Buried Ships Prove Just the Ticket for History, Mystery Buff

The judge’s Town Car tears along the dirt road, bumping to a halt in the middle of a muddy field. Pine trees rustle in the bluffs. A snowy egret glides along a pond.

But the judge’s mind is racing back 136 years, to a time when the crackle of musket fire sounded across the meadow and the smell of gunpowder filled the air. A time when the ponderous Red River meandered through this spot, and gunboats struggled to navigate its shallow waters.

Two of the ships are still here--buried 40 feet beneath Mike Wahlder’s boots.

“I just want the whiskey and the guns,” booms Wahlder, a blustery 65-year-old Social Security judge who lives on a plantation, owns thousands of acres in the area and calls the Civil War wrecks the pride of his “backyard.”

Wahlder’s eyes twinkle. The truth is that no one knows if any whiskey or guns exist, and if they do, it’s not clear who would get them: Wahlder, who owns the land, or the U.S. government, which claims the ships.

Over the years, the river has changed course around the wrecks, and it now flows 150 feet to the west. The boats were covered by sediment and eventually by woodland.

The judge would like to dig them up.

Wahlder has no personal ties to these ships. He jokes that his family’s only connection to the Civil War is the fact that some of his ancestors were Confederate deserters.

But he loves the smell of history as much as the smell of a challenge. And he’s not a man to turn his back on either.

This is a man who, at age 21, spotted a beautiful woman in a travel brochure, tracked her to Israel and married her.

A man who challenged David Duke for the U.S. Senate in 1990, knowing he didn’t have a hope but determined to air his opinions regardless.

A man who feeds $100 bills into the riverboat casino slot machines in Vicksburg and sometimes walks away with thousands.

Envisioning the Past

Wahlder’s parties at his antique-filled mansion in the woods are legendary. His holdings are too. They include a riverside bluff where a mythical Indian princess named Creola was courted by her soldier lover (Wahlder is so enamored of the tale, he is incorporating a town in her name), a plot where archeologists dug up a 45-million-year-old dinosaur fossil, and a portion of a buried 16th century Spanish mission.

“I like dabbling in history,” Wahlder says. “History is romantic. And I’m a romantic.”

He’s also a pragmatic businessman who knows that history can be lucrative, whether it’s buying sites that can later be sold to the government, or getting a tax break for protecting history on his land.

“The snipers were firing from right over there,” Wahlder says, pointing to the distant bluffs--and to another time.

April 26, 1864. A warm light breeze drifted up the Red River, floating over the smoke and the noise and the enemy advancing through the pines.

The crew of the USS Eastport was desperate. They could hear the rebels’ muffled cries, see their shadows in the woods, practically smell defeat as the cannons roared and their mighty ironclad sank further into the mud.

“For the first time, hope left me,” Capt. Seth Ledyard Phelps wrote later. “My crew was worn out by labor beyond its power of endurance.”

After striking a Confederate mine just below Grand Ecore, the 700-ton ship, pride of the federal fleet, had limped about 60 miles downriver. The smaller tin clads, the Juliet and the Cricket, tried to haul it into higher water. To lighten it, the crew unloaded the heavy guns, the 30-pound Parrott rifles and the 50-pound Dahlgrens. They threw bales of captured Confederate cotton overboard.

But the river kept falling, and the rebels kept shooting, and the crippled gunboat was taking in water faster than the crew could bail. If they spent any more time trying to rescue the Eastport, the many other ships of the Red River fleet would be trapped behind enemy lines. Abandoning her would be to deliver her into the hands of the rebels.

So they loaded her with gunpowder and laid trims of cotton and tar. At 1:55 p.m., Capt. Phelps lit the match that blew his prized ironclad to pieces.

It was said that trees were bent for two miles by the force of the blast. Rear Admiral David D. Porter in his official report called it “as perfect a wreck as ever was made by powder.”

Or was it?

