THE SULTANA EXPLODES

4/27/1865 - As if the butcher's bill of blood and treasure required a last gruesome payment before the American Civil War could be declared over, a final tragedy takes place on the Mississippi River about seven miles north of Memphis, Tennessee (at a place on the river called Paddy's Hen and Chickens) when the worst maritime disaster in United States history occurs with the explosion of the side-wheel steamboat Sultana.

Disaster

Built of wood in 1863 at the John Litherbury Boatyard in Cincinnati, Ohio to ply the cotton trade on the lower Mississippi, Sultana is one of the biggest steamers on the river, registered at 1,719 tons, the vessel has a length of 260 feet, is 42 feet at her beam, contains four decks (including its pilothouse), and is powered by four large steam boilers that turn two paddlewheels 34 feet in diameter.   She is designed to have a passenger capacity of 376 and a crew of 85.  Carrying supplies, and frequently Union troops, for two years the vessel is a regular on the Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans.  Originally owned and operated by Captain Preston Lodwick, on its last voyage on the river the steamship is owned by a consortium of businessmen that includes its latest commander, 33-year-old Captain James Cass Mason of St. Louis (who is has growing debt problems brought on by his purchase of the steamship and conducting business during the war).

Mason

Sultana

The Sultana's last voyage begins on April 13, 1865 when she leaves St. Louis for New Orleans.  Tied up in Cairo, Illinois on April 15, word reaches the city that President Abraham Lincoln has been assassinated in Washington D.C. and when Mason sets off downriver, he is carrying large stacks of Cairo newspapers to pass on the grim news.  Reaching the town of Vicksburg (passage slowed by a leaky boiler), Mason makes a deal with the chief quartermaster of the town, Lt. Colonel Reuben Hatch (who gets a kickback ... a political hack, he has his job because his brother was a friend of Lincoln), to take a recently released batch of Union prisoners north for their returns home at the agreed government payout of $5 per enlisted man and $10 per officer (after they are mustered out of the army by assistant adjutant general for the Department of the Mississippi, Captain Frederic Speed) ... way above capacity, Hatch guarantees a rich haul of 1,400 former prisoners.  Arriving in New Orleans, the Sultana unloads the supplies for the Crescent City and then takes on transport for the return journey north which includes 100 surplus army mules, 120 tons of sugar, 100 hogs, and 100 civilian passengers (a lucky handful get off at Vicksburg).  Course reversed, the Sultana arrives back in Vicksburg on April 23 suffering now from its left hand boiler being cracked and bulging ... usually at least a three day job to repair, fearing he will lose his prisoner contract if his ship's journey is delayed, Mason (and his chief engineer, Nathan Wintringer) talks a local boilermaker repairmen, R. C. Taylor, into only doing a temporary patch job on the damaged boiler.  At the same time the patch is being worked on, trains start arriving in Vicksburg with the promised former prisoners ... but with several individuals making decisions on the deposition of the men (not to divide them on to several other vessels, keeping the men grouped by the states they came from, and bad counts are made) when the Sultana leaves the port on the 24th to speed the men back to their homes, the steamship is carrying over 2,000 men on board ... 1,960 ex-prisoners (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia veterans from the Cahaba camp near Selma, Alabama and the infamous Andersonville camp in southwest Georgia, many suffering from a variety of diseases and malnutrition), 22 guards from the 58th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, 70 paying passengers, and 85 crewmen packed into every available space, so many and so overcrowded that the vessel begins to creak and sag and has to have its decks supported by the addition of temporary heavy wooden beams.

Hatch

Cahaba

Andersonville

And the recipe for disaster is complete when the Sultana leaves Vicksburg on the 24th and immediately begins battling the Mississippi, the river in spring flood state and in some spots overflowing its banks for three miles.  A last photo before its doom, at the port of Helena, Arkansas, on April 26, photographer Thomas W. Bankes, takes an exposure of the vessel that documents it epic overcrowding (and almost causes its capsizing when its occupants rush to one side of the ship to be in the shot).  Memphis reached by 7:00 in the evening, the Sultana briefly offloads some supplies and then is headed north again shortly after midnight.  Back on the river, the vessel takes on a new load of coal from a group of barges on the river before heading for Cairo, Illinois.

