Almost everything that went up into that country, and almost everything that came down out of it, went by the Missouri.
And it was one of the most dangerous rivers in the world to travel on.
It was muddy.
That was the first thing everyone noticed.
The Missouri carried an enormous load of silt and sand washed down from the plains.
So much that its water was thick and brown and opaque, and you could not see more than an inch or two below the surface.
People said it was too thick to drink and too thin to plow.
And it was restless.
The river did not keep to one channel.
It wandered.
Every spring, when the snows melted in the mountains, it rose in a great flood and tore away its banks and cut new channels through the soft soil of its flood plain and abandoned old ones.
A town built on its bank one year might find itself half a mile from the water a few years later, or in it.
And when the river cut into its banks, it took down the trees that grew along them.
Huge trees, cottonwoods and sycamores and walnuts, 100 ft tall, undercut by the current until they toppled into the water, roots and all.
The river carried them downstream until their heavy roots caught in the mud of the riverbed, and there they stayed, anchored to the bottom, their trunks angled up toward the surface, pointing downstream, often just below the water where no one could see them in the brown flood.
The rivermen called them snags, and snags were the great killers of the Missouri River steamboats.
A steamboat coming upstream, against the current, would run straight onto a snag hidden just under the surface, and the pointed trunk would punch through the wooden hull like a spear.
Of the hundreds of steamboats lost on the Missouri in the 19th century, most were sunk by snags.
Historians have estimated that around 400 steamboats were lost on that river, and that nearly 300 of them were sunk by snags.
Many of those wrecks have never been found.
The steamboats themselves were extraordinary machines.
They were built for shallow, treacherous rivers with flat bottoms that drew only a few feet of water, so that they could float over sandbars and run up into shallow channels.
They were long and wide and low in the water, with a broad main deck for freight, a second deck above it for passengers with cabins and a dining saloon, and a pilot house perched on top, high up, where the pilot stood at the great wooden wheel and read the river.
Tall, twin smokestacks rose from the boilers, and they were driven by paddle wheels.
Some had a single wheel at the stern.
Others, the side-wheelers, had two great wheels, one on each side, turned by steam engines fed from boilers that burned wood, enormous amounts of wood.
A steamboat on the Missouri might burn 30 cords of it a day and stopped constantly at wood yards along the banks to load more.
The Arabia was a side-wheeler.
She was built in 1853 near Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh, one of the great steamboat building centers of the country.
She cost about $20,000.
She was 171 ft long and 29 ft wide, with two paddle wheels, each 28 ft across, a crew of about 30, and room for well over 100 passengers and many tons of freight.
Upstream, against the current, she could make about 5 mph.
She worked the great rivers of the West for 3 years, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri.
On one early trip up the Missouri, she carried soldiers from Fort Leavenworth far up the river into the northern plains to a remote army post called Fort Pierre in what is now South Dakota, and then went on up the Yellowstone River, a journey of nearly 3 months through country that most Americans had never seen.
And in March of 1856, she was bought by two new owners, Captain William Terrell and his partner, William Boyd.
That spring, they put her to work running freight and passengers between St.
Louis and the towns on the upper river.
Over the next 6 months, she made more than a dozen trips up and down the Missouri.
It It a dangerous year to be on that river, and not only because of the snags.
In 1856, the stretch of the Missouri River where the Arabia worked ran along the edge of a war.
Two years earlier, in 1854, Congress had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
It opened the vast territories west of Missouri to settlement, and it left one question to be decided by the settlers themselves.
Whether slavery would be allowed there.
It was a decision that set off a race.
People who wanted Kansas Missouri, which was itself a slave state, poured across the border to settle and to vote.
People who wanted Kansas to be free poured in from the north.
Many of them sent and supported by anti-slavery societies in New England.
Both sides rigged elections.
Both sides formed armed bands.
Towns were raided and burned.
Men were murdered.
In May of 1856, pro-slavery forces sacked the free state town of Lawrence.
Days later, an abolitionist named John Brown and his followers killed five pro-slavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek.
The newspapers of the time gave the conflict a name that has stuck to it ever since.
Bleeding Kansas.
The Missouri River was at the center of it.
It was the main road into Kansas Territory.
Settlers from the north came up it by steamboat from St.
Louis to the landings at Kansas City and Leavenworth, and the new towns on the Kansas side of the river.
And all along the Missouri side of the river, in the slave-holding counties of western Missouri, there were men watching those boats, searching them, turning back passengers they suspected of anti-slavery sympathies, and looking for guns.
In March of 1856, the Arabia was stopped and searched by pro-slavery men at Lexington, Missouri, on the river east of Kansas City.
