Drought unveils 100-year-old Missouri River steamer

The North Alabama steamer sunk on the Missouri River near Goat Island in 1870, between Nebraska and South Dakota, between Nebraska and South Dakota. This summer, however, due to a drought that started in the autumn of previous year, the river exposed the sunken ships.

Dugan C. Smith, a park ranger with the Missouri National Recreational River in South Dakota, said, “The Missouri claimed a large number of steamboats during that century, but this is one of the few that is still there and has not been removed.”

Smith said that there are no intentions to disrupt what is there, since it will likely decay.

The sun-bleached timbers provide a tantalizing view of the kind of ship that helped to unlock the West. The North Alabama contributed to commerce along the Missouri.

Smith said that the hamlet of Yankton was founded primarily because it was a prominent steamboat port at the time.

The boats would sail the river, transporting gold and precious metals from Montana all the way to St. Louis, as well as homesteader goods such as plows and horses.

“I depict it to pupils as a precursor to the interstates of today,” he added. “As much as they could, steamboats traveled up and down the river until it became too dry. But if it was a rainy year, they would continue transporting goods up and down.”

According to the Missouri River National Park, the 220-ton packet riverboat was transporting $12,000 worth of wheat and whiskey from Sioux City, Iowa, to Montana when it sank. The 170-foot hull returned for the first time in 1904, and has occasionally reappeared during periods of drought and low water, such as this summer.

It is not the only piece of history that dry weather have brought to the surface this year. Historic drought conditions in Europe have lowered the Po River in Italy to the point that a barge from World War II and a 1,000-pound WWII bomb are visible. On the Danube River, dozens of German ships from the same period have become apparent. And in Texas, a dry river in Dinosaur Valley State Park uncovered 110 million-year-old footprints of Acrocanthosaurus and Sauroposeidon.

Current News