Robert Gudmestad

And so there are a lot of boiler explosions that happen right when a boat was starting because the walls of the boilers weren't ready for the steam to hit them.

And then when the boiler exploded, it was a bomb going off and you'd have scalding water and people were literally scalded to death.

That's an exaggeration.

Yeah.

It was not one to two per week.

But they were common enough that people didn't get stirred up when all of a sudden a steamboat blew up.

It's like, oh, this hasn't happened in two or three months.

Now, I calculated in my book as best I could the danger, if you will, of steamboat travel on the Mississippi River.

So these are southern steamboats compared to flying.

Okay.

You know, accidents.

Okay.

And it was a thousand times riskier to travel on a Mississippi River steamboat than to fly in a modern commercial airliner.

That's crazy.

It really is.

And the Sultan is a bit of a special case because most of the men who died in that explosion were Union soldiers.

Oh, gosh.

Some of them were former prisoners of war.

Some of them were being mustered out of the service.

And they were put on this boat.