According to the accounts of the time, someone aboard had let it be known that there were weapons on the boat bound for anti-slavery settlers in Kansas.
The searchers found crates marked as carpenter’s tools.
Inside them were rifles, about a hundred of them by most accounts, and two small cannons.
They were seized.
It was one of many such incidents on the river that year as both sides tried to arm their people in Kansas and stop the other side from doing the same.
That same spring, the Arabia had other troubles.
She struck a sandbar or a rock and damaged her rudder and had to be repaired.
Later, a cylinder head on her engine blew out and that had to be repaired, too.
Steamboats on the Missouri were always breaking down.
The river was hard on them and most of them did not last long.
A steamboat that survived five years on the Missouri was considered old.
But mostly, through the spring and summer of 1856, the Arabia did what she had been built to do.
She carried freight.
The frontier towns along the Missouri and the settlements spreading out from them into Kansas and Nebraska and beyond needed everything.
They had almost no factories.
Almost everything they used, from nails and axes and plows to dishes and buttons and boots, had to be brought in from the east, from the factories of New England and Pennsylvania and Ohio, and from across the ocean, from England and France and beyond.
It came by steamboat.
A merchant in a small town on the upper Missouri, keeping a general store, would send his order down the river to wholesalers in St.
Louis.
And months [snorts] later, his goods would arrive at his landing on a steamboat, packed in crates and barrels to be carted up to his store and sold.
That was what the Arabia was carrying in September of 1856, the orders of frontier merchants, the supplies for the stores of towns that were being built right then on the edge of the American West.
About 200 tons of it packed into her hold and stacked on her decks.
In late summer of 1856, the Arabia left St.
Louis on what should have been one more routine trip up the Missouri.
She was bound for Council Bluffs, Iowa, far up the river with stops at landings along the way.
She carried about 130 people, passengers and crew together, settlers bound for the territories, traders, families, and the men who worked the boat.
By the 5th of September, she had come up past Kansas City and was steaming on upstream toward Parkville, Missouri, where the river swings in a long bend.
The rivermen called it Quindaro Bend after a town site on the Kansas bank that anti-slavery settlers were laying out at around that time.
Nobody saw the tree.
That is almost always how it happened on the Missouri.
The snag was under the surface, in the brown water, invisible.
The pilot in his house on the top deck could read the river as well as any man alive, could see the faint ripples and changes in color that marked sandbars and shallows and hidden dangers.
But a big snag lying just a few feet below the surface, its trunk pointed downstream, left no mark at all.
A boat coming upstream against the current drove straight into it, bow first, at full speed.
The Arabia struck at Quindaro Bend near Parkville on the 5th of September, 1856.
The great submerged trunk of a tree rooted in the riverbed pierced her hull below the waterline.
>> >> It tore a hole in her bottom and the river came in.
Steamboats were built of wood and they were built light for speed and for shallow water.
They were not built to survive having their hulls torn open.
Water poured into the Arabia’s hold through the hole made by the snag, and she began to settle into the river almost at once.
Imagine what it must have been like for the people on board.
The shock of the impact, the sound of timber breaking somewhere below, the water rising in the hold, and the deck beginning to tilt under their feet, and the brown river climbing up the sides of the hull.
And then she stopped.
The Missouri at that point was not deep.
The Arabia went down until her hull settled onto the bottom of the river, into the soft mud and sand of the riverbed.
And there she sat.
Her lower deck was underwater, and her hold was flooded, but her upper decks, where the passengers had been, were still above the surface.
That is why everyone lived.
The people on board were able to get off the stranded boat and reach the shore.
Every passenger and every member of the crew survived.
They had lost almost everything they had with them, but they were alive, standing on the riverbank, watching the boat they had been riding settle into the river.
There was one life lost, a mule.
By the accounts that have come down to us, it was tied to a piece of sawmill machinery on the main deck, and in the panic of getting the people off, it was forgotten.
It drowned where it stood.
Its bones would still be there, 132 years later.
By the next morning, the river had already gone a long way towards swallowing the Arabia.
A steamboat sitting in the soft bottom of the Missouri did not stay where it was.
The current scoured the riverbed around her, and the hull sank deeper and deeper into the mud and sand, and the silt carried by that heavy brown water began to settle over her and into her and around her, filling every space.
By morning, people standing on the bank could see little more than the top of the boat, the smokestacks, the pilot house.
Within a few days, the river had taken even those.
The current knocked them down and carried them away.
And the Arabia was gone.
It happened so fast that almost nothing was saved.
The cargo in her hold, around 200 tons of it, the orders of frontier merchants up and down the river, went down with her and was buried.
Somewhere upriver, storekeepers who had been waiting for those goods would never receive them.
The boat herself was a total loss.
