Monthly Archives: January 2019

A chance to do something extraordinary

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And a chance to BE something extraordinary.

Legislation has been introduced at the capitol that will save a major part of the history of Missouri and the American push west.

If passed, the legislation will establish the funding to build a new home in Jefferson City for the Arabia Steamboat Museum, opening after the museum’s lease runs out on the Kansas City-owned building that has been its home since 1991.

It is essential that this legislation passes if one of America’s unique museums is to stay in Missouri.

A museum in Pennsylvania has offered to buy the Arabia artifacts and move them there.  If somebody doesn’t act, Missouri will give away an irreplaceable resource.  Jefferson City is acting.

The development could change the way Jefferson City sees itself and the way the state and nation see Jefferson City.  Accepting it means accepting an incredible opportunity.  And a major challenge.

We should not underestimate that challenge.  Nor should we underestimate this incredible opportunity.

We know opposition to our plan is likely to be powerful because we are asking the casino industry to finance this program by adding to the “admission fees” paid by the casino industry to the state.

There is more than a steamboat museum in this funding package.  It also would finance construction of a new state museum building.  Every curator of the state museum since it opened in the early 1920s has said the space in the capitol is not adequate for the telling of the story of Missouri, its people, and its resources.

This proposal also would finance the creation of a special Capitol Museum and visitor center in the vacated capitol space that will detail the history of the Capitol and what happens in it and in state government.

This is a huge venture, the biggest thing our city has tackled, perhaps, since the construction of the present capitol.  The message has to be sent to the decision-makers: MISSOURI CANNOT FAIL to keep our history in our state.

You are looking at a display of some of the startling things recovered from the wreckage of the Arabia, which sank north of Kansas City in 1856—so quickly that everybody but a mule got off the boat safely but they left everything behind.

If you have ever been to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, you recognize that display of items most of us never thought people on the western frontier were using five years before the civil war.  We hope in seeing that picture that you immediately understand why the opportunity to have that collection in a spectacular building on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River a few blocks downstream from the Missouri Capitol is such an amazing opportunity.  If you have seen the greatest single collection of pre-Civil War artifacts anywhere in America, you know why moving that collection here could be a transformative event for Jefferson City.

A small volunteer group of private citizens, city and state officials has been working with leaders of the museum to develop this proposal.  There is an urgency in arranging the financing for the new museum.  We can tell you that, because no movement for a greater museum has been shown in Kansas City, the museum leaders want to move the collection to the state’s capital city if we can find the funding. Owners of an outstanding site have assured us it will be available.

We are asking the legislature to pass a bill adding a dollar to the casino boarding fees they pay the state.  We expect the casino industry to strongly resist. But we are asking our lawmakers to determine what is better for the people of Missouri—spending those millions to create these museums or sending them to the home cities of the five corporations that own the state’s thirteen casinos.

This is an important point:  We can do all of this without tapping the state’s limited general revenue funds.  We can do all of this without a general tax increase.

Our proposal is even more significant because—

It includes the financing for another steamboat excavation, later this year, of a boat that sank fifteen years before the Arabia went under in 1856.   It is the Malta, which was headed toward a much earlier frontier with much different cargo when it sank near the present community of Malta Bend in 1841.

Why are these boats so special?  And why is a potential national steamboat museum for Jefferson City so special? Because nowhere else in this entire country will we be able to understand the humanity of the people who left so much behind, who risked so much of their lives, to go west.  Our state is the “Mother of the West,” and our Missouri River is the liquid highway that carried explorers, developers, statesmen and scalawags to the frontier.  We cannot come closer to them than we can when we see, with this cargo, how they really lived. 

From 1856 until 1988, when the Hawley family of Independence and some friends dug fifty feet down in a Kansas farm field (the river channel had changed a lot in the interim), the Arabia and its cargo had been sealed off from the deteriorating effects of light and air.  The same is true of the Malta, which rests 35-50 feet down in a farm field near the Saline County Community of Malta Bend.

The diggers of 1988 recovered two-hundred tons of merchandise that has been properly cared for so that visitors to the museum are looking at clothing, tools, food, household items, and other things that are as new today as they were when they were loaded on the Arabia in St. Louis a few days before the boat sailed past Jefferson City to its ultimate fate north of early Kansas City. That includes jars of canned fruit and alcoholic beverages bound for the two-year old community of Omaha City, population 1,500. The diggers opened a bottle of Champagne and found it still bubbly and tasty.  Digger Jerry Mackey tasted an 1856 sweet pickle and various canned fruits and pronounced them as good as they were when the lid was screwed on the bottle or jar in 1856.

