Sally M. Walker - Sinking the Sultana: A Civil War Story of Imprisonment, Greed, and a Doomed Journey Home

More than twenty-five hundred people are part of the Sultanas story. They include army and navy personnel, paroled prisoners of war, civilian passengers, steamboat crews, medical personnel, and the civilians of Memphis, Tennessee. All their stories are interesting, but to include everyone in this telling would require a book hundreds of pages long. Some individuals made decisions that affected thousands of lives. The following people tell various parts of this particular Sultana story.

OFFICERS IN THE UNITED STATES ARMY: DEPARTMENT OF MISSISSIPPI

Major General Napoleon Dana

Brigadier General Morgan Smith

Colonel Reuben Hatch

Captain George Williams

Captain Frederic Speed

Captain William Kerns

CREW ON THE SULTANA

James Cass Mason captain

George Kayton pilot

Henry Ingraham pilot

Nathan Wintringer chief engineer

Samuel Clemens second engineer

William Gambrel first clerk

William Rowberry first mate

CIVILIAN PASSENGERS ON THE SULTANA

The Annis family: Harvey (invalided out of the army), Ann, and their daughter Isabella

Seth Hardin Jr. and Hannah Hardin, his bride

Daniel McLeod, Eighteenth Illinois Infantry (invalided out of the army)

Nine members of the Spikes family, including Samuel, Elethia, Susan, and DeWitt

PAROLED UNION PRISONERS OF WAR

Simeon Chelf Sixth Kentucky Cavalry

Ben Davis Seventh Kentucky Cavalry

Michael Dougherty Thirteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry

J. Walter Elliott Tenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry and Forty-Fourth Regiment U.S. Colored Troops

John Clark Ely 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry

Stephen Gaston Ninth Indiana Volunteer Cavalry

Robert Hamilton Third Tennessee Cavalry

Nicholas Karns Eighteenth Ohio Infantry

Albert King 100th Ohio Infantry

Hugh Kinser Fiftieth Ohio Infantry

William Lugenbeal 135th Ohio Infantry

Jesse Martin Thirty-Fifth Indiana Infantry

Joseph Mayes Fortieth Indiana Infantry

William McFarland Forty-Second Indiana Infantry

James Payne 124th Indiana Infantry

Jacob Rush Third Ohio Cavalry

APRIL 27, 1865, 2:30 A.M.

The second time a crewman knocked on the door of her husbands quarters in the middle of the night, Frances Ackley knew something serious had happened. Less than half an hour earlier, her husband, Charles, the executive officer on the gunboat USS Tyler, had been summoned to the deck. Upon returning to their berth, he told Frances that a boat was burning on the Mississippi River but it was too far upriver for his men to render assistance.

News of a steamboat fire would not have surprised Frances. Coal fueled a steamboats furnaces, so fires were not unusual. Also, the effects of the recently ended Civil War still shook the United States. She knew that boats often caught fire during river battles. For the past three years, Charles had served in the United States Navy on gunboats that patrolled the Mississippi River and its tributaries, on guard against boats and soldiers belonging to the Confederacy. But that night on the Tyler, which was docked in Memphis, Tennessee, Frances hadnt heard any gunfire.

Frances rose from the berth and dressed. Leaving their baby soundly asleep, she joined her husband on the Tylers deck. A distant orange glow flickered against the cloudy sky. But it was the sounds nearby that distressed her. From all directions in the river, men screamed for help.

Just a few hours earlier, several officers from the Tyler had visited the steamboat Sultana while it was refueling at a coal barge near Memphis. More than two thousand Union soldiers, recently released from prisoner-of-war camps, crowded its decks. The Tylers men had offered the ill, half-starved soldiers words of encouragement and wished them a safe journey. Everyone on board the Tyler knew that only a boat heavily loaded with people could account for the number of men and women in the river.

Charles ordered the Tylers two cutters, or small boats, lowered to the water. Frances stepped toward the second cutter. Charles tried to stop her, but Frances, determined to help, pulled free and climbed aboard.

Francess boat floated toward a drift of wood. Men, sobbing with pain, clung to the dead branches. Standing in the bow, Frances reached out with a boat hook and snagged a mans shirt. She pulled him toward the cutter. As others lifted him on board, she reached for the next man. Dozens more floated past, out of reach. The Mississippi River had become a living nightmare. And it had only just begun.

THE CROOKEDEST RIVER

The name Mississippi comes from two words in the Ojibwe language, gichi and ziibi, which mean a big river. And the Mississippi River is big. During its 2,350-mile-long journey from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, the rivers and streams of two Canadian provinces and thirty-one states funnel into its channel. The author and riverboat pilot Samuel Langhorne Clemens (who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain) believed that the Mississippis looping meanders made it the crookedest river in the world. One leg of its journey, he declared, used up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five.

For thousands of years, people from many different cultures have lived near the Mississippi River and traveled its waters in a variety of floating vessels.

Hundreds of years before Europeans arrived in the New World, the Chickasaw people navigated southern portions of the Mississippi in dugout canoes. The Ojibwe paddled birch-bark canoes along the rivers northernmost reaches. In 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto and his men reached the rivers east bank, near the area now known as Memphis, Tennessee. They were the first Europeans to see the river that far inland, and they marveled at its powerful current: The water was alwaies muddie: there came downe the river continually many trees and timber, which the force of the water and streame brought downe. Sometimes, so much mud and sand are suspended in the river that the water looks like cocoa.

During the next two hundred years, explorers, traders, and then settlers from the east spread into the western frontier. Flatboats became a common sight on the vast western river system created by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. These large, rectangular boats accommodated settlers and their belongings even their horses and cows. But flatboats worked best as a one-way vehicle. While they easily floated downriver, their blocky shape made upstream travel against the Mississippis current (which ranges from one to three miles per hour) difficult, if not impossible.