Steamboats sank on the Missouri every year.
A sinking like this one, with no human lives lost, did not stop the river trade for long.
Other steamboats went on carrying freight up past Quindaro Bend, over the place where the Arabia lay.
But people did not forget her entirely because of what was in her hold.
Think for a moment about the people who were waiting for that cargo.
In the autumn of 1856, the towns along the Missouri above Kansas City were very young.
Leavenworth, on the Kansas side, had grown up beside the old army fort and was only 2 years old as a town.
Atchison was just as new.
St.
Joseph, on the Missouri side, was older, a jumping-off point for the wagon trains heading west on the trails to Oregon and California.
Further upriver, Omaha had been founded only 2 years before on the Nebraska side of the river, and across from it stood Council Bluffs in Iowa, where the Arabia had been bound.
These were rough, raw places, with muddy streets and wooden buildings thrown up in a hurry, full of settlers and speculators and traders and soldiers and people passing through on their way somewhere else.
And in every one of them, there were stores, [clears throat] general stores, where a person could buy almost anything.
Flour and coffee and sugar, nails and rope and axes, cloth and thread and buttons, boots and hats, dishes and lamps and soap, medicines, guns and powder, everything a family needed to build a house and work a farm and live through a winter on the edge of the settled world.
The storekeepers ordered their stock months in advance from wholesale merchants in St.
Louis and further east and waited for the steamboats to bring it.
The arrival of a steamboat at a landing, with its whistle blowing and its smokestacks pouring smoke, was the greatest event of the week in a river town.
People came down to the landing to watch the freight come off.
Letters and newspapers came with it, news of the outside world.
And on the landing, among the crates and barrels being swung ashore, a storekeeper would watch for his own name painted on the side of the boxes and know that his winter stock had arrived.
The crates in the Arabia’s hold were on their way to people exactly like that.
Somewhere up river, in September of 1856, those merchants were waiting at the landings for a steamboat that never came.
Sooner or later, word would have reached them that the Arabia had gone down at Quindaro Bend and that their goods were gone.
For a small merchant on the frontier, the loss of a season’s stock could be a heavy blow.
None of them could have imagined that their orders would arrive at last more than 130 years later.
Not on a riverbank, but in a cornfield.
Not unloaded by deckhands, but lifted out of the mud by a crane.
>> >> And not to be sold, in the end, at all.
But to be looked at by visitors from all over the world as the most complete picture that survives of what those little stores on the edge of the American West actually sold.
From the moment the Arabia went down, there were rumors about what she had been carrying.
Some of them were ordinary.
200 tons of frontier goods was a valuable cargo in itself.
But rumors on the river always grew.
People said that the Arabia had been carrying gold.
People said she had been carrying guns for one side or the other in the troubles in Kansas.
And above all, people said she had been carrying whiskey.
Barrels and barrels of it.
Fine Kentucky whiskey, sealed in the hold, sitting at the bottom of the Missouri, waiting for anyone who could reach it.
People tried.
Over the following decades, there were a number of attempts to salvage the Arabia.
They found that it was very hard to do.
The river had buried her in sand and silt, and the current was strong, and the water was thick and dark, and every hole that was dug down toward her filled with water and sand as fast as it was dug.
The attempts that were made over the years, by the accounts that survive, recovered very little.
One effort in 1877 brought up a single case of felt hats.
Others brought up a few boxes of shoes and some lumber.
That was all.
The most determined attempt came in 1897, more than 40 years after the sinking.
An expedition set out to find the Arabia and recover her cargo, drawn, by most accounts, by the old rumors of whiskey.
They sank a caisson, a large open-ended iron or wooden box that is pushed down into the ground so that men can dig inside it without the walls collapsing, down toward where they believed the wreck lay.
They did not reach the cargo.
In the end, they gave up and went away.
And they left their caisson where it was, in the ground, near the wreck.
Nobody would ever find the whiskey.
If those barrels were ever aboard at all, no one has recovered them.
There was one more attempt, much later in the 1970s, by a pair of treasure hunters.
They never reached the boat, either.
By then, something else had happened to the Arabia.
The river had left her.
The Missouri never stays in one place.
All through the second half of the 19th century, as it had for thousands of years, the river kept shifting its channel across its wide, flat flood plain, cutting away one bank and building up the other, swinging back and forth like a rope being shaken slowly.
At Quindaro Bend, the channel gradually moved away from the place where the Arabia had sunk.
It moved by about half a mile.
And as the river moved, the old channel where she lay filled up with sand and silt and dried out and became land.
>> >> Grass grew over it, then trees.
Then it was cleared and plowed.
The land on that side of the old river, the Kansas side, had a long history of its own.
