In the small hours of April 27, 1865, the side-wheel steamboat Sultana was laboring up a flooded Mississippi River about seven miles above Memphis, near a cluster of islands called the Hen and Chickens, jammed with somewhere near 2,100 people — the great majority of them gaunt Union soldiers just released from the Confederate prison camps at Andersonville and Cahaba, going home at last. The boat had been built to carry 376 passengers and a crew of 85. It was carrying more than five times that. At roughly two o’clock in the morning, three of her four boilers exploded with a roar heard for miles, blowing the center of the vessel apart, scalding men in their sleep, and turning the splintered superstructure into a torch.
The explosion and the fire and the cold spring river together killed an estimated 1,100 to 1,200 people — the most recent careful tally puts the dead at about 1,168, though official counts of the era ranged higher. It remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history, with a death toll greater than the Titanic’s. And yet almost no one remembers it. The country was reeling: Robert E. Lee had surrendered eighteen days before, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated on April 14, and John Wilkes Booth had been cornered and killed only the day before the Sultana burned. The news of a thousand homecoming soldiers drowned in the Mississippi was swallowed whole by larger headlines.
The horror was compounded by its cause, which was not bad luck but human greed and negligence. The men aboard had been loaded in their hundreds because the steamboat’s officers stood to collect a government bounty for every prisoner ferried north — and a corrupt army quartermaster at Vicksburg helped funnel a crushing, profitable load onto one vessel. The fatal boiler had been patched, not repaired, days earlier so the boat would not lose time. A river running high with spring melt made the overloaded, top-heavy steamer roll from side to side, sloshing water away from hot boiler plates until they failed.
This entry follows the survivors — the men who came through the blast and then faced the river itself. Roughly 700 to 800 of those aboard lived, many of them already weakened by months of starvation in prison, now thrown into a black, frigid, flood-swollen current in the middle of the night. What saved them was a mix of luck, debris to cling to, the warmth of bodies pressed together, and the boats and people of Memphis who came out into the dark to pull them from the water.
In September 1870, a small party of Montana citizens and soldiers — the Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition — pushed into the strange, unmapped country of geysers and hot springs at the head of the Yellowstone River, the wilderness that would become the world’s first national park. Among them was Truman C. Everts, a fifty-four-year-old former federal tax assessor, badly nearsighted and the least woodsman-like member of the group. On about September 9, riding through dense lodgepole timber near the southern arm of Yellowstone Lake, Everts fell behind, became separated from the others, and lost track of the trail. Within a day he had also lost his horse — and with it his blankets, his gun, his matches, and nearly everything he needed to live.
What followed was thirty-seven days alone in the high wilderness as autumn turned to early winter. Everts was left with little more than the clothes he wore, a small knife, and a pocket opera glass — and the wits to use them. He survived mainly on the boiled roots of a thistle that would later be named for him — Everts’ thistle — and he kept from freezing by sleeping beside the hot springs and thermal vents that riddle the country, scalding himself badly when the thin crust gave way and burning his hip while he slept. He lost his glasses, half-blinding himself; he was stalked by a mountain lion; he was caught in snow; and as starvation and exposure wore him down he began to hallucinate, conversing with an imaginary companion.
The expedition searched for days, firing guns and building signal fires, then reluctantly gave him up for dead and rode out for the settlements. A reward was offered, and two frontiersmen — Jack Baronett, known as ‘Yellowstone Jack,’ and George Pritchett — kept looking. On October 16, more than thirty-seven days after he had gone missing, they found Everts over fifty miles from where he had been lost, crawling on his hands and knees, delirious, frostbitten and burned, and so wasted by hunger that accounts put his weight at around fifty pounds — a living skeleton whom they at first took for a wounded animal.
Everts recovered, and in 1871 he published his own account of the ordeal, ‘Thirty-Seven Days of Peril,’ in Scribner’s Monthly. It became one of the most widely read survival narratives of its day and helped fix the wonders of the Yellowstone country in the public imagination at exactly the moment Congress was being persuaded to protect it. In 1872 Yellowstone became the first national park; a mountain near Mammoth Hot Springs carries Everts’ name to this day.
In the spring of 1869, a one-armed Civil War major named John Wesley Powell launched ten men in four wooden boats onto the Green River in Wyoming Territory, bound for the last great blank space on the map of the United States. Below the confluence of the Green and the Colorado lay a thousand miles of unrun river and, at the bottom, the deepest canyon on the continent — what Powell himself would call the “Great Unknown.” No one knew whether the river was passable at all, or whether it dropped somewhere into unrunnable falls that would kill them.
Over roughly three months the expedition was ground down by the river. They lost a boat — the No Name — and a third of their provisions in a violent rapid on the Green, and the food that survived rotted and spoiled until the men were near starvation on rancid flour and dried apples. One man quit early and walked out. Then, deep in the Grand Canyon and only days from the end, with rations almost gone and one last fearsome rapid ahead, the party fractured. Three men — the brothers Oramel and Seneca Howland and William Dunn — decided they would sooner climb out of the canyon on foot than run the next rapid. They left at a spot Powell named Separation Canyon.
The six who stayed ran the rapid, and within two days reached the mouth of the Virgin River, where Mormon settlers were watching the water for their bodies. They had survived. The three who climbed out did not. They were killed on the high plateau north of the canyon, in country that is the homeland of the Southern Paiute. By one widely repeated account they were killed by Shivwits Paiutes who mistook them for other men; that attribution has been disputed for over a century, with some historians arguing they may instead have been killed by Mormon settlers. Their true fate remains genuinely uncertain.
The river ran through the homelands of many nations — the Ute of the upper Green, the Hopi, the Diné (Navajo), the Hualapai, the Havasupai, and the Southern Paiute of the canyon country — peoples who had lived along and within these canyons long before Powell declared them “unknown.” His expedition mapped the river and made him a national figure, but the phrase “Great Unknown” was always only true from the deck of a white explorer’s boat.