Porter’s report was written long before the development of technology to detect shipwrecks, and a century and a half before archeologists hung from a helicopter, dangling a magnetometer over Mike Wahlder’s land. A magnetometer is a small electrical box that measures changes in the earth’s magnetic field. The measurements it detected were enormous.

They suggested that the Eastport was largely intact. And they hinted at something much more: at another wreck buried in the mud, lying directly across the Eastport’s bow.

“We all knew about the Eastport,” Wahlder said. “At that point no one had heard of the Dix.”

The Ed. F. Dix, a 166-foot-long side-wheel steamer, was one of the many steamboats that chugged up and down the Missouri River carrying whiskey, tobacco and hides, and sometimes passengers. A year after being built, it was seized by government troops in New Orleans and pressed into service to carry troops up the Red.

Technically, the war was over. Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House a month earlier. But a number of Confederate units had split from their commands and were refusing to surrender.

So, in June 1865, loaded with men, horses and supplies of the 1st Louisiana Regiment of Cavalry Volunteers, the Dix steamed up the Red River as part of a mass movement of ships and troops to extinguish rebel skirmishes in Texas.

The troops were commanded by Capt. Samuel B. Alger and were heading to join Gen. George Armstrong Custer in Texas, explains Wahlder, who has read every book he can find on the campaign, visited all the major battlefields and hired a researcher to learn more about the captains, crews and cargoes.

The “steamboat graveyard,” as the Red River became known, dashed their plans.

At 9 a.m. on June 23, 1865, the wooden hull of the Dix bored into the submerged iron armor of the Eastport, which had sunk a year earlier. The Dix sank in 20 minutes.

“For a few minutes there was some agitation among those less accustomed than others to travel on steamboats,” wrote passenger A.M. Samford, in an understated account of the chaos as horses and men and guns tumbled into the river. “But this was speedily dissipated by the sober calmness of Capt. Henry [the ship’s captain] and his officers.”

No lives were lost, so the Dix was more or less forgotten and is barely mentioned in the official records. But there remained one huge mystery about its sinking: an insurance payment of $66,949 awarded by the government to its owners, two businessmen from St. Louis. The sum was enormous for the time--the Dix only cost $35,000 to build--leading to speculation about the cargo that had been lost. Heavy guns, whiskey, Spencer Carbine rifles, which would be considered rare treasures today? No one knows for sure.

Relishing the Search

Adding to the mystery is the fact that much of the file on the Dix, including its manifest, is missing from the National Archives in Washington.

“Either there was something valuable on that ship, or the owners were so influential that the government decided they had to be well compensated for its loss,” Wahlder says.

He grins his winner-take-all gambler’s grin. Whatever the result of his searching, he says, “I’m just having a hell of a time finding out.”

Wahlder gained the property in a land swap with a bank in 1994, after the search for the Eastport got underway. It was launched as part of a multimillion-dollar federal project to build a series of dams and locks on the Red River. Part of the project involved historic research. Under the National Historic Preservation Act, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is required to locate, identify and document significant historic resources.

So it dispatched archeologists to Montgomery to search for a lost ironclad.

For years, locals had speculated about the Eastport, wondering exactly where it sank and whether all the guns had been removed. Old Civil War maps indicated that the river had changed course. Fragments had been found--pieces of coal, a large iron nut, a rusted armor plate--in the swamps nearby. Older folks remembered their grandparents’ talking about diving on a wreck before the river shifted. There were rumors of barrels of whiskey and cases of guns.

But until government archeologists began scouring the riverbanks, brandishing their magnetometers and poring over old maps, no one had a clue that another wreck was buried there too.

“The only thing we were sure of was that a ship had gone down,” said Mike Sibley, one of the searchers. “And a ship is a pretty hard thing to lose.”