The rushing waters of the Missouri River damaged the boat so extensively that only the boilers, the steam engines, paddle wheel mechanism, and part of the stern could be recovered from the boat itself. The cargo was mostly in the cargo hold. But several artifacts were still on deck.

The  Malta passed our town in 1841, a few days after Missourians of 178 years ago finished loading it with about 100 tons of cargo, some of which was to be offloaded at Westport Landing (now Kansas City) and sent by wagon to outposts on the Santa Fe Trail. The rest was bound for Indian trading posts and military forts upstream on the Missouri.

David Hawley, the Arabia museum president located the Malta a few years ago. It wasn’t easy. He talked to a school group.

And he thinks test borings that have confirmed the location of the Malta indicate it might be structurally complete.  If that is the case, he plans to lift the entire boat from that farm field near Malta Bend and preserve an entire 1841 Missouri River steamboat.

If it is raised it will be the centerpiece of the steamboat museum proposed for Jefferson City.

Can you understand the incredible opportunity that is ours for the taking if we are able to convince the legislature to pass this bill?  Can you understand what the construction of a Missouri Steamboat Museum—especially one that could develop into a NATIONAL steamboat museum could mean to Jefferson City and to our state?

David Hawley a few weeks ago created a speculative drawing of what the museum could look like. What finally materializes is likely to be much different but we have to start somewhere.  The brown object in the middle of the drawing is the Malta, which is 142 feet long.

David is a dreamer.  Ultimately he wants a national museum that would house cargo and six other boats that capture the great riverboat history of the Missouri River.  That history spanned 1820-1880.  By 1880, railroads had reached the frontier towns that had relied on steamboats until then.

The year 2026 will mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson City being the capital city of Missouri, the year that state government moved here from its temporary home in St. Charles.  It is also the year that the Arabia museum in Kansas City will close.  The lease runs out then. The city has offered no new location for the museum that already has outgrown its current quarters and will far outgrow them with the addition of the Malta. 

We—Jefferson City or some other city in Missouri, and the state of Missouri—cannot allow this incredible part of our history, the frontier’s history, America’s history to leave Missouri. We just can’t.

The calendar marks the time Missouri has to secure the contents of that museum and build a museum that will hold them—and more. The proposed legislation designates Jefferson City as the location.

2019-2026. It’s not much time.

Jefferson City is a city with a steamboat on its city seal.  It is a town with one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining Missouri River riverboat landing building still in use. It is a town that was sustained by steamboats until the railroad began regular operations thirty-seven years after the first steamboats passed this site.

Our area lawmakers who are sponsoring the bills—Rep. Dave Griffith and Senator Mike Bernskoetter and others from mid-Missouri—will be working to get the legislation passed.  But we, as a community, must help them.  Many people in Jefferson City rent rooms, apartments, or homes to our lawmakers.  Many more are their staff members at the capitol. Many of our citizens wait on them in our dining and drinking establishments or check them in and out of their motel rooms.  It is up to all of us to impress on our legislators how important this museum will be to our city and to us as a people.

We have only one registered lobbyist at the capitol. But we can have tens of thousands of lobbyists in the homes and businesses of Jefferson City who need to encourage lawmakers from throughout the state to “Vote for the Boats.”

We can do this. We can save this important heritage for our city, for our state, and for history. And for generations we will not know.

We must do this.

(photo credits: All pictures by Bob Priddy except the Malta, the YEP Malta Mural 2011 by Waymark)

Josh and Bill

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Some capitol graybeards are watching the developing investigation of suspicions that Attorney General Josh Hawley used public money to further his successful campaign to oust Senator Claire McCaskill. We’re watching because we remember when another young, charismatic Missouri Attorney General who seemed to be a Republican shooting star crashed and burned.

Can it happen again? Let’s just wait and see.

The fact that it’s another Republican statewide office holder who has triggered this investigation adds some heft to the issue. And Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s successful involvement of State Auditor Nicole Galloway, a Democrat, in the investigation because she has subpoena powers adds more.