The Last Shot 

More coal shoveled into the boilers to fight the steam, sometime around 2:00 in the evening, at a point where the river is about five miles wild, something goes horribly wrong below and one of Sultana's boilers blows up, followed a split-second later by two more boilers exploding.  The carnage and chaos are massive and mortal (the absolute cause will never be known ... some blame the faulty patch work, others call out the boilers being made of Charcoal Hammered No. 1, a metal which tends to crack and grow brittle when subjected to repeated heating and cooling, too much pressure built up fighting the current is also postulated, the water levels, caused by the overcrowding list of the vessel, are too low in the boilers, and there is a theory that Confederate agent Robert Lowden puts a bomb (disguised as an innocent piece of coal and called a "Courtney Torpedo" after its southern inventor) in one of the boilers.  Whatever sets off the explosion, the big boom sends a blast of killing steam upward at a 45-degree angle that goes through the upper decks and completely obliterates the pilothouse.  Captain Mason gone in a flash, the Sultana is spun 180 degrees, catches fire, and then begins to drift down the river as her twin smokestacks topple into the water ... the left-hand one into the boiler hole below it, the right-hand one on to the crowded forward section of the upper deck.  Only 76 life preservers aboard and two small life boats (hundreds killed in the initial explosion, the former soldiers of Kentucky and Tennessee that are positioned alongside the boilers are decimated), in seconds survivors have a choice of staying aboard the fire ravaged wreck, or jumping overboard to face potential drowning in the chilly flood waters of the Mississippi (the waters are full of men fighting for anything that floats ... in their weakened state from months in prison, many die of hypothermia).  The next morning, after a six mile drift, one of her paddlewheels gone, the Sultana goes to the bottom of the river ... with estimates of the death toll ranging from 1,800 to over 2,100 (by contrast, 1,500 perish when the Titanic goes under after its iceberg confrontation in the Atlantic), some bodies will never be found and others will not surface for months in places as far away as Vicksburg.

Too Many People

Explosion

Disaster

For the nine hundred or so souls that somehow survive the explosion, rescue comes in a variety of ways (it is a night none of them will ever forget ... and how could they when many afterwards start participating in an annual reunion of those that escaped death ... one southern in Nashville, Tennessee, one northern in Toledo, Ohio, when the last survivors eventually pass, the reunions continue with grandchildren and great grandchildren).  Boom heard and seen in Memphis and along the Mississippi's river banks, the southern town's citizens waste no time in beginning to pull people out of the water (as do the citizens of Mound City, Arkansas, now the town of Marion ... one man, John Fogelman will create a makeshift raft that plucks a handful of individuals out of the waters).  On its maiden voyage down the river, the Steamer Bostona (No. 2) comes on the scene at about 3:00 in the evening and starts taking survivors on board, and other vessels that also support the rescue efforts include the steamships Silver Spray, Jenny Lind, and Pocohontas, the navy ironclad USS Essex, and the gunboat USS Tyler.  Brought to local hospitals within the region, only 31 more deaths will occur between April 28 and June 28. 

Survivor Alonzo Vanvlack

Disaster

Big News

The Sultana

Surprisingly, especially based on the magnitude of the disaster, no one is ever held accountable for the tragedy (the last northern survivor, Private Jordan Barr of the 15th Michigan Volunteer Infantry dies in 1938 at the age of 93, and his counterpart, the last southern survivor, Private Charles M. Eldridge of the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry, passes away in 1941 at the age of 96).  Speed is found guilty of overcrowding the Sultana, but his conviction is overturned by the judge advocate of the army (based on Speed not witnessing the actual loading of the soldiers on to the Sultana).  The military chooses not to place charges against West Point graduate, Captain Williams, who actually places the paroled soldiers aboard the Sultana.  Captain Mason is already dead, and Hatch quits the military and becomes a civilian before he can be charged.  Ouch!

Tragedy

1890 Reunion

No one responsible, but not forgotten, memorials and monuments remembering the tragedy are erected in the towns of Memphis, Tennessee, Muncie, Indiana, Marion, Arkansas, Vicksburg, Mississippi, Cincinnati, Ohio, Knoxville, Tennessee, Hillsdale, Michigan, and Mansfield, Ohio.  Additionally, a temporary museum, the Sultana Disaster Museum is opened to the public in Marion, Arkansas in 2015 (while funds are being gathered for a more permanent location).  And in 1982, course of the Mississippi changed over the decades following the disaster (the river is two miles away from where it was in 1865), at an archaeological site established by Memphis attorney, Jerry O. Potter, about four miles from Memphis, blackened wreckage consisting of burnt deck planks and timbers is found 32 feet below an Arkansas soybean field.

Knoxville Memorial

Hillsdale Memorial

Museum Exhibit

Arkansas   

Sultana

A MASSACRE IN COLORADO

4/20/1914 - Not that long removed from the Wild West violence of the Sand Creek Massacre, the Meeker Incident, and the Bear Creek Massacre, eighteen miles northwest of the town of Trinidad, the state of Colorado adds another wart to the history of the country when management and labor in the coal industry clash in a tragedy that will come to be known as the Ludlow Massacre.