Sibley, a congressional aide at the time, was the local coordinator for the search. Like Wahlder, he grew up in the area, tramping the trenches of Grand Ecore and the battlefields of Vicksburg. He knew that the Red River campaign, a joint Union Army-Navy drive to take control of Texas, had been a disaster: the army routed, the ships turned back. He knew that Captain Phelps had first captured the Eastport from Confederates and then overseen its conversion into a Union ironclad. But, like Wahlder, Sibley didn’t know much more about the history of the scuttled gunboat or the individuals on board. And he knew nothing about the Dix.

But he had certainly heard of the judge.

“It didn’t surprise me at all,” he says, “to learn that those shipwrecks were on Mike Wahlder’s land.”

The search involved a dozen or so researchers, including Sibley, Corps archeologists and engineers, local historians and Wahlder himself.

In the summer of 1995 he watched as the Corps dug a large pit on his land, one that quickly filled with sediment and water. For 10 weeks, scuba divers descended into the murky depths. They crawled through the hatch of the Dix. They lowered themselves into its hull and onto the iron-encased deck of the Eastport. They placed their hands in the hole where the steamboat had struck the ironclad.

“The past just flashed before you,” said Sibley, who spent 30 minutes in the pit, exploring the wrecks. “You could almost hear the roar of the guns in your head.”

No lights could pierce the silt, so divers took measurements by tying knots in string, by taking mental notes and by radioing information about what they could feel. Gradually they pieced together a composite of the two ships, the hull of the Dix resting across the bow of the Eastport.

Wahlder watched as slivers of history were pulled from his field: metal from the Eastport’s casemate, charred timbers from its hull, shafts of wooden barrels from the Dix, stamped with the words “pilot bread” and “beans.”

From the start, archeologists made it clear that their purpose was simply to locate and document the wrecks, not conduct an exhaustive excavation or search for treasure. In fact, they argue, the best way to preserve the ships is to leave them be.

For now there is no other option. Raising the wrecks would cost millions, and no one is prepared to spend the money. Wahlder clings to the hope that things will change, that the government or a preservation group will decide his ships are worth digging up. It’s been done before. The USS Cairo, sunk in the Yazoo River in 1862, was raised a century later and is now exhibited at Vicksburg National Military Park. The Arabia, a side-wheel steamer that sank in the Missouri River in 1856, was raised from a Kansas cornfield and is now housed in a giant museum at the site.

“I’ll find out what is down there,” Wahlder proclaims. “It might take time and money, but I’ll find out.”

Time and money are not the only obstacles. Wahlder’s lawyer argues that because the ships were abandoned, they belong to his client. The government maintains that it never abandons ships and that any artifacts recovered belong to it.

“It is a terrible thing to destroy one’s ship,” Capt. Phelps wrote in 1864 in a letter to his wife describing the most difficult duty of his career. “But while I felt sad, I felt no sense of humiliation. We succumbed to the fiat of heaven and not to the power of an enemy.”

A century and a half later, Wahlder stands in the field where the boats went down, pondering the twist of history that brought him here. He wonders about the fate of the soldiers. Did Capt. Phelps ever get another command as prestigious as the Eastport? What of Capt. Alger, who commanded the troops on the Dix? Did he and his men eventually join Custer in Texas? And what about the lesser-known crew members: Henry Hartwig, the Eastport’s chief engineer, or 14-year-old Henry Augustus, a coal heaver and recently freed slave.

The judge peers into the pond. He sees only snakes. But it’s easy to sense ghosts on this land, to imagine the exhausted faces of the sailors, blackened by gun smoke, as they struggled to save their ship, to hear the snipers firing from the bluffs. For the moment, the images seem as real as the river, chocolate-colored and languorous, much the same as it looked in 1864, when one soldier wrote that he had never seen anything “so near being a compromise between earth and water” as the Red River.

The judge shrugs. There’s only so much imagining he can do. For now, his shipwreck site is a good place for duck-shooting. History, and its mysteries, must wait.

*

On the Net:

https://www.history.navy.mil/wars/civilwar.htm