Treasure on the Missouri
In 1854, a steamboat hits a snag on the treacherous Missouri River. In 1989, a farmer and a treasure hunter encounter something hidden beneath the soil.
They say the silty water of the Missouri River is too thick to drink and too thin to plow. But it’s perfect for hiding dead trees, trunks poking up like spears, lying in wait just below the water’s surface.
First came the crack of splintering wood, then a lurch that flung me against the railing of the upper deck. The Charlotte listed into the river as brown water filled the hull.
Poppy’s chubby little fingers tugged at my collar. With my free hand, I held my husband’s old beret to my head. My Jim, who’d tossed the hat on at a jaunty angle as he strode out the door, who’d pushed it onto my hair and kissed my cheek. Who’d laughed when it had fallen over little Poppy’s eyes. That old beret, worn and faded. Besides Poppy, it was all I had left of him.
I looked for a crewman, a rowboat, anything. Women and children scurried from the ladies’ cabin. Nearly every passenger was a woman or child. The families of homesteaders, coming to meet their husbands, to make a new home. And me, a widow at nineteen, going to an uncle who had need of an extra pair of hands. I had thought Kansas, a farm, would be a new start for us, a new life.
Not this.
A panicked braying on the lower deck rose above the passengers’ shrieks. The mule, a family’s noisy cargo, tied to a post.
I darted for the staircase, but a crewman beat me to it and pounded down the stairs.
He would free the trapped animal. He had rushed down the steps, so eager.
In moments, water swallowed the lower deck.
Passengers clustered on the balcony in a frenzy – where’s a rowboat, where is the crew?
Too soon, too quickly, water licked at the floorboards of the upper deck, and my eyes caught movement on the river.
The crew, loaded tight as pickled preserves, rowed toward shore in our only lifeboat.
“They’re running away from the boiler,” a woman shrieked. “If it explodes, it’ll kill us all!”
In a gush, the river rose above the floor of the upper deck, filling our shoes with cold, brown water.
It was only then that I realized the mule had gone silent.
December 11th, 1989
“Everybody thinks they know where the Charlotte sank,” Harvey Harp said with his country slowness. “But no one knows exactly where the riverbed was back then.”
Jeremy Orkatz stuck his metal detector in the crook of his elbow and removed one of his headphones. “That so?”
Harp nodded. “Did I mention my great-great-grandmother was on the Charlotte? We still have her diary. This farm’s been in my family for generations, since before that steamboat sank.”
Putting his headphones back on, Orkatz held his metal detector close to the chilly ground and continued pacing the fallow soybean field.
Harp shook his head and leaned against a fencepost to watch for a while. The stringbean man in his fresh new boots didn’t care about the history, about the soil and the river, how its course shifted over generations. For all his scientific talk, this Orkatz was just another treasure hunter. Another city boy wasting his time, trudging through cold, hard fields for days on end.
In the middle of the field, Orkatz stopped. He doubled back.
As he came nearer, Harp could hear faint, high-pitched beeping through Orkatz’s headphones.
“There’s something down there,” Orkatz said. In spite of himself, Harp couldn’t suppress the sudden, boyish leap in his stomach. “Something big.”
“We hit bottom!”
The sinking slowed, but it didn’t stop. The silty riverbed sucked like hungry quicksand at the boat’s underbelly.
The shore wasn’t far. A quarter-mile at most, and I was a strong swimmer. I could swim it with Poppy if I took off my heavy petticoats. But around me were mothers and babies, dozens of children. How many of them could do the same?
All around us were plains and wilderness, miles of tangled trees cloaking the riverbed. But just upriver was flat, tamed land - a lone farm.
From far off in the isolated clearing, a figure rushed toward the river, leaving two head of oxen yoked in the field.
There was shouting from the land as the farmer reached the crewmen, who stood watching the boat sink further into the river bottom. He tried to wrest an oar from one of them, while another crewman shoved him backward.
Then, begrudgingly, two crewmen pushed the lifeboat off the shore.
They must have decided the boilers were too waterlogged to explode.
By the time it was our turn in the rowboat, the cold, murky water splashed at my knees. I held Poppy higher above the coursing brown river.
The last women and children squeezed into the boat, leaving five male passengers for the final load.
The rowboat struggled against the current. From the Charlotte came panicked shouts, and I turned to see part of the balustrade swept away by the river. Several men leapt overboard, splashing toward the rowboat.
“Hold onto the side,” a gruff crewman called. “We’ll pull you.”
One man, white-faced and gasping, scrambled over the side of the rowboat. Water sloshed into the boat, and a child screamed.
“We can’t fit more inside!” A crewman lunged across the boat to push the man out, and the rowboat lurched in the current.
The boat tipped.
Cold water closed over my head and filled my mouth. Limbs kicked and flailed, bashing my head and body. I pushed away from the frenzy, clutching Poppy.
I surfaced amid shrieks and shouts as the crewmen tried to right the rowboat.
