Saturday, February 21, 2015

  I keep getting behind. We are keeping pretty busy. On Saturday January 17th,  we went with the Seamans, and the Garretts, to Kansas City, Kansas, to see the Arabia Steamboat Museum. The boat wrecked and sank on the Missouri River on September 5, 1856. It was carrying 200 tons of goods to be taken to shops and outposts all along the Missouri river to sell to their customers, when it sank.
What the Steamship would have looked like
 
  It lay on the bottom of the river until 1987, when some local men out for adventure went looking for it. The course of the river had literally been moved by the Army Corps of engineers years before. They ended up sending probes down all around the area. They ended up finding it in a farmers corn field 45 feet underground. They dug for at least a year, and what they found was amazing. Clothing, shoes, boots, weapons, china, pots, pans, preserved food, all still in pristine condition because of the sealed hull. They had to clean layers of grime, hardened mud, and rust off of everything, but what they found is incredible. Instead of declaring it, and selling it for profit, they built this museum to show to the public. Otherwise, it would have been purchased by a lot of different people and ended up around the world. Here it is all in one place to enjoy. Rooms and rooms full of "stuff".
The excavation