Hawley proclaims innocence—just as Bill Webster did throughout the long federal investigation against him while he was successfully winning the Republican nomination for governor in 1992, beating State Treasurer Wendell Bailey and Secretary of State Roy Blunt in the primary.

Circumstances will show whether Hawley’s “innocence” is genuine or whether it’s as flimsy in the end as Webster’s often-claimed “innocence” was all those years ago.

Public officials under investigation are right to maintain their innocence for two reasons. First, our justice system operates on the proposition that all of us are innocent until proven guilty.  Second, it’s important that those who supported the office holder with their money and their votes continue to believe that person is above the suspicion swirling around him or her. While confession might be good for the soul, it’s disastrous for the career.  People have survived close scrutiny, even charges and trials, and gone on to useful political careers.

But here’s something about investigations of public officials.  Once one gets started, there’s no   telling where it’s going to go.

We told friends about  a year ago that the suggestions of sexual impropriety against Eric Greitens were a she-said-he-said matter.  But, we suggested, if a prosecutor stepped in, things were suddenly much more serious.  And if a grand jury was convened, all of the cards would be wild and who knows where the story would go. The Greitens story escalated pretty rapidly and Greitens left office to keep things from becoming even more serious, particularly on issues not connected with the first suspicions, and before light was shined on his dark money supporters.

So it was with Bill Webster, son of a powerful state senator; some said he was more powerful than some governors although he was a Republican, which then was the minority party.  Some analysts thought that Dick Webster, who lost a shot at the being attorney general in 1952 and a chance to run for governor four years later, groomed Bill to reach political levels the father never could.  He provided a good part of the money for Bill’s campaigns for state representative in 1980 and ’82. And in 1984 the elder Webster called in a lot of political IOU’s from various special interests for Bill’s attorney general campaign account. Bill was elected to a second term in 1988.  He had his eyes on the governorship in 1992 as a successor to John Ashcroft (Jay’s father).

But Dick Webster did not survive heart surgery in March of 1990.  State Senator Gary Nodler, who took the elder Webster’s seat in the Missouri Senate, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch many years later that the death of the father made the son “more driven to succeed.”

The early news stories by investigative reporter Terry Ganey in the Post-Dispatch centered on the Second Injury Fund which compensated employees whose job-related injuries make an earlier health situation worse.  The early suggestions were that a second-injury fund lawyer in the attorney general’s office also was collecting campaign money for Webster’s run for the governor nomination and that private lawyers hired by Webster were getting bigger judgments for their clients than non-Webster friends.  Webster survived the primary election but his reputation took a hit when his former deputy attorney general and a resort developer who had bought some Webster property pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. Voters took notice and made Webster a big loser in the race with Mel Carnahan in November.

The investigation shifted to Webster’s use of Attorney General employees and equipment for campaign purposes. A corruption charge was dropped against him in return for a guilty plea on two charges using state resources for political campaign purposes. Almost until the unavoidable end, Webster claimed his innocence.  In fact the federal judge in his case, who ran a multiple-day sentencing hearing, gave Webster an hour at the end to consider whether he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea or whether he wanted to accept his sentence.

He went to prison for 21 months, getting out three months early for good conduct.  When he got out, he went to work for Bartlett and Company, a Kansas City agribusiness firm.  As far as we know, he’s still a Vice-President.  Life didn’t take him where once he wanted to go, but he’s done well.

Today, one of his political descendants is being investigated for using public funds while attorney general to support his senatorial campaign.

Josh Hawley, young, charismatic, is seen by some as a shooting star in the Republican Party.  He’s entitled to proclaim his innocence. It’s unfair to assume that he is another Bill Webster despite circumstances reminiscent of twenty-five years ago.  He has his protectors who say the investigation is baseless and shouldn’t go forward, just as Webster had his protectors.  He has his critics who say smoke equals fire, as Webster did.

Time will answer enough questions, one way or another, as it did in 1992 and ‘93. We can wait.

Disasters

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Almost eight years ago (has it really been eight years?) after the Joplin tornado we were curious about how it stacked up compared to other disastrous events in Missouri and we put together a list on the old Missourinet Blog that we knew was incomplete.  We’ve found some other tragic events to add to that list and have decided it’s time for an update. In fact, the number of deaths from the Joplin tornado was a premature total so we’ve updated that. Some accounts vary in the number of deaths for some of these incidents and some are only estimated numbers.

