Don Wildman

As you said, just after leaving from the Cincinnati waterfront, the captain was trying to set a speed record.

These guys are competitors.

They're out to prove themselves.

Enormous loss of life.

120 to 160 passengers died out of a 300-passenger load.

Amazing.

Another one, I'll just go through these.

Steamboat Sultana exploded and sank on the 27th of April in 1865, toward the end of this era, just north of Memphis, Tennessee, killed 1,864 people, the worst maritime disaster in U.S.

history, and I hadn't even heard of this until prepping for this conversation.

Crazy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Back when the federal government wasn't regulating things, there was a downside to that.

Steamboat.

They also faced a lot of hazards in the water, which I mentioned before as one of the reasons for the design.

You had big snags in the water.

You had lots of debris in the water on any given day.

I mean, I have a boat on the Hudson River.

You'd have to check the water to know what's coming down river.

It's a big part of having a boat on a river because anything can sink you, puncturing the hulls and so forth.

Then you had collisions with other ships in the night.