The Arabia Steamboat Museum: King Tut's Tomb of the Missouri River
Near Kansas City, Missouri
On September fifth, eighteen fifty-six, a side-wheel steamer called the Arabia left Westport Landing, which is now downtown Kansas City, heading upriver toward Saint Joseph and beyond. She was carrying two hundred tons of cargo: boots, shoes, axes, pocketknives, china, fabric bolts, hardware, champagne, and the thousand small goods that general stores in sixteen frontier settlements were waiting on. The passengers and crew, roughly one hundred fifty people, were along for the upstream journey.
Six miles west of Westport Landing, the Arabia hit a submerged sycamore snag, a hazard so common on the Missouri River that it was the defining danger of the steamboat era. The hull broke. The ship went down in minutes. Every person on board made it out. The mule tied to the cargo deck did not.
The Missouri River, which moves its channel constantly, eventually shifted its course eastward. The Arabia sank in what became a Kansas cornfield, buried under forty-five feet of silt, and stayed there for a hundred and thirty-two years.
In nineteen eighty-eight, a group of treasure hunters tracked the wreck using historical records and a proton magnetometer. They excavated through the winter and found the Arabia almost perfectly preserved, sealed from oxygen and packed in anaerobic clay. The cargo they pulled out was largely intact. Pickles still pickled. Perfume still fragrant. Boots still supple after a century and a third underground.
The recovery produced two hundred tons of artifacts from the year eighteen fifty-six, the largest single collection of pre-Civil War material in the world. The museum that opened in the Kansas City River Market in nineteen ninety-one displays more than four thousand individual objects, the inventory of an entire frontier moment, frozen on the day the ship went down.
