SEARCHING FOR THE COLUMBIA

Picture is an overlay using photo provided Murphy Library Special Collections, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Wisconsin and a picture of the Wesley City river bend taken by author.

Perhaps one of the greatest mysteries, as well as the greatest disasters to ever take place on Illinois waterways; even today, the sinking of the riverboat Columbia continues to haunt the pages of American history. Now over a hundred years later, I wanted to find the place where the famed riverboat sank killing 87 people and injuring hundreds; a place that, even today, remains unmarked and unremembered. Could I find it, and with it, the ghost of the Columbia? To try, my search would have to begin with that cool evening on July 4^th, 1918 when it all happened.

THE WARNING OF WHAT WAS TO COME

A breath of cool air descended over the great riverboat as a thick fog lay dead ahead. Both Captain Herman Mehl and Pilot Tom Williams had seen fog like it before, but not in summertime in mid-state Illinois, and not in July when it is supposed to be hot. The uncharacteristic cold and dense fog should have been an omen for all those aboard the Columbia that Fourth of July evening, in 1918, and perhaps for some, it was.

Like Ishmael in the classic movie Moby Dick (starring Gregory Peck), encountering the profit Joshua, warning him that the whaling ship he was about to board was doomed; Herman Mehl, Captain and Owner of the Columbia, had his own unnerving encounter earlier in the evening. A passenger, an older seaman, with desperation in his voice told the Captain, “The ship is riding too low in the water...entirely too low”. So convinced that something was wrong with the ship, both the man and his wife refused to get back on at Al Fresco Park for the return trip to Pekin, a decision that likely saved their lives.

Even then, Captian Mehl gave the man’s concern little credence. Just months before he had spent over fifteen thousand dollars (tantamount to a quarter of a million dollars today) on refurbishments meant to insure the safety of the ship. They had also just taken on close to a hundred tons of coal which, added to the weight of the five hundred passengers, would have understandably made the ship ride lower in the water. Add to that, Federal inspectors had just months before, proclaimed the Columbia to be the “safest vessel on western waters”. So proud of the claim and trusting in it so completely, Captain Mehl had the words “SAFETY FIRST” prominently painted on the side of the ship, and to tempt fate even further, he refused to insure the vessel that year.

NIGHT EXCURSIONS TO AL FRESCO PARK

The evening excursion from Pekin to the amusement park Al Fresco Park on the far side of Peoria had become a popular evening entertainment venue on the Illinois River, but tonight, it would end far differently than past excursions. It would be the perfect storm of strange and unlikely occurrences that, had they happened individually, might not have caused the disaster, but together, intersecting at a single moment in time, they resulted in what many Illinois historians would describe as one of the greatest maritime disasters in US history.

It happened just before midnight on the return trip to Pekin Illinois. On the last leg of her journey home from Al Fresco Park, the Columbia passed under the Peoria and Pekin Union Railway Bridge, little more than a mile from the Pekin dock, when an eerie fog appeared. Ahead, lay the Wesley City bend in the river and beyond it, the Wesley City sandbar. Number 11 sandbar had become one of the most notorious obstacles in the river and one of the most difficult to navigate around. Tonight it would be far worse than normal. The current was faster due to rains upstream, earlier in the evening, and now, this dense fog.

Captain Mehl called up to the pilothouse to, “Turn on the Sun”, the nickname given to the large carbon ark search light at the front of the ship. Suddenly, the huge light lit up the night. Panning back and forth from bank to bank, a riverboat precautionary measure used by pilots to stay in the middle of the channel and deeper water, but many pilots looked at using the big light as a sign of inexperience. As masters of the river, experts of the water, they prided themselves on knowing every inch of the river--every ripple on the surface, every shallow, and every sandbar. In the days before channels were dredged, making it safer for boats to navigate the river safely, riverboat captains and pilots had to be able to read the river: how swirls and ripples on the surface meant how shallow or deep the river might be. One such device used was a rope with knots spaced in single feet increments with a weight at one end. When dropped over the side, the number of knots indicated the distance between the bottom of the river and the bottom of the boat. They called it “marking the twain”. It also is where Samuel Clemons, a licensed river boat captain and soon to be author of such American classics as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, would get his pen name-Mark Twain.

Wesley City Bend — Wesley City River Bend

Tonight however, the big light caught in the dense fog only made the banks harder to see. As the Columbia traversed the bend in the river, Tom felt the big paddle wheeler drift. Hard to port he tried to compensate, but it was too much. The Columbia shuttered as it suddenly lodged on top of the Wesley City sandbar on the Peoria County side of the river.