A Bad Day In Colorado

Ludlow

An abundance of accessible coal and the creation of rail lines to bring the product to market, the coal industry explodes in Colorado after the Civil War ... at its peak in 1910 it will give work to thousands and create 10% of the jobs in the state.  Consolidated into the hands of a few, the largest operator in the industry is Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I), a company controlling 71,837 acres of the state run by one of the wealthiest men in the country, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., from his high aerie at his New York City office on Broadway, over 2,000 miles away (a birthday present Senior gives Junior in 1909), with other powerful players in the region being the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, and Victor-American Fuel Company.  Dangerous work for the hands-on colliers, explosions, collapsing mines, and suffocation cause an industry that loses 3.15 men for every 1,000 employed, but the rate is even worse in Colorado where 10 men forfeit their lives for every 1,000 that toil in the mines while living in corporate towns where all real estate (shacks sometimes occupied by twenty people or more) and amenities are controlled by the coal companies (more than 1,700 miners will lose their lives in the state between 1884 and 1912).  Concerns over safety and pay ignored, without a political voice, the coal workers (an international work force composed of men of English and Scots-Irish descent, and workers from distant locales like Greece, Japan, and Serbia) increasingly turn to unions for the protection of their rights, and there are strikes in Colorado in 1884, 1894, and 1904.  Seeking shelter under the labor umbrella of the United Mine Workers of America (UMV), in 1913, Colorado's colliers ask for union representation in future collective bargaining, an adjustment down in the tonnage compensation rate for digging coal, enforcement of the state's eight-hour work day laws, payment for work that doesn't involve digging coal out of the mines, weight checkers to be chosen by the workers, mitigation of company town policies, and an end to the company guard system of workman intimidation.  Demands rejected, after a fiery speech during a local rainstorm by Irish-born schoolteacher and dressmaker turned union activist, Mary G. Harris Jones (Mother Jones to history, in her speech she will exclaim, "Rise up and strike!  If you are too cowardly, there are enough women in this country to come in a beat the hell out of you.  When we strike, we strike to win!" ... unhappy with her words, authorities put her in the Trinidad jail for twenty days), over 20,000 colliers strike on September 23, 1913.

Senior

Junior

Jones

Ludlow Strikers

Escalating towards tragedy, CF&I responds by evicting the strikers and their families from company owned housing (the workers will in turn create tent cities near the mines being struck, one of the largest is the Ludlow site near Trinidad of roughly 120 tents and 1,200 people), strike breakers are brought in, and "security" personnel are hired from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency (said to be comprised of "... Texas desperadoes and thugs" ... upon arrival in the area, many are immediately deputized as county sheriffs), that employ the unusual protective activity of driving about the camp in a specially made armored car from nearby Pueblo that sports a machine gun called the "Death Special").  And answering to the powers that provide his political funding as strike related violence escalates, Colorado Governor Elias Milton Ammons calls out the state's National Guard (led by General John Chase) to patrol the striking region (paid for from the deep pockets of Junior, the militia is at first welcomed by the strikers).  Catalyst for catastrophe, when strikebreaker Neil Smith is found murdered on March 8, 1914, near the striking colony of Forbes, Colorado, the National Guard turns its full attentions on the Ludlow colony, where the killer is presumed to be hiding and decides to go find the culprit (additionally, insults and spit are exchanged on April 19, 1914, between women of a union aligned baseball squad and members of the Guard, one of whom states, "Go ahead, have your good time today, and tomorrow we will get your roast.").

The "Death Special"

Ammons

Chase         

Death At Forbes

The powder keg finally explodes the day after the Ludlow colony celebrates the Easter Sunday of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  On Monday morning, three guardsmen come to the camp and demand the release of a man they say is being held by the strikers.  Interested in preserving the peace of the spring morning, the camp's leader, Louis Tikas agrees to meet on the issue with Major Patrick J. Hamrock at the nearby Ludlow railroad depot.  While there, to the jeers of the strikers and their families, guardsmen set up two machine gun positions overlooking the camp.  Weaponry too enticing not to use, in the exchange of lead that soon begins between the antagonists, both sides point the finger at the other for being the first to fire ... and in the chaos that ensues, no one will ever know now.  For the rest of the day the two sides fire on each other with some strikers fleeing into the nearby hills, while others hide in pits dug specifically to keep tent families from being targeted.  Leaderless after Tikas has a rifle butt broken over his head by Lt. Karl Linderfelt and is then murdered by being shot in the back three ties, when gunfire from the camp dies down as the colliers run out of ammo, the guardsmen leave their defensive positions to loot and torch the colony (a pumpman for the Colorado & Southern Railroad named M. G. Low will become a hero when he moves a train engine to block the rounds of one of the machine guns).  By 7:00 in the evening, the tent city is in flames and the carnage begins to be analyzed (the bullet back and forth lasts ten hours) ... on the company side of the ledger, Rockefeller loses three company guards and one guardsman, while the strikers take losses to the men, women, and children of Ludlow to the tune of between 21 and 55 deaths (with the press selling papers telling the tale of a camp infirmary cave in which two women and eleven children will suffocate to death, the youngest, Elvira Valdez is only three months old).