Poppy coughed out a mouthful of water and looked at me, indignant. Rolling to my back, I held her to my chest and kicked toward shore.
A chill wind brushed my head. The beret was gone.
Jim.
Jim, if you can hear me, get us out.
My soaked skirt pulled me down, but I hadn’t time to take it off. The current would sweep us away if I stopped moving.
Nearly there. A dozen yards more. My lungs and legs burned, and water splashed in my face.
Someone grabbed my shoulder.
The young farmer, his wet hair sticking to his forehead.
He pulled Poppy from my arms. “Almost there.”
I swam behind him, kicking against the fabric dragging me down.
Then, finally, my lungs burning, my feet touched land.
As I scrambled behind him onto the shore, mud filled my shoes, and I could have cried with joy. Clusters of dripping passengers stood watching, wide-eyed, while the surly crewmen, still dry, looked at the dirt beneath their feet.
I took Poppy in my arms, and the farmer splashed back into the water, toward the people still struggling to right the rowboat.
Children too young to swim, mothers weighed down by their clothes.
I kissed Poppy, hugging her tight and pressing her chubby, wet cheek against mine.
Then I handed her to a shivering woman on the shore. “Her name is Poppy.”
The woman gasped when I undid my belt and let my sopping petticoats fall to the ground, leaving only my chemise and pantalets.
I ran back toward the river.
October 14th, 1990
The bones of the Charlotte poked up like a whale carcass from the crater in Harp’s field.
“My great-great-grandma wrote about a beret she lost,” Harp said, looking over the treasure hunter’s shoulder.
Crouched in the Charlotte’s wooden skeleton, Orkatz dug through the day’s muddy findings, cataloguing them for cleaning and preservation. He didn’t look up at the slow-talking farmer. “Textiles wouldn’t survive these conditions.”
“What’s the plan for all this?”
“Original plan was to sell it,” Orkatz said. “But with this haul, I could build a museum. Fifteen bucks a head, hundreds of visitors a week.”
“My great-great grandma, she wrote all about that day in her diary. It’s how she met my great-great-grandpa.” Harp bent down and with his thumb wiped at the silty mud covering one of the crates.
“Don’t touch that,” Orkatz said. “It’s full of china plates. Very delicate.”
“They seem to have survived just fine for the past century and a half.” Harp straightened up, surveying the massive, boggy hole that once had been his field, and the yellow excavator still working to remove shovelfuls of dirt. “You really think folks would come to a museum for an old, sunken steamboat?”
“The best museums have stories,” Orkatz said. “That’s why this is a gold mine, in more ways than one. This wreck’s gotta be chock full of stories. Adventure stories, love stories.” Orkatz paused, a glint coming into his eye. He turned to Harp. “You said there’s a diary?”
“Hm. Did I?”
“You still have it? Is it still in the family?”
Harp slid his hands into his pockets. It was packed away in a box inside an old cedar chest in the attic. “Well, I’d have to take a look and see.”
My skirt was gritty when I pulled it back over my soaked underclothes.
All passengers accounted for.
All except for the poor, drowned mule.
I hugged Poppy close, and breathed in the scent of her hair, now fishy from the river water.
Wind gusted, and by instinct I reached up to catch the beret that wasn’t there.
Jim.
My limbs grew heavy, and I bit my tongue to keep back tears.
I didn’t realize the farmer was standing beside me until he cleared his throat.
“You’re quite a swimmer.” He was drenched, his face suddenly red. He held out his hand. “Desmond Harp.”
I shook his calloused hand, and, for the first time since I’d watched the light go out of my Jim’s eyes, the heaviness lightened, just a little.
“Probably not the greeting you were expecting,” the farmer said, eyeing the top of the Charlotte, quickly disappearing beneath the Missouri River as the silty soil and rushing current sucked it down. He looked back at me, and his smile was bashful. “But welcome to Kansas.”
…
The End
…
This story was inspired by a stop along a cross-country road trip I took with my family when I was thirteen. In the midst of a sweltering Midwest summer, we stopped at the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and spent hours learning about all the treasures that researchers uncovered when they found and excavated the nearly 150-year-old wreck of the Arabia.
It was a fascinating story, and, miraculously (though it’s still very sad!), the only casualty of the sinking was a poor forgotten mule on the lower deck.
While researching steamboat wrecks for this story, I came across another sunken steamboat (not the Arabia) in which the crew did exactly what they did in this story - take the only rowboat the second the boat started sinking, leaving the passengers to die if the boiler exploded! Way to be the absolute worst, guys. When it eventually became clear that the boilers were too wet to explode, the crew came back for the passengers.
Have you ever visited the Arabia Steamboat Museum, or do you, like me, have a morbid fascination with shipwrecks? What are your favorite historical calamities to research? Let me know in the comments!
If you're the naptime novelist, I'm the naptime reader! This had me absolutely riveted while waiting for my little guy to wake up.
This was such a good read that I want more!!! I love the two POVs in two time periods. The ship sinking was so tense. Thanks for including the historical basis for the story, too, that was super interesting.