One stop we enjoyed on our way back home with our new-to-us truck was the De Soto wildlife refuge on the Missouri River (between Nebraska and Iowa). I went there years ago with my folks when it first opened and knew I wanted to come back when the museum was completed. In 1865, the Bertrand, a paddle wheel boat going from St. Louis to the Montana territory taking passengers and supplies to those on the gold fields, hit a sandbar and sank completely in the mud in a matter of minutes.
Here’s some information from Wikipedia about this steamboat”
The Bertrand was a steamboat which sank on April 1, 1865, while carrying cargo up the Missouri River to Virginia City, Montana Territory, after hitting a snag in the river north of Omaha, Nebraska. Half of its cargo was recovered during an excavation in 1968, more than 100 years later. Today, the artifacts are displayed in a museum at the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge near Missouri Valley, Iowa. The display makes up the largest intact collection of Civil War-era artifacts in the United States, and are an invaluable time capsule of everyday life during that period.
In the late 1960s, a couple of men wanted to find the boat and get the containers of mercury that it carried for processing gold. What they found was the supplies in pristine condition. Now these items are in the museum. What a great way to learn what was important in the post civil war era.
Hope these pictures give you a glimpse of what was needed on the frontier and gold fields.
Try to read the description of black ink from that time–amazing.
At least one type of black ink was made from an interesting combination of logwood extract (a dye from a spiny tree in the American tropics), bichromate of potash (potassium dichromate that’s an oxidizing agent), muriatic acid, galls water (tannic acid), and crushed sugar.
If you’re ever in this area along the Missouri River, please stop in. It’s such an interesting look at life in the late 1860s as miners were traveling from St. Louis to the gold mines in the Montana Territory. I would have taken more pictures, but the lighting and the glare wasn’t cooperating.
