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I have tried very hard to dig out the final chapter of the Yellowstone, but with no success. She was heard of passing through the locks on the Ohio River in 1838. From there she was most likely sold and her name changed, and she may have ended up a derelict tied to a tree along the riverbank, her incredible history ignored and forgotten.
But there was one steamboat whose history no fiction writer could have matched. The saga of the New Orleans’s voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers past the rapids and through the New Madrid earthquake, her escape from hostile Indians, the baby born on board, the comet that streaked above her, all seemed too unbelievable to be true. Yet it was chronicled and her final end described in detail.
During the summer of 1986, unable to resist hunting for such a fabulous boat (any vessel that sails the inland waterways is always called a boat, never a ship), I began researching into a newspaper account of her loss. A passenger on board the morning she hung up on a snag and sank reported the event for a local newspaper. What is most important is that he mentioned almost the exact spot where she came to grief:
Clay’s Landing on the west bank of the Mississippi, a short distance above Baton Rouge.
With optimism beating in my heart — my brain too used to failure to be confident — I launched a search for Clay’s Landing.
That proved to be tougher than it sounded.
In the meantime, I came across a delightful book by Mary Helen Samoset titled New Orleans. I quickly began correspondence with Mrs. Samoset and found her to be a wealth of information about the vessel.
I learned that the owners of the boat salvaged her engines and most of her hardware. Engines were expensive and complicated pieces of machinery for their time. Boilers, however, were seldom salvaged, since prolonged use generally wore them beyond the value of the costly repairs that were usually needed. Any piece of equipment, such as an anchor, a steering mechanism, a helm, or hardware, was removed. These were placed in a new vessel, also called New Orleans.
This removal of equipment would not leave much for our magnetometer to detect, but we thought there still might be enough iron to detect, and there was always hope that part of the hull might still be visible above the mud and could be picked up on our sidescan sonar.
I began to wonder why no one had ever looked for such a historic ship before.
Fortunately, I was contacted by Keith Sliman, who at the time worked for Seven Seas Dive Shop in Baton Rouge. Keith generously volunteered his time to probe the real-estate records in the Louisiana state capital in Baton Rouge and find the missing part of the puzzle. It wasn’t easy. Though ownership of the shore on both sides of the river was reasonably well documented, most records didn’t go back to 1814. Until now, no one had found a document recording Clay’s Landing. At first it looked as though that part of the west riverbank had been owned by a Dr. Doussan and was now called Anchorage Landing. This item of information did not look encouraging until Keith dug up a deed of transfer of the property from John Clay to Dr. Doussan, which included an 1820 plat map of the site.
Thanks to Keith, we thought we were rounding third and heading for home. Craig Dirgo and I flew down to Louisiana to examine the shoreline and try to get an exact fix on Clay’s Landing. Baton Rouge, though a fine capital city, is like the surface of Mars, thanks to the humidity in August. Why is it every time I head south it’s August? I never seem to get it through my head to go in the spring, before the bugs and heat are bad.
I am often asked how NUMA schedules shipwreck searches. We use a scientific formula that consists of who is available to go, when necessary permits are in hand, and what the tide and weather conditions are. The main factor, however, centers around whether I have the time to go between writing books.
After landing at the Baton Rouge airport, renting a car, and checking into our motel, we drove to the site above West Baton Rouge across from the state capital on the west side of the Mississippi.
It was not an auspicious begi
On what was once the site of Clay’s Landing, where the famed New Orleans had snagged and sank, was a huge tank facility owned by the Placid Oil Company. On one side of the levee stood the tanks and pumping houses. On the other side, along the bank and out into the water, were the oil-loading platforms, pipelines, and tank barges, all built of steel. With more metal scattered about than what is found in a hundred-acre scrap yard, distinguishing what remained of New Orleans with our trusty Schoenstedt gradiometer would be next to impossible.
Though we hadn’t pla
That afternoon and most of the next day, we walked a systematic grid across the property we defined as having been Clay’s Landing. Other than a few buried pipelines, which are fairly easy to identify because of the narrow readings that stretch in a straight line, we found little of interest. By inspecting the ground in minute detail, we got a pretty good idea of the scope of our task in locating any remains of the steamboat.
Since Sheriff Bergeron and his West Baton Rouge sheriff’s department had been so generous with their assistance back in 1981, when Walt Schob and I found the site of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas, we asked for their help once again. And they came through again, lending us their aluminum river search boat, which had been beautifully crafted and welded by a trustee who was in jail for murder. A deputy came along as pilot.
We began soon after sunrise. Once Clay’s Landing was established from the riverside, we began sweeping back and forth. By nine that morning, it was already hot. The Mississippi was as flat as a mirror, and the only wind we enjoyed came from the movement of the boat. For the next few hours we swept, begi
While I ran the gradiometer, Craig killed time perusing the boat’s logbook. It made interesting reading, since the little craft was primarily used for retrieving bodies from the river. There wasn’t any finesse to it. A large grappling hook on a line was tossed from the stem, and the deputies trolled until they snagged something.
“How do you know if you have a body or a big fish on the line?” Craig asked the deputy.
“A waterlogged body creates a lot of drag,” the deputy replied. “It slows down the outboard motor real good.”
Craig held the stainless-steel hook in his hands and examined it. “What do most of the bodies look like when you find them?”
“They can be real ripe,” the deputy answered casually. “The skin can slide off like a tangerine.”
Craig’s face wrinkled as he quickly replaced the hook in its holder and wiped his hands with a rag.
“Sometimes they’re gassy and explode like a flesh bomb when they reach the surface,” the deputy continued matter-of-factly. “But mostly they’ve been chewed up by fish and turtles. Sometimes boats go over them, outboard props ripping them up. Once I just hooked a head and part of the shoulders and chest. I ain’t got no idea where the rest of the body went.”
Craig stared at the grappling hook he’d been handling.
I couldn’t resist.
“Lunchtime,” I a
Craig shook his head. “Maybe later,” he said, finally taking his eyes off the hook.
It was four o’clock when we called it quits. We could not mag close to shore because the steel barges blew the gradiometer off scale. We had gotten no magnetic signature that indicated we had found New Orleans. On top of that, we had run out of water two hours earlier.