The Steamboat Bertrand
Near Omaha, Iowa
On April first, eighteen sixty-five, the sternwheeler Bertrand hit a submerged log and sank in ten minutes into the Missouri River about twenty-five miles north of Omaha, bound for the Montana goldfields with a cargo of general goods. No lives were lost. The wreck disappeared under shifting river silt and was forgotten for over a century until treasure hunters using a magnetometer located it in nineteen sixty-eight within what is now DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge.
Excavators removed more than ten thousand cubic feet of cargo and more than five hundred thousand artifacts, preserved in near-perfect condition by the oxygen-free mud. The visitor center at DeSoto holds one of the premier archaeological collections in the country from a single nineteenth-century shipwreck.