Tikas

Machine Gun Position

The National Guard

After

Carnage

The Death Pit

The Costa Family - Four, Including Both Parents, Will Die On 4/20/1914

Services For The Dead

Tikas Funeral Procession

Enraged at what has taken place, the next day the strikers rearm themselves and begin a guerilla campaign against the company towns and mines of Colorado's southern coal fields along a 221-mile front from the town of Trinidad to the town of Louisville which will become known as the Ten Day War ... ten days more of carnage in which there will be more deaths (the final count for the Colorado Coalfield War is somewhere in the neighborhood of 169), mines in the towns of  Berwind, Tabasco, and McNally are seized by the strikers, the coal mines of Aguilar and Walsenburg are completely destroyed, a band of roughly 1,000 Greeks, Italians, Slavs, and Mexican miners take the town of Forbes from a force of state militia, mine officials, and hired strikebreakers, and armed colliers take a victory parade over the streets of Trinidad.  Ten days that also finally gets the Federal government involved in the strike as Congress begins investigating the massacre and President Woodrow Wilson declares a state of emergency and sends in Federal troops to squelch the violence.  As if the war had never happened (it is estimated that the strike costs $18 million (converted to 2019 standards, a sum of $459,448,505, almost half a billion dollars), both sides disarm and face the consequences of their actions ... 400 miners are arrested and 332 are charged with murder, but only one, John Lawson is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, a sentence which the Colorado Supreme Court soon shoots down on the technicality that the state never declared martial law in their push to end the strike.  Opposite those judgments,  22 guardsmen, including 10 officers are court martialed (they will all be acquitted and Junior will crazily contend that no massacre at all took place and the guardsmen were merely protecting themselves from a superior force), with Major Hamrock found not guilty of murder, and Lt. Linderfelt receiving responsibility for the murder of Tikas in a killing the military court finds warranted.

Area Of The Conflict

Lawson

Hamrock

Linderfelt

Public sentiment on the side of the strikers after the massacre (the strike is officially called off on December 10, 1914), after Congress reports on the incident in 1915, the union is not recognized and many strikers are replaced and never work their jobs again, however, they are instrumental in promoting new child labor laws and seeing the institution of an eight-hour work day (and the CF&I does improve its colliers working conditions, improving safety standards and health requirements, while building recreational areas and paved roads through the area).  Over a hundred years in the past now, the massacre still serves as a rallying cry for labor ... the massacre site is now a ghost town owned by the UMW and is designated as a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009.  And lest it be forgotten despite numerous books, magazine articles, plays, operas, and movies on the subject, the incident forms the bones of the poetry for one of Woody Guthrie's rousing works of folk song protest, 1944's "The Ludlow Massacre:"

It was early springtime when the strike was on,
They drove us miners out of doors,
Out from the houses that the Company owned,
We moved into tents up at old Ludlow.

I was worried bad about my children,
Soldiers guarding the railroad bridge,
Every once in a while a bullet would fly,
Kick up gravel under my feet.

We were so afraid you would kill our children,
We dug us a cave that was seven foot deep,
Carried our young ones and pregnant women
Down inside the cave to sleep.

That very night your soldiers waited,
Until all us miners were asleep,
You snuck around our little tent town,
Soaked our tents with your kerosene.

You struck a match and in the blaze that started,
You pulled the triggers of your gatling guns,
I made a run for the children but the fire wall stopped me.
Thirteen children died from your guns.

I carried my blanket to a wire fence corner,
Watched the fire till the blaze died down,
I helped some people drag their belongings,
While your bullets killed us all around.

I never will forget the look on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.

We told the Colorado Governor to call the President,
Tell him to call off his National Guard,
But the National Guard belonged to the Governor,
So he didn't try so very hard.

Our women from Trinidad they hauled some potatoes,
Up to Walsenburg in a little cart,
They sold their potatoes and brought some guns back,
And they put a gun in every hand.

The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corners,
They did not know we had these guns,
And the Red-neck Miners mowed down these troopers,
You should have seen those poor boys run.

We took some cement and walled that cave up,
Where you killed these thirteen children inside,
I said, "God bless the Mine Workers' Union, "
And then I hung my head and cried. 

Headlines

Memorial

Tombstone

The Death Pit

Ghost Town