It is difficult to pin down the exact number of deaths caused by heat waves throughout Missouri. The National Weather Service has extensive records of the heat but we haven’t been able to find comprehensive numbers of deaths for  Missouri during heat waves. We’ve been able to find numbers for St. Louis in three of them but it’s quite likely the statewide totals were much higher. We’ve listed the fatalities in St. Louis to make note of the tragedies and will update the figures if we find better numbers.

Few deaths were recorded in the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes.  The areas hit hardest were thinly-populated in those days and while records were kept of the violence of the shocks it appears no effort was made to compile a comprehensive death total.

Just for the record or a record of some kind, here’s the list of disasters that have taken twenty or more lives in Missouri.

  • 4,317—St. Louis cholera epidemic, Summer, 1849 (Some accounts put the number closer to 6,000.)
  • 4,000 plus—Kansas City and St. Louis Spanish Influenza 1918-1919
  • 479—St. Louis only, Heat wave of 1936.
  • 255–St. Louis tornado May 27, 1896
  • 209-300 (est.) Steamboat Stonewall fire, Neely’s Landing, Cape Girardeau County, October 27, 1869 (accounts vary)
  • 158–Joplin tornado May 22, 2011 (plus three “indirect” deaths)
  • 118—St. Louis tornado  May 27, 1896 (118 more in East St. Louis)
  • 114–Hyatt Regency Hotel Skywalks collapse, Kansas City July 17, 1981
  • 100-plus–Steamship Saluda explosion, Lexington, Apr. 9, 1852
  • 87–Poplar Bluff tornado May 9, 1927
  • 72–St. Louis tornado Sept. 29, 1927
  • 72–Katie Jane Memorial Home for the Aged, Warrenton, February 17, 1957
  • 70 (est.) Steamboat Shepherdess sinking, St. Louis, January 3,1844
  • 65–Marshfield tornado Apr. 18, 1880
  • 55–Six County tornado (southeast Missouri) May 30, 1917
  • 42–Tipton Ford train collision, (near Neosho) Aug. 5, 1914
  • 39—West Plains Dance Hall Explosion, April 13, 1928 (various accounts put the total at 33 or 37. But 39 seems to be the most commonly cited)
  • 38–Ozark Airlines FH-227 crash, St. Louis July 23, 1973
  • 37–Kansas City (Ruskin Heights) tornado May 10, 1957
  • 34–Kirksville tornado Apr. 27, 1889
  • 34—St. Louis only, Heat wave, 2007
  • 30 (est.)—Steamboat LaMascot explosion, Neely’s Landing, October 5, 1886
  • 30—St. Louis Athletic Club fire, March 9, 1914
  • 31–Gasconade River railroad bridge collapse Nov. 1, 1855
  • 28–Kansas City (Lathrop School) May 11, 1886
  • 26–Fire at Wayside Inn Nursing Home, Farmington, 1979
  • 24—Rich Hill Coal Mine Explosion, March 29, 1888
  • 24—St. Louis only, heat wave, 1980
  • 23–Cape Girardeau tornado May 21, 1949
  • 21–St. Louis tornado  Feb. 10, 1959
  • 21–Coates House Hotel fire, Kansas City, January 28, 1978

There have been other plane crashes, train wrecks, fires and tornadoes that have taken lives. We put the cutoff point at more than 20 deaths.

Convening the session

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Almost 200 men and women you and I have chosen to represent us in writing the laws that govern our lives begin their work today at the Capitol.  Some are rookies with high ideals and others are weather-beaten veterans facing the last of their eight or sixteen years making those decisions.

Governor John S. Phelps speaking to the General Assembly on February 8, 1877, said: “I trust we are assembled, not as partisans, but as patriots, with a sincere determination to support the right and to condemn the wrong. We are assembled not to carry out our own wishes, but to respect and speak the voice of the people, restrained within constitutional limits. For a time the destinies of the people of this State have been confided in us, and it is to be hoped our deliberations will be characterized by wisdom, patriotism and justice.”

It would be interesting for this year’s rookies to write down their goals and ambitions, their ethical standards that they hope to carry into their service, and their thoughts about who they represent and seal them into an envelope that will not be opened for, say, twenty years.

