
How a Champagne-Laden Steamship Ended Up in a Kansas Cornfield - benbreen
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-champagneladen-steamship-ended-up-in-a-kansas-cornfield
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jbuzbee
If you're in Kansas City, the wreck museum is a great place to visit. The
amount of goods retrieved from the wreck of the Great White Arabia is just
astounding and serves as a window into the trading goods of the early American
frontier. It's a true time-capsule of the 1850's.

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X86BSD
Seconded! The Arabia museum is incredibly fascinating and interesting to
anyone remotely interested in learning, or history. It's an incredibly rare
and accurate view into the world at that time. Really fascinating. The wife
and I have been there several times.

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metasean
Previous post and discussion about the same ship -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11006254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11006254)

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cjrp
> The plan was to bring the banks closer together, and by narrowing the width
> of the river, speed up the current, making boat passage much faster.

Probably a stupid question, but what about the people who want to travel
upstream?

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GunboatDiplomat
I imagine that a narrower river would be deeper and with a better channel,
removing or at least lessening the danger of snags such as the one that sank
the Arabia.

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cjrp
But if the split of upstream/downstream traffic was roughly 50:50, the time
you gained going downstream you'd cancel out on the return journey.

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pash
The excavation of the _Malta_ near the Missouri River east of Kansas City
started this spring. The exploration group has a blog [0], but it hasn't been
updated since March. A newspaper article from April has more details [1].

The _Arabia_ museum really is surprisingly interesting, serving not just as a
time-capsule of the frontier period, but also revealing a lot about what it
was like to embark on a westward journey across the continent before the
railroads were completed.

(The two most-traveled trails of settlement, the Oregon and California trails,
as well as the busiest overland mercantile route, the Santa Fe trail, all
began in and around Kansas City, where the Missouri River turns to the north,
and is consequently as far west as you could get by steamboat. Passengers and
goods disembarked there before provisioning wagon trains for the overland
journey, and most of the _Arabia_ 's goods were intended for sale to would-be
settlers of the American west coast.)

If you're ever in KC, check it out. And if you haven't had your fill of
history museums, hop on the streetcar line down to the Liberty Memorial and
National World War I Museum [3], which is the best in the country on that
subject and will host the national centennial commemorations over the next few
years.

0\. [http://www.moexplorer.com](http://www.moexplorer.com)

1\. [http://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/the-
steamboat-m...](http://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/the-steamboat-
malta-begins-to-reveal-its--year-
old/article_944f0f22-0a67-11e6-a11a-0f6a83c724b9.html)

3\. [https://www.theworldwar.org](https://www.theworldwar.org)

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sandworm101
One has to wonder whether the diversion of this river is the origin of a scifi
trope. Ships being found far from any water is today a common image to suggest
that someone/thing has lifted and moved the ship. But just after the diversion
of this river, many wrecks would have been left high and dry in the middle of
fields, an odd sight.

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mturmon
I toured the _Arabia_ museum last month. According to a map there, there were
about 249 such steamship wrecks between St Louis and just upstream of Kansas
City. The average steamship lasted just 5 years in service.

There were a lot of wrecks.

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keithpeter
So the boat sinks, and settles on the muddy bottom. Then the engineers narrow
the width of the river so that the bottom is no longer in the river. How did
the land level rise to bury the boat? Can't quite picture that.

 _Excellent_ occupational niche by the way!

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qbrass
The water flowing around the ship's hull washes the sediment out from around
the bottom of it, and the ship continues to sink down into the pit that
creates. Eventually the ship sinks far enough that it quits impeding the
river, and the silt carried from upstream fills the hole back in.

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keithpeter
Thanks - so the boat is actually buried _before_ the change in river route,
and it was the change in route that made the boat more accessible (and dry).
I've got it now.

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mentos
Here's a walk through of the museum on youtube
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3W7L2vS0kY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3W7L2vS0kY)

I wonder if you could make a worthwhile VR experience out of this museum

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blastrat
make it a "shopping trip" to an old store, virtual time travel :)

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michaelbuddy
visited the museum a few years ago. We watched a film and when it was over,
the father archeologist who discovered the steamboat and unearthed it was
there to greet us. Really amazing museum. Behind a few booths you can watch
them still cleaning and documenting items found in the wreckage decades later.

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dsfyu404ed
I was hoping for a story about a tornado accompanied by Wizard of Oz puns.

An interesting story nonetheless.