People on the opposite Tazwell County shore remembered hearing the roar of the Columbia’s engine as the Pilot Tom Williams tried to back it off the sandbar under full power. Now sensing the worst and remembering the old seaman’s warning earlier in the evening, Captain Mehl had a crew member check the below deck. He came back white as a ghost. “At least two feet of water and rising fast...sir,” the young man reported.

Had they also hit a tree stump in the water that put a hole in the side of the boat? Had the massive steel hog chains that essentially held the massive wooden ship together been compromised when Tom tried to back up under full power? No one would ever know, but Captain Mehl knew one thing for sure. The Columbia was sinking.

Once, Tom Williams backed the Columbia off the sandbar he made the decision to head for the Tazwell County side of the river where the shore was not overgrown like the Peoria side. Little did he realize they only had minutes before the Columbia would founder. Even if the ship sank, Mehl reasoned, the water was only fifteen feet deep. The Columbia was forty feet tall from the water line so people would still be safe on the upper two decks should the worst happen. Also people lived on the Tazwell shoreline, fishermen and coal miners, who would be able to help passengers get off the ship safely. But before the Columbia could get there another cruel twist of fate would intervene.

The dominos of fate began falling the moment the Columbia hit the sandbar. Now only a few yards away, the great steamer began to list, as black water rushed in. Only seconds from safety the Columbia shuttered in the darkness, her hull split open and she went straight down. The upper decks suddenly burst apart collapsing, beams shattering, cables snapping. In a matter of seconds the upper decks collapsed beneath the breach, wood and metal surrendering, the terrified screams of people trapped below echoed up through the hemorrhaging body of the dying ship. The great riverboat Columbia gasped her last breath as the black river flooded her broken body. Just moments before Captain Mehl frantically ordered everyone to the upper decks, but many would not make it. Now he could only watch in horror as the night turned pitch black, under a starless, moonless sky. The warning bell of the Columbia rang feverishly, pleading for help. On shore lights began to come on as rescuers rushed to their small skiffs and head toward the foundering riverboat.

In all, eighty-seven people died as the upper decks mysteriously collapsed on to of them. Many

women and children were among the dead, one young mother was pulled from beneath the wreckage still holding her two babies in her arms...all three dead. Men who manned the small jack boats and skiffs, heading into the black night of an angry river wept as they pulled the dead from the wreckage. Beside the eighty-seven dead hundreds of others, hurt and clinging to anything they could find, were pulled from the wreckage. Many others would relive the nightmare of that night for years to come. The bell once used to sound the alarm had to be wrapped to keep it silent as it was carried from the wreck. Captain Mehl, so devastated by the carnage, could not bear to hear it ring. In the days after the disaster, the pilot, Tom Williams left the river never to return. He would die in a mental institution years later, still hearing the sounds of the passengers, trapped and dying, in the decks below.

Hundreds of families and generations to follow would be scarred by the events of that single night. And yet, America, still numb from the sinking of the Titanic six years earlier, and in the midst of the First World War, would never fully realize the magnitude of what happened that night on the Illinois River. Within a generation, the wreck of the Columbia would become “little more than a footnote on the pages of history, as Ken Zurski, author of “The Wreck of the Columbia” would say.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

Why do certain things linger in the back of our minds, haunting the gray cells of memory like ghosts? I don’t know the answer to that, though, I often have those ghosts myself. One in particular for me, is and always has been the Columbia.

I grew up in a small town called Glasford not far from either Peoria or Pekin, the home of the Columbia and during the days of the riverboat excursions at the turn of the century, it was not uncommon for people from small towns near the Illinois River like Glasford, Canton, Mapleton and Kingston Mines, to be the patrons of the Columbia. They boarded at small landings along the river, but typically, as on the night of the disaster, the bulk of the 500 souls aboard came from Pekin.

Even as a kid in grade school, the story of the Columbia fascinated me. Imagine a huge riverboat sinking in the Illinois River, but how could that happen? If it hit a sandbar, was it not already sitting on the bottom of the river? It was not until years later when a friend sent me Ken Zurski’s book “Wreck of the Columbia” that the mystery of the Columbia disaster would make sense, and rekindle my interest.