Then, as they start their final year in the capitol—whether it be their eighth or their sixteenth—they write their accomplishments, the ethical standards they have at the end and the challengers to them they have faced and the alterations in them they are brave enough to acknowledge, and who they really represented in the end.  Those statements should be sealed in an envelope and not opened until they open the first envelope, enough time having passed that they have a perspective on their years in office that they might have lacked when they closed that second envelope.

We have a lot of documents at the State Historical Society of Missouri.  It would be interesting for future generations of Missourians wanting to study Missouri’s political system to read the contents of those two envelopes.

A year ago a young State Representative facing his last year in the House and with no plans to try to move to the Senate did something like that and what he wrote, published in his constituent newsletter is worth saving. And it’s worth reading every two years by rookies.

Ten years ago, a former State Senator who was seen as a rising star in his party wrote of how his political ambition cost him a career.

We offer these two reflections for consideration by those who begin the 100th session of the General Assembly of the state of Missouri.

Representative Jay Barnes of Jefferson City will be most remembered as the chairman of the committee that investigated the machinations of Governor Eric Greitens and his earlier investigation of the Mamtech scandal in Moberly.  In his newsletter of January 5, 2018, he wrote, in part:

There have been great moments of satisfaction from feeling of a job well done – and moments of gloom from failure. Such is life. Sometimes when I think of the things I’ve learned over these eight years, I think of Bob Seger – “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

As I reflect on my eight years, I noticed something on the House website that puts things in perspective – this week we are beginning the second regular session of the 99th General Assembly. It is the 198th time in our state’s history that this has happened. For those nearly 200 years, our statehouse has been filled with men and women of goodwill – and also a fair share of opportunists, con men, and people whose ambition you could see through a brick wall.

 …Governments are inherently prone to corruption — both the criminal kind and the softer corruption that settles in over time. Soft corruption happens when a legislator sponsors a piece of legislation just because a lobbyist asked, without knowing anything about the subject or asking any questions. It happens when a legislator grows lazy and makes decisions about votes without reading the actual bill or considering what it does, but just asking who’s for it and against it.  

It also happens when their heart or head tells them a vote is wrong, but they do it anyway because of pressure, inertia, an unwillingness to stick their neck out, or for some favor to be traded later. Instead of doing what is right, the path of convenience and personal advantage is taken instead.  Of course, it’s human nature to avoid confrontation and to have ambition. The question is not whether it will happen, but how often and whether it will happen on votes that have serious impact on the lives of people beyond the Capitol’s marble halls.  

A colleague once explained the “favor to be named later” idea to me when he tried to flip my vote on a bill. “I disagree with your no vote, but even you can’t say this is a huge deal,” he said. “And, you know, you may have a bill that comes along where someone else might be on the fence, and you’re gonna need their vote. Why don’t you just throw a vote here, and then when your bill comes up, the favor will get returned?”

This is legislative utilitarianism: the idea that good ends justify bad means to get there. It may help clear a legislator’s conscience if they don’t think too hard about it, but it’s just as flawed as utilitarianism anywhere else. Doing something you believe to be wrong (even if it’s just a little wrong) under the belief that it will have a good result on an unrelated issue can justify nearly anything so long as you are an optimist about that potential good result in the future. And it’s addictive. Once you do it once, it’s all the more difficult to resist the logic the next time around.  I feel that I have resisted the temptation more than most, but I speak from experience: these trades are not worth it. Not even the little ones. They whittle away at your soul, and, as Jesus said in Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”

There’s no legislative cure for human nature. So, what is to be done? I think the answer for the individual legislator is no different from the answer in the real world: when delusions of grandeur tempt, where ambition or fear of political consequences threaten, it’s time to take a step back and consider the larger picture. Individually, we are insignificant. Legislators do not have legacies. (Nor do governors for that matter.) As a general rule, people do not remember politicians other than the president. The realization of one’s own insignificance and the humility that emanates is a better antidote to corruption than any law ever passed. Instead of serving oneself and ambition, better to serve the Lord, our families, and our communities.

In my eight years, I’ve seen the worst and the best aspects of human nature: greed, pride, vanity, laziness, and vindictiveness are here every day. And so are diligence, humility, sacrifice, charity, and compassion. The Missouri state legislature, is a place where, in spite of our human weaknesses, when things go right — paraphrasing Gov. Nixon —people of goodwill can work together in service to make great differences in the lives of people who will never meet, who will never know our name, and who will never know we ever did anything to help them.

