Rivers are graveyards of steamboat skeletons

ST. LOUIS -- His boots caked in the shoreline muck befitting the Missouri River's pseudonym as the "Big Muddy," Steve Dasovich gingerly climbs about the carcass of a 19th-century steamboat and thinks death becomes her.

Partly hidden under murky water and silt, the remains are a muddle of rusted steel spiking through rotting wood, veined with cracks and bleached by decades of sun and water. The outline of a vessel spanning half a football field still can be seen, as can the wooden spokes -- half-buried in mud -- showing where the massive paddlewheel once was.

Dasovich, an area maritime archaeologist hired by the state of Missouri to preserve any artifacts from the relic, isn't put off by the river that teases him by giving up such skeletons of American history when its waters recede, only to swallow them up again.

"Wrecks show you something, then hide it again," he said, near what could be what's left of the Montana, among the largest steamboats to ply the Missouri before it hit a railroad bridge and sank in 1884.

Hundreds of ships

He's beaming. "This is a lot of wreck to be still in one piece. This is an active river, a living river. So we're lucky to have this much in one spot."

The Missouri and Mississippi rivers have claimed hundreds of the wood-devouring, smoke-belching giants. Many underwater tombs are awaiting discovery.

Many historians estimate that in the Missouri from St. Louis to Fort Benton, Mont., hundreds of ships -- many of them steamboats -- were done in by such calamities as run-ins with toppled trees in the water, fire, explosions and ice floes.

Along a 180-mile stretch of the Mississippi from St. Louis south to the river's confluence with the Ohio near Cairo, Ill., records suggest more than 500 boats met similar ends.

No one knows how many steamboat wreckage sites remain underwater or beneath farm fields (hidden there by the river's shifting course) or were ripped apart by currents. Their remains do appear to have been alluring to those wanting to salvage them -- or souvenir seekers.

"Everyone wants to see these wrecks," said Terry Norris, the archaeologist with the Army Corps of Engineers St. Louis district. "If you envision the past as a jigsaw puzzle, each piece lying out there is a piece. If enough of it is removed, it's impossible to see the whole image."

Look, don't touch

Between St. Louis and Cairo, by some accounts, the Mississippi steamboat wrecks averaged one each mile -- 200 altogether before the vessels faded into lore and railroads gained popularity.

Once salvaged, wrecked steamboats have proven to be popular draws. Each year, roughly 150,000 people visit a Kansas City museum where the centerpiece is the Arabia, which sank in 1856 near Parkville and was exhumed -- along with thousands of artifacts -- in the late 1980s.

"There are still hundreds that remain to be identified, all preserved under the sediment," said Norris, citing existing insurance records that show where the ships went down and what was salvaged at the time. "The ones still intact with cargo are essentially time capsules."

There are few artifacts around the weathered wreckage Dasovich hopes to spare. The sternwheeler's resting place, he says, has been looted countless times. Dasovich has salvaged a crate of rusted, enameled saucepans -- some in pieces or without bottoms.

He plans to let the wreckage stay put.

"Pending a big flood, it's not going anywhere."

His only request is, "look but don't touch."