Steamboat Montana and the Opening of the West: History, Excavation, and Architecture

4. Excavating the Montana

4. Excavating the Montana •• Although it has been 120 years since the Montana wrecked, there are few historical records chronicling the great service riverboats performed in America’s westward migration. Even fewer consist of detailed descriptions of nineteenth-century steamboat technology and the ingeniously innovative designs of these inland waterway vessels. This dearth of historical information is greatest in reference to the hulls, which had remarkably little draft or, as Mark Twain described in Tom Sawyer, they “could float on a heavy dew.” Montana, built at the zenith of light-displacement riverboat construction , is the best extant archaeological representation of riverboat technology and exhibits virtually all the design features that made wooden riverboats successful. Incorporating standard Phase II predisturbance procedures allowing maximum data collection for the least survey time and cost,the East Carolina archaeological team documented the remains of theMontana on the Missouri River bottomlands across from St. Charles, Missouri (figure 19). The extant wreckage lies half-exposed on the riverbank and half-submerged in the river. The disposition of the wreck is fortuitous as underwater survey of such a large site in the swift, brown Missouri River would have been difficult, time consuming, and expensive. The wreck site’s position on the riverbank was also fortunate as it allowed easy documentation of half the hull, including the stern, and logical inference of what the submerged half looked like. Survey of the Montana site included documentation of the prominent features on site, as well as documentation of associated artifact scatters and other site features (figures 20 and 21).As with most predisturbance surveys,little in the way of excavation was planned, and artifacts were documented photographi52 cally in situ while few were removed for conservation and diagnostic testing. Site features were mapped by establishing a datum system tied to a baseline stretched parallel to the port side of the wreck along the riverbank (figure 22).The steel cable baseline was delineated every 10 feet (3.04 m) with a zero point established aft of the stern of the vessel’s paddlewheel. The site was then mapped using trilaterated offset measurements. The site was divided systematically into 10-foot by 20-foot (3 m x 6 m) sections. Each base sketch represents a section. Drawings were supplemented with photography and video mapping of the entire site (figure 23). figure 19. Steamboat Montana wreck location along the Missouri River across from St. Charles. (Maritime Studies Program, © 2002.) Excavating the Montana · 53 figure 20. A barrel found along the port side of the wreck site. (ECU Maritime Studies Program, © 2002.) figure 21. Brick and artifact scatter located near the wreck site. (ECU Maritime Studies Program, © 2002.) figure 23. Project team engaged in site mapping at the Montana wreck site. (ECU Maritime Studies Program, © 2002.) figure 22. Steel cable baseline set up alongside the Montana to facilitate mapping of the wreck site. (ECU Maritime Studies Program, © 2002.) Preliminary dives recorded a maximum beam that approached 48 feet (14.6 m), an impossibly large figure for any historical vessel in this locality except for Montana and her two sister ships, Wyoming and Dacotah. Of the three, only Montana was reported to have wrecked in this area. The wreck’s gigantic dimensions, particularly beam and hold depth, closely matched extant historic registry records for Montana. The finished plan view of the site (figure 24) reveals why the Montana was easy to identify, as it is double the size of a normal steamboat on this river. Nonetheless, the shipwreck site was recorded according to a predetermined research design using multiple working hypotheses to limit the influence of Ruling Theory.134 The remnant wreck site represents approximately 53 percent of the original hull (figure 25). It appears from the archaeological documentation that the forward 100 feet (30.5 m) of the hull is gone. Interestingly, an 1884 newspaper article states that the forward 100 feet (30.5 m) of the ship was salvaged, possibly to repair or rebuild another steamer of average size.135 Structural Analysis Little is written concerning the inner workings of western river steamers. There are perhaps several reasons for this. First, there are few if any plans or written descriptions dated before the use of iron and steel in steamboat construction. Although shipwrights of oceangoing vessels often used halfmodels and patterns, western river shipbuilders did not. According to most historians, few nineteenth-century steamboat builders drafted anything but rough sketches of...