The second document is from another young lawmaker who entered office with high ideals but who found his career far shorter than he thought it would be—-because he failed his own principles. The Post-Dispatch ran an op-ed piece on September 8, 2009 from former State Senator Jeff Smith under the headline “I was stupid and wrong.”   It complements Jay Barnes’ reflection. And it’s from someone who buckled to political utilitarianism.

I once held a position of public trust. I write today as a felon, having broken that trust, and I don’t want anyone to make the terrible mistakes I made.

I thought I could get away with it. If anyone learned of what happened, it would be my word and the word of my friends and staffers against that of a loner with a shady past.

It was easy to think this way. I had arrived on the political scene.

When I decided to run for Congress in 2004, I was a nobody. It was a familiar role. As a boy I was the smallest kid on the court, scrappy and hypercompetitive, and I tried to overcome my political weaknesses with the same drive. Eventually I went from a non-entity to a contender.

As Election Day drew near, I authorized a close friend and two aides to help an outside consultant send out a mailer about my opponent but without disclosing my campaign’s connection.

Fiercely competitive, I was seeking any advantage I could get. I knew that hiding my campaign’s involvement was against the law. I was raised better than that, but I thought the ends justified the means. I was stupid and wrong.

When my opponent filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against me, I wanted to preserve my political future and concealed the misconduct. Instead of taking the hit, I stonewalled, assuming the FEC would not connect the dots.

I was elected to the Missouri Senate in 2006 and was honored to serve my constituents. My dream was fulfilled, and I had a platform to effect social change and fight for the city I love.

In 2007, the FEC cleared my campaign of wrongdoing. It was the worst thing that could’ve happened to me.

Because the lesson I took wasn’t that “I got lucky. What I did was reckless, illegal, and wrong. I won’t break the law again.” My takeaway was, “Whew. I’m home free.”

Wrong again.

In 2009, the FBI obtained new information indicating a cover-up of the original misconduct. They approached me, and I stuck with my earlier account. It was easier for me to lie than to face the scrutiny and embarrassment that would come with accepting responsibility.

I was terrified of admitting anything. My nightmare was for all this to come out: my betrayal of what I thought I stood for and wanted to achieve; my betrayal of supporters and constituents; my parents’ embarrassment reading about my actions in the newspaper, and their shame as friends and neighbors searched for what to say to them and how to say it.

Well, it all came out, and it is worse than I had feared.

I’ve lost what I loved most: serving my district and teaching political science. I have lost the respect of others I cherished and my self-respect — even the ability to look strangers in the eye. And I haven’t even been sentenced yet.

I apologize to my constituents, my Senate colleagues, my family and friends and to anyone who has lost faith in government because of my actions. Telling the truth is the basis of public trust: the minimum I owed my constituents, my family and myself. I am a reminder of the obligation to always be truthful, particularly for those honored to serve the public.

(Jeff Smith resigned from the Missouri Senate effective August 25, 2009 and was sentenced to one year and a day of prison. He also was fined $50,000. Smith was sent to the federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky. He was released early in November, 2010.

Since his release, he’s written a couple of books, lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York, and co-founded Confluence Academies, an organization of charter schools in the St. Louis area.  And he’s done a lot of other stuff.

Jay Barnes has been promoted to private citizenship (as Harry Truman once said after his presidency) and is a lawyer in Jefferson City.  He said in last weekend’s Jefferson City newspaper that he has no interest in returning to politics.

It might be useful every now and then for those who will sit behind the century-old desks the lawmakers first sat behind in January, 1919 to re-read these two reflections, especially toward the session’s end when the challenges are greatest—and think about how the four-and-a-half months they are starting today will have changed them.

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Tennial Time, Boat Edition

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Bi and Cen.

The new year starts an ten-year run of tennials.   Between now and August 4, 1828 we will observe a series of 200th and 100th anniversaries:

2019 is the first of the bicentennials.  We doubt that anybody was here to see these two events.  It was two years before the legislature decreed this area become known as the City of Jefferson City. On May 15, 1819 the steamboat Independence under Captain John Nelson became the first steamboat to challenge the dangers of the Missouri River .  It arrived at the now-vanished town of Franklin on May 28. It got as far as the community of  Chariton, near the mouth of the Chariton River, called by some “Missouri’s gran divide” because streams east of it flow towards the Mississippi and those to the west flow into the Missouri or into its tributaries.

