Aunt Sally's Landing

In the summer of eighteen seventy-eight, the people of Arkansas City lined both banks of the Arkansas River to witness something they thought impossible. A steamboat named the Aunt Sally was churning upstream toward them, the first to come up the river this far. The Aunt Sally was an old packet boat, and her arrival here was a sensation.

The riverbanks filled with crowds eager simply to set foot aboard. That evening she shoved off again with hundreds of passengers crammed on deck and gave the whole town a delightful pleasure cruise. The Arkansas River never became the highway of commerce these settlers dreamed of.

The water proved too shallow and unpredictable for regular steamboat traffic. But for one giddy day, this landing was the head of navigation, and the Aunt Sally was the most famous boat in Kansas.