It had been part of the homeland of The Wyandot were a nation from the Great Lakes country, from what is now Ohio and Michigan and Ontario, who had been forced to give up their lands in Ohio and move west in 1843.
They came to the mouth of the Kansas River, where it joins the Missouri, and bought land there from the Delaware, who had themselves been moved there earlier.
They built a town, a church, a school.
Many of the Wyandot were farmers and traders.
But within a few years, the pressure of white settlement in Kansas grew, and in 1855, under a treaty with the United States, the Wyandot lands were divided into individual allotments, and much of that land passed in the following years into the hands of white settlers.
Some of the Wyandot stayed.
Many moved on again, south into the Indian Territory, where the Wyandot Nation is based today in Oklahoma.
The county in Kansas where the Arabia lies still bears their name, Wyandotte County.
>> >> In the 1860s, a settler named Elisha Sortor bought a piece of that land on the flat bottom land where the old river channel had been.
He farmed it.
His family went on farming it, generation after generation, for more than a hundred years.
And the family knew the story that somewhere under their land there was a steamboat.
It was a legend in the family and in the area, the old river channel, the sinking, the boat that people said had gone down full of whiskey.
But nobody knew exactly where it was.
Over the decades, as the river moved and the old channel vanished and the fields were plowed again and again, the exact location of the wreck was forgotten.
It was down there somewhere under the corn.
That was all anyone could say.
Meanwhile, the river was changing, too.
In the 20th century, the United States Army Corps of Engineers undertook an enormous project on the lower Missouri to tame it for navigation.
They straightened its bends, narrowed its channel, and lined long stretches of its banks with rock and wooden pilings to hold it in place so that it could no longer wander across its flood plain the way it always had.
>> >> The Big Muddy was turned into something much more like a canal.
The snags were cleared, the wandering stopped, and the old channels that the river had abandoned stayed abandoned, buried under farmland all along the valley with whatever the river had left in them, including, people said, a great many steamboats.
In the 1980s, a family from Independence, Missouri, became fascinated by those buried steamboats.
The Hawleys ran a refrigeration business in Independence.
Bob Hawley and his sons Greg and David were practical men who worked with machines and pumps and pipes and they were amateur historians with a particular interest in the steamboats of the Missouri River and in the idea that some of the hundreds of boats lost on that river might still be lying where they sank buried in the mud of old river channels under dry land with their cargoes intact.
It was not a foolish idea.
The Missouri’s mud is a remarkable preservative.
A boat buried in it deep below the surface sealed in waterlogged silt where almost no oxygen can reach is protected from the things that destroy wood and leather and cloth.
There is too little air for most of the organisms that cause rot.
The temperature stays cool and steady all year round.
Things buried in that mud do not decay the way they would above ground.
They wait.
The Hawleys began to research the wrecks.
>> >> They read old newspapers and the records of the steamboats era.
They studied old maps of the river from the 19th century which showed where its channel had run before it moved and they focused in the end on one boat in particular.
A sidewheeler that had sunk near Parkville in 1856 with a full cargo whose wreck had never been salvaged and whose location according to the old maps now lay under farmland on the Kansas side of the river.
The Arabia.
Finding a buried steamboat under a cornfield is not as simple as it sounds.
There is nothing to see on the surface.
The Hawleys had the old maps which showed roughly where the channel had been in 1856 but roughly is not good enough when you are trying to find a boat buried tens of feet down in a field covering many acres.
So in 1987 they used an instrument called a proton magnetometer.
A magnetometer measures the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Iron changes that field.
A large mass of iron buried in the ground, like a steamboat’s boilers and engine, and the countless iron fittings in its hull and cargo, creates a small disturbance in the magnetic field above it, which a sensitive magnetometer carried across the surface can detect.
The Hawleys surveyed the field with it.
And in one place, about half a mile from the modern river, under the farmland of the Saucier family, they found it.
A strong magnetic disturbance, large enough to be a steamboat.
The wreck was there, buried under about 45 ft of silt and soil, below the water table, in the old river channel.
The land still belonged to the Saucier family.
The owner by then was Norman Saucier, the grandson of the Elisha Saucier who had bought it in the 1860s, a retired judge.
The Hawleys went to him and asked for permission to dig.
He gave it, but with a condition.
The field was farmland, and it had to be farmed.
The Hawleys could dig in the winter, after the harvest, but they had to be finished and the field restored in time for spring planting.
That gave them only a few months, and it meant they would be digging through the coldest part of the year.
They put together a team, Bob, Greg, and David Hawley, and two partners, Jerry Mackey and David Luttrell, who joined them in the venture.
Together, according to accounts of the excavation, they raised close to a million dollars, much of it borrowed, to pay for the equipment the dig would need.