A month later, on June 21another steamboat, the Western Engineer, left St. Louis.  The boat had been built for an exploratory expedition organized by the U.S. Topographical engineers and led by Major Stephen Long.  It was the first steamboat to make it all the way across Missouri, wintering at Fort Lisa near present Council Bluffs, Iowa on September 17 before going back to St. Louis in the spring.

Steamboating seems to be slow developing on the Missouri, perhaps because it took time to develop boats strong enough to run the great river.  Five boats were regularly running the river in 1836.  But travel on the river was assuming such importance a short time later than when the original government building in Jefferson City burned in 1837, a new capitol put up on the first hill to the west was built facing east. Travelers coming upriver, therefore, saw the new capitol’s impressive face as they approached.  In 1839, James Crump, built a stone building to serve as a landing point for riverboats. The upper story became a hotel popular with river men and legislators.  The building, known locally as “Lohman’s Landing,” still stands, one of the few early nineteenth century river port buildings remaining. Today it’s part of the state museum system and has been renovated to represent the kind of general store that a riverboat landing structure might have been.

May Stafford Hilburn wrote in the local Sunday News and Tribune, in 1946 that, “In 1840 fruit trees were shipped into Jefferson City by boat and sold for twelve and one-half cents each. In 1840 Captain Dunnica, a pioneer builder of the city, reported that “the Steamer Camden on key passage down the Missouri struck a snag and sunk in eight feet of water. Ship and cargo were a total loss. In 1841 a stranger who came into Jefferson City by steamboat wrote home to a relative in Lancaster Pa., this statement: ‘The boating trade of the Missouri River is increasing annually. This insures a ready market for all produce of every kind.’”

James E. Ford, who wrote a history of Jefferson City and Cole County eighty years ago, said, “In 1841 twenty-six steamboats were engaged in regular trade on the Missouri River. These boats made 312 arrivals and departures at Glasgow with freight and passengers.  The Iatan, regular packet, made twenty regular weekly trips from St. Louis to Glasgow. About forty-six thousand tons of freight were transported during the year 1841, according to the Columbia Patriot.”

The St. Louis Western Journal observed in 1842, “Two years ago it was considered foolish and dangerous to navigate the Missouri River at night, and the time by steamboat from St. Louis to Jefferson City was forty to forty-eight hours. Just one year ago thirty-six hours was considered a speedy trip. In 1842, the trip was made in twenty-four hours by several boats. The steamboat Empire made the trip last week in twenty-two hours and fifteen minutes. Now Jefferson City, one hundred and fifty miles distant from St. Louis, is within a day’s travel.”

But steamboats transported more than politicians and trade goods.  Sometimes they transported death to Jefferson City.  City Clerk James E. McHenry recalled in 1893 that when he was fourteen years old in 1849:

“On a bright May morning, I sauntered down to the river to see if there were any boats in sight, when I was surprised to see the James Madison lying at the wharf, apparently deserted.  She had no steam up, no one on board, and the passengers with their baggage lying around loose on the levee, some were vomiting and all looking forlorn and distressed. I learned the boat had arrived sometime the night before, from St. Louis, with a number of cases of cholera, had docked and abandoned the trip; her Captain and other officers had deserted the Monroe and struck out across the river for their homes and firesides, leaving the poor sick passengers to take care of themselves.

When the citizens learned of the situation, they organized and took charge of the sick passengers, gave the dead and dying all of the attention possible. After a few days I ventured uptown—we lived at the foot of Richmond Hill on Main street. I found the town a deserted, desolated looking village. There was no business in the stores, no wagons on the streets, and but few people and they were gathered in little squads talking low and looking scared and anxious. The only places doing business were the “groceries,” as saloons were then called.  After going uptown and seeing the hearse constantly on the move, going and coming, the doctors hither and thither, and the good citizens bracing himself at the “grocery,” I picked up courage enough that day to take a peek into the Episcopal Church. I saw men in all stages of the cholera; some vomiting in the first stage, some in agony of pain, some dying and some dead. I became an errand boy, going after soup and medicine for the sick. The James Monroe landed here on that May morning with 75 people on board, now only two of whom escaped death by cholera. Most of them were California emigrants. The Captain and other officers who deserted their posts, we learned afterwards died either before or after they reached home.”