It was an enormous gamble.
They did not know what condition the boat would be in.
They did not know whether her cargo had survived, or whether it had been salvaged long ago, or whether the rumors were all there was.
They only knew that there was something very large and made of iron under 45 ft of mud in a cornfield in Kansas and that they had until spring.
The dig began on the 13th of November, 1988.
The problem was water.
The Arabia lay in the old channel of the Missouri in ground that was mostly sand and silt laid down by the river and the modern river was only half a mile away.
The water table, the level below which the ground is soaked with water, was only a few feet below the surface of the field.
45 ft down, where the boat lay, the ground was not just wet, it was saturated, like a sponge held under a tap and connected through all that sand to the river itself.
Any hole dug down toward the Arabia would simply fill with water and collapse as every salvage attempt in the 19th century had discovered.
The Hawleys knew water.
They had spent their working lives with pumps and pipes and their answer was to lower the water table itself.
Before they dug down to the boat, they drilled a ring of wells around the site, each about 65 ft deep and set heavy irrigation pumps in them, about 20 of them.
Running day and night, the pumps pulled water out of the ground around the wreck at a rate, by the accounts of the excavation, of about 20,000 gallons a minute and sent it away across the fields.
As long as the pumps ran, the ground around the boat drained and the water table dropped and a hole could be dug.
If the pumps stopped, the hole would fill fast.
They brought in heavy equipment, bulldozers and backhoes to strip away the soil and a crane, a big one with a capacity of about 100 tons to lift what came out of the pit.
They drilled test holes to find the edges of the hull and marked out its outline on the surface of the field and then they began to dig down through the topsoil and the river silt, layer after layer, into the ground where the Missouri had run in 1856, opening a great pit in the middle of the field.
It was winter in Kansas.
It was cold.
The men worked in heavy coats and boots in mud and freezing water, and the pumps ran and ran, and the pit went deeper.
On the 26th of November, about 2 weeks after they started, they reached her.
The first parts of the Arabia to come out of the mud were the spokes of one of her great paddle wheels.
Wood.
Still wood.
Not rotten.
Not crumbling.
Dark and wet and solid.
The timber of a boat that had been underground for 132 years, emerging into the daylight looking almost as if it had sunk the year before.
The mud had done exactly what the Hawleys had hoped it would.
It had kept her.
They kept digging down along the hull, and on the 30th of November, they found the first piece of her cargo.
It was a shoe.
A rubber overshoe.
The kind people wore over their ordinary shoes to keep them dry in the mud and the snow.
And it had a name stamped on it.
>> >> Goodyear.
Charles Goodyear had patented his process for vulcanizing rubber, making it strong and flexible enough to be useful only 12 years before the Arabia sank.
This overshoe was one of the new marvels of its age, on its way to a frontier store to be sold to someone walking the muddy streets of a river town in the West.
It had been lying in the mud of the Missouri since 1856, and it looked, the excavators said, almost new.
That was the moment they knew.
>> >> If a rubber shoe had survived, other things had too.
On the 5th of December, they uncovered a wooden crate.
They opened it.
Inside, packed carefully in yellow straw, exactly as it had been packed in a warehouse in the East for the long journey to the frontier, was a set of fine China, plates and cups and saucers, unbroken, clean, their glaze shining.
>> >> Still nested in the straw that someone had packed around them 132 years before so that they would arrive safely at a store somewhere up the Missouri.
They never arrived, but they had survived.
And there were more crates, many more.
The Arabia’s hold was full of them, crates and barrels and boxes stacked and packed and stowed by the deckhands at the landing in St.
Louis, exactly where they had been when the snag came through the hull.
The Hawleys had found what they had been hoping to find, more than they had dared to hope.
They had found a frontier store, hundreds of them.
All the orders of all the merchants waiting up river in the autumn of 1856, sealed in mud and kept.
And they had about 2 months left before the spring.
They also found, in the ground near the boat, a reminder of everyone who had tried before them.
It was the old caisson from the expedition of 1897, the box that the whiskey hunters had sunk into the ground and then abandoned.
It had been sitting there for 91 years near the wreck, close, but not close enough.
Through December and January and into February, the Hawleys and their partners took the Arabia’s cargo out of the mud, crate by crate, box by box, barrel by barrel.
And every one of them was a small window into a world that had vanished.
Think about what a general store on the frontier in 1856 needed.
Everything.
Because the people in those towns and on the farms and claims around them could make very little for themselves, and the nearest factory was a thousand miles away.
>> >> So, the Arabia’s cargo was, in effect, a cross section of everything that American life on the edge of the West depended on.
And it came out of the ground in the order it had been packed.
There were boots and shoes, more than 4,000 of them by the museum’s count.
Men’s work boots and women’s shoes and children’s shoes in leather that had been kept soft and supple by the airless mud.
There were the rubber overshoes, like the first one they had found.
There was clothing, coats and gloves and shirts, hats, nearly 250 of them.
Bolts of cloth in many colors, silk, some of it from as far away as China.
Wool.
And something the excavators noticed that told its own story.
Some of the boxes that had held cotton cloth were empty of cloth.
Cotton, unlike wool and silk, had not survived.
It had rotted away entirely in the mud.
But the dyes it had been colored with had not.
They had soaked into the mud inside the boxes, so that the excavators found boxes of colored mud in the shapes of the folded bolts of cloth that had once been there.
There were things for sewing, thread and yarn, needles, scissors, thimbles, and buttons.
Buttons by the tens of thousands of glass and China and metal and shell in every shape and size, packed on cards and in boxes, waiting for the hands of frontier women who would sew them onto the clothes that their families wore.
There were beads, great quantities of glass trade beads of many colors, of the kind that merchants on the frontier traded with native peoples across the West.
They are a reminder that the frontier was not empty land, and that the steamboats carried goods for trade with the nations whose country it had been.
There were tools, axes, more than 200 ax heads alone, saws and hammers and chisels and files, more than 300 pocket knives, hardware by the crate, nails and screws and hinges and locks and doorknobs for the houses that settlers were building as fast as they could saw the lumber.
There were dishes, the fine China in its straw, and plain stoneware, too, and cookware and glassware, tumblers and goblets and bottles, and brass and porcelain ornaments for the mantelpieces of houses that were barely built.
There was perfume in small glass bottles from France.
There was tobacco, and among all the merchandise, one child’s doll.
And there was food.
This is the part of the Arabia’s story that people remember most, and it is true.
Among the cargo were glass jars and bottles of preserved foods, sealed in 1856, packed in crates on their way to frontier stores.
Pickles, above all.
29 jars of them have been counted in the collection, and other preserved foods besides.
And because the jars were sealed, and the mud around them kept them cool and dark and steady for 132 years, much of the food inside them survived.
The Hawleys have said that the pickles, in particular, were still edible, that they still had their flavor.
The excavators were opening a frontier store, one crate at a time, and the frontier was looking back at them.
That is what makes the Arabia’s cargo so extraordinary to the historians who have studied it.
It is not a collection of the finest things of its time, carefully chosen and preserved by people who thought they were important.
Those survive in museums everywhere.
The Arabia’s cargo is the opposite.
It is the ordinary things, the shoes and buttons and nails and pickles and cheap glass beads that ordinary people bought and used every day, and wore out and threw away.
The things that almost never survive.
Packed exactly as they were shipped in the quantities that frontier merchants thought they could sell at one moment in one autumn in one year on one river.
As if someone had taken a photograph of the everyday life of the American frontier in September of 1856 and buried it.
And as the cargo came up, so did the boat herself.
Her timbers, pieces of her decks, her boilers, and one of her steam engines, and her anchor, all hauled up out of the pit by the crane.
A section of her stern weighing several tons with the marks still painted on it that showed how deep in the water she rode, >> >> and traces of her old white paint.
And on the 9th of December, 1988, they found the mule.
Its bones were still there in the wreckage where it had been left when the river came in 132 years before.
The only life lost in the sinking of the Arabia.
Forgotten by everyone in the rush to get the people off and left behind and buried with the boat.
It was found and brought up.
And today it is one of the things visitors to the Arabia’s museum stop to look at longest.
The winter went on and the pit went deeper and the deadline came closer.
Every day the Hawleys and their partners kept the pumps running, the river pushed back.
Every day the water in the sandy ground around the pit pressed in against the edges of the excavation, held back only by the ring of wells pulling 20,000 gallons a minute out of the earth.
If a pump failed, the water rose.
If several failed at once, the pit could flood and the walls could collapse with men and equipment at the bottom.
It was a race and the men in it knew it.
Against the water, against the cold, and against the calendar and the promise they had made to Norman Sortor that his field would be ready for planting in the spring.
They worked through Christmas, through New Year, through January.
The crates kept coming.
The boat kept coming.
Every day brought up something new, something nobody had seen since 1856, washed clean of the mud and set out on the frozen ground in the light of a Kansas winter.
And as it came up, a new problem emerged, one that would last far longer than the dig.
Things that have been buried in waterlogged mud for more than a century do not stay preserved for long once they are brought up into the air.
The same conditions that kept them, the darkness, the cold, the lack of oxygen, the constant wetness, are suddenly gone.
Wood that has been soaked for a hundred years can shrink and crack and warp as it dries.