On August 26, 1854, the steamboat “Timour” (number 2) was tied up at the Edwards wood yard about three miles below Jefferson City when it exploded.  Former State Treasurer Phil E. Chapell, then a barefoot boy just turned 17, was standing on the Jefferson City levee waiting to be rowed across the river, when he saw and heard “a loud report as of a tremendous blast, and the boat was enveloped in a great cloud of steam and smoke.  In a moment the cloud had blown away but alas! The boat had disappeared. The ferryman and I at once realized what had occurred, and jumping into a skiff, rowed as rapidly as possible to the wreck…We were the first to arrive, and what a horrible scene met our gaze.  All of the boilers of the boat, three in number, had exploded simultaneously, wrecking the entire forward part of the boat, and causing the hull to sink after of the forecastle. The shrieks and groans of the dying, and their piteous appeals that they be put immediately out of existence to end their sufferings were heartrending, and resound in my ears to this day, although more than a half-century has passed.  Many lives were lost—how many was never known, as many bodies were blown into the river and never recovered. Those still alive were so badly scalded as to have but little resemblance to human beings.”

The New York Times on September 6 carried a report from the St. Louis Democrat that, “There had been no record of deck hands kept, and, doubtless, there are some who have been blown into eternity whose names will never be heard again, and whose fate will always remain a mystery within the circle of relatives and friends from which they will be missed. We have learned that the complement of hands which the boat had in leaving this port was 45 or 47, and that of these but 25 have returned.”

By then, however, a competitor was making its way toward Jefferson City and it eventually would kill steamboat traffic as it is fondly remembered. In fact, a Cincinnati newspaper reported two of the Timour’s boilers had been thrown onto the nearby railroad tracks by the explosion. The third was blown into the river and some pieces of the boat were found a mile away.

The Pacific Railroad planned to start began passenger and freight service from St. Louis to Jefferson City in November, 1855, prompting this ad from the Jefferson City Inquirer on November 10, 1855.

June, 1861 brought not death, but a military invasion. When Confederate-leaning Governor Claiborne Jackson hurried back to the capital city after negotiations with federal officials in St. Louis failed to produce a promise the U. S. Army would stay out of Missouri, and fled to Boonville with several state lawmakers in tow, the Army was in pursuit.  General Nathaniel Lyon and his troops disembarked from the steamboat Iatan (a replacement of the earlier one that helped open shipping on the river) east of the penitentiary, marched behind the prison to Lafayette Street, then marched through town to occupy the Capitol. A special correspondent for the St. Louis Missouri Democrat described “an enthusiastic reception from the loyal citizens, headed by Thomas L. Price…(They) marched in good order through the city, cheered at several points, and finally occupied Capitol Hill, amidst tremendous applause.”  Price had been the city’s first mayor and long remained a prominent civic leader.

Long-time Jefferson City banker and politician Julius Conrath remembered a happier experience in about 1868:

“I can remember as a boy of about five years seeing my first circus.  It came up the river on a steamboat and landed at what was called the levee, or Lohman’s landing, at the foot of Jefferson Street. A large crowd and especially the small boys went down to see it unload…

“In those days Jefferson City boasted a wharfmaster who was one of the city officials. He had charge of all loading and unloading of steamboats.  Steamboats were plentiful on the river then, and three or four passed up and down every week.  Every boy in town knew every boat by its whistle. In summer time, as soon as we heard a boat whistle we grabbed a basket filled with peaches, apples or grapes, or whatever fruit might be in season, and rushed to the levee and sold our wares to the passengers for in those days many passengers traveled by boat.”

But the days of the steamboat being a lifeline to Jefferson City were numbered, as they were for communities along the Missouri River.  By the 1880s, the railroad had reached the farthest most point on the river served by steamboats.

It was a glorious era, however. But it was a dangerous one.  The average lifespan for a steamboat on the Missouri was only about three years.  It’s estimated more than three-hundred steamboats sank between St. Louis and Kansas City.

In 2019, we’ll observe the bicentennial of steamboats on the Missouri River, kicking off what we are calling the “tennial era” in Missouri.  We’re thinking of the best way to commemorate our steamboat history.