Leather can harden and split.
Metal that has been protected from the air begins at once to rust and corrode.
Cloth can crumble.
The moment the Arabia’s cargo came out of the ground, it began, very slowly, to decay.
So, the excavators did what archaeologists do with waterlogged finds.
They kept them wet.
Much of the cargo, as it came out of the pit, had to be kept wet or cold to stop it from drying out too quickly before it could be properly treated.
For a family in the refrigeration business, it was a problem they understood better than most.
And the work of preserving what they had found would go on for decades.
By the beginning of February 1989, they had reached the bottom of the hold.
They had taken out nearly all of the cargo.
They had taken out the boilers, an engine, the anchor, a section of the stern, timbers from the hull, the paddle wheel spokes, and the mule.
They had found the snag.
The tree trunk that had killed the Arabia was still there in the mud near her hull where it had been since the day it tore through her bottom.
They brought that up, too.
On the 11th of February, 1989, they shut off the pumps.
It took no time at all.
With the wells silent, the water came back into the ground the way it had always wanted to and rose up the sides of the great pit and filled it.
Whatever was left of the Arabia’s hull deep in the mud at the bottom went back under the water of the Missouri’s old channel as it had been for 132 years.
The pit was filled in with earth.
The equipment was taken away.
The ground was leveled.
And in the spring of 1989, on schedule, Norman Sortor’s field was plowed and planted and the corn grew over the place where the Arabia had been.
The dig had taken about 3 months.
The [snorts] Hawleys and their partners had pulled out of that field, by most accounts, around 200 tons of cargo.
It has been described as one of the largest collections of pre-Civil War artifacts ever recovered from a single site in the United States.
And they had a choice to make about what to do with it.
They had borrowed close to a million dollars.
The cargo was worth a great deal of money.
Collectors of antiques and Americana would have paid enormous sums for it piece by piece.
They could have sold it, paid off their debts, and made fortunes.
Many people expected them to.
They did not sell it.
They decided to keep it together, all of it.
To preserve it and to put it on display so that the public could see the cargo of a steamboat that had been on its way to the frontier in 1856 exactly as it had been packed in one place, which meant they would need to build a museum.
The Arabia Steamboat Museum opened in Kansas City, Missouri on the 13th of November, 1991, 3 years to the day after the first bulldozer went into Norman Sortor’s field.
It stands in the city’s old river market district near the Missouri River, close to where the city’s old steamboat landings once lined the riverfront.
Inside, the Harleys built a full-size reconstruction of the Arabia’s main deck, 171 ft long, and set her real boilers and her real engine and her anchor on it.
Beside them, they built a working replica of one of her great paddle wheels, 28 ft across, turning.
They displayed the 6-ton section of her stern with its draft marks and its traces of white paint.
>> >> And the snag, the tree that sank her.
And they displayed the mule.
Then they filled the rest of the museum with the cargo, row after row of glass cases, shoes and boots by the thousand, hats, coats, axe heads, pocket knives, China and glassware, buttons and beads in glittering heaps, the jars of pickles, the little bottles of French perfume, the children’s doll, a frontier general store, a whole fleet of frontier general stores on display exactly as they had been shipped.
Visitors walking through it are seeing something that no one in 1856 ever saw, the whole of the Arabia’s cargo unpacked >> >> all at once.
And they built a preservation laboratory right there in the museum where visitors can watch through the windows as staff work on the artifacts that are still being cleaned and treated.
Because the work has never stopped.
Preserving the Arabia’s cargo turned out to be an enormous task.
Every single item had to be cleaned of a century and more of river mud by hand and then treated according to what it was made of so that it would not crumble or warp or rust now that it was out of the ground.
Wood and leather were soaked for long periods in a special preservative solution called polyethylene glycol, which replaces the water in the material and keeps its shape, and then freeze-dried.
Corrosion was removed from metal by hand with fine tools and special erasers, a fraction of an inch at a time.
Jars and bottles of food were treated with nitrogen to keep the contents from spoiling now that they had been brought up.
Shoes and boots and clothes had to be taken apart and sewn back together again because the cotton thread they were originally stitched with, like all the cotton in the cargo, had dissolved away in the river mud.
By the museum’s own account, a single small nail can take more than an hour to restore.
A pair of boots can take up to 3 months.
And there were tons of cargo.
The museum originally expected to finish preserving the whole collection by around 2022.
It did not.
The work has gone on year after year, crate after crate, and the museum has said that it will take years more.
More than three decades after the dig, people in that laboratory are still opening boxes that were packed in a warehouse in the East in the summer of 1856 and seeing what is inside them for the first time.
>> >> The Arabia has traveled, too.
In 2014, around 2,000 objects from her cargo were lent to the John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh for an exhibition near the stretch of the Monongahela River where the Arabia had been built in 1853, 160 years before.
Her cargo went home to the place she started from.
And the Hawleys did not stop looking.
The Missouri River had swallowed hundreds of steamboats, and many of them were still somewhere under the farmland of the valley.
In 2013, the museum opened an exhibit built around the engine of the Missouri Packet, a steamboat that had sunk in the Missouri in 1820, one of the very first ever lost on that river.
And in the years after, David Hawley spent long days walking farm fields in central Missouri with a magnetometer, as the family had done in Kansas in 1987, searching for another lost boat, the Malta, buried somewhere under the fields near a place still called Malta Bend.
Most of the boats the river took will never be found.
Their timbers have rotted or been broken up or lie too deep or under towns and highways or in places no one has thought to look.
But some of them are still down there, sealed in the mud, in the dark, in the cool, steady, airless ground of the old river channels, waiting, the way the Arabia waited.
There is one more piece of this story and it is still being written.
>> [clears throat] >> In recent reports, the Arabia Steamboat Museum announced that it planned to close its Kansas City location in November of 2026 after 35 years and proposals were made to move the collection to a new home elsewhere in Missouri.
If that happens, the Arabia’s cargo will make one more journey, one more trip after all these years with everything in it still packed and accounted for, which is more than she managed in 1856.
So, step back and look at the whole of it.
A wooden steamboat, 171 ft long, built on the Monongahela in 1853, working the most dangerous river in America through the most violent year of the war for Kansas, searched by armed men for rifles in March, damaged and repaired and sent back out, steaming up the Missouri on the 5th of September, 1856, with 130 people and 200 tons of frontier goods aboard until a tree that no one could see came up through her hull at Quindaro Bend.
Everyone lived.
The mule did not.
And the river took her overnight and buried her.
Then the river left.
It wandered away across its valley, half a mile, the way it always had.
The old channel filled and dried and became land, >> >> Wyandot land, and then Sauk and Fox land.
The salvagers came and went.
The whiskey hunters sank their caisson and gave up.
The family who farmed the field kept the story and lost the place.
And for more than a hundred years the corn grew over her every summer, while the mud kept her cargo in the dark.
Until a family of refrigeration men from Independence, Missouri, with old maps and a magnetometer and a borrowed million dollars went looking and found her.
And spent a freezing winter at the bottom of a 45-foot pit in the middle of the cornfield, pumping 20,000 gallons of water a minute out of the ground to hold the river back, and racing the spring.
And then, when they had her cargo out and could have sold it, chose instead to keep it together and show it to everyone.
There is no mystery in this story, no curse, no hidden hand, no secret that someone wanted buried.
It is something rarer than that.
It is a true story in which almost everything that could have been lost was saved.
The passengers, the cargo, the boat herself in pieces, even the mule.
And it tells us something that the history books mostly cannot.
What life on the American frontier was actually made of.
Not the battles and the speeches and the treaties, though they were happening all around the Arabia every mile of that river in 1856.
The other things, the ordinary things.
4,000 shoes, 200 ax heads, tens of thousands of buttons, 29 jars of pickles, one child’s doll.
The things that real people bought to build real lives in a raw new country at a time when the country itself was beginning to tear apart over the question of whether people could be owned.
Those things almost never survive.
People use them up.
They wear out the shoes and lose the buttons and break the dishes and eat the pickles.
That is what those things were made for.
And so history, most of the time, forgets them.
But in the autumn of 1856, a river took a whole boatload of them all at once and sealed them away in the dark where nothing could use them up.
>> >> And 132 years later, it gave them back.
The Missouri is a quieter river now.
It runs in its channel, held in place by stone and pilings, and the snags that killed so many boats are cleared away.
The steamboats are gone.
Barges and pleasure boats run on it now, past Kansas City, past Parkville, past the long bend where the rivermen used to watch the water for the faint ripple that meant a tree just below the surface.
And half a mile from the river, on the Kansas side, in Wyandotte County, there is a field.
In the summer, crops grow on it.
Nothing marks the place where the pit was dug or where the boat lay for 132 years.
Somewhere below the surface, deep in the old channel, under the water table, lie the last timbers of her hull, put back into the dark when the pumps were switched off in February of 1989.
And all up and down that valley, under other fields, under other farms, in other old channels of the river that never stays in one place, there are other boats, hundreds of them, the river historians say, lost in the steamboat years.
Most of them gone for good, but some, perhaps, still sealed in the mud, still loaded, still waiting for someone with an old map and a magnetometer and the patience to walk a cornfield in the cold back and forth until the needle moves.
Sleep well.