SOME PERSPECTIVE

If you are unfamiliar with Pekin Illinois, and unless you live in Illinois you probably aren’t, Pekin is a small city with a population of roughly 34,000, but in 1918, at the time of the wreck, it had a population of around 12,000 people. Peoria, only ten miles away and its largest neighbor, had, at the same time, a population of 80,000. Along the Illinois River between Pekin and Peoria, there are a number of smaller towns, one important to this story--Creve Coeur, known in 1918 as Wesley City. It was also the namesake of the bend in the river between Pekin and Peoria known as the “Wesley City end”, and of the notorious sand bar in the river that the Columbia hit--the Wesley City sandbar.

By 1918, The Columbia had become the Queen of the Illinois River: a popular entertainment venue, but before that, rivers were mostly used to move goods from city to city on what was called “packet or pack boats” which were steam driven and the forerunners of the later steam paddle wheel excursion boats. At the time they were key to much of the growth in the country, and interestingly, most of the battles of the Civil War were fought on or near large river cities because the rivers became the means, by which, the north and south moved troops, weapons, and ammunition from one battle site to another. When trains came along however, that changed dramatically and pack boats quickly became a thing of the past.

To adapt to the new economy many pack boats were bought up and converted into excursion boats, and the Columbia, purchased by Captain Herman Mehl early in 1917, was no exception. It had previously been a pack boat named the Douglas Boardman and like many of the refitted excursion riverboats, The Columbia was actually an “old” boat with a new face, which likely played heavily in her final demise.

Add to that the transition from workhorse to show horse had a dark side. Even when they were new, pack boats had a spotty reputation of safety: boiler explosions, fires, and even deaths were not uncommon; and those dangers only grew more probable as the aging refaced pack boats became entertainment venues.

WHEN FASCINATION BECOMES A PASSION

It is hard to say when my interest in the Columbia became a journey. I had thought for many years that the story of it would make a great song, like Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald”. It, however, did not occur to me, even though I am a trained musician and songwriter, to actually write it myself. Then one day while playing around with the guitar, the pieces of the story and a melody line began to fall into place.

In my first set of lyrics I had the Columbia hitting a log in the water (which is actually still in dispute today) and then capsizing while trying to make it to the opposite “Tazwell County” shore. I was really only guessing, but in an effort to be at least somewhat accurate I reached out to Ken Zurski himself, the author of “The Wreck of the Columbia” and probably the foremost expert on the Columbia and its eventual demise.

He told me for the most part that everything I had written was wrong. “Didn’t you read my book?” he asked. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had put it in a box, stored it in the garage, and now didn’t know where it was. I did buy it again, however, but not until later.

For some reason, even though I had read it years ago, I had forgotten what had actually happened, or maybe it hadn’t sunk in because it was so strange. Either way, hearing it again from Ken, was like hearing it for the first time and I began to realize this wasn’t just an accident. It was a perfect storm of events that began years before with the purchase and refitting of the pack boat Douglas Foreman- transforming it into the “Columba”, and culminating several years later in a series of events, that each on its own, might not have caused the disaster, but in their aggregate, sealed the fate of the Columbia.

I corrected the lyrics, though admittedly some are not entirely accurate, relying on a little artist license since the multitude of details simply wouldn’t fit into a four verses and choruses. Fitting a story like the Columbia into a single song is like fitting twenty people into an elevator that only holds five, as I found out. But I finished it late in 2017 and put it to music and released it on YouTube to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the Columbia’s sinking which you can still see today at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYDYh_4koZM .

In 2019, I re-mastered the recording after more than 300 views, which when resubmitted, dropped the count down to 78 views (should you go out to see it). Overall, between both versions I suspect there have been close to 500 hundred people that have seen it.

But for some reason finishing the project was not enough. After all the research I had done I had grown close to the Columba. In the back of my mind I wondered, did the place where it happened still exist? And could I find it?

Perhaps it was a morbid idea, my wanting to find the site where so many people had died so horrifically, but I realized that wasn’t why I wanted to go. To me there is something almost sacred about such places: like parents who have lost a child, who keep the child’s room exactly as it was when he or she lived there. Maybe that’s why I wanted to go where the Columbia went down, because I wanted to connect with that sense of “hope”, the most important part of remembering. That is how it began, my search for the Columbia. I knew the wrecked remains of the Columbia had long since been removed. But the presence of it--the location of where it happened, call it the spirit of the Columbia...would still be there.

In the March of 2017 I went back to Pekin Illinois for the birthday of my wife’s mother. The day after I set out by myself to find the Columbia, or rather where she sank. I read about a group of historic divers (Mudwater Archeology Society) who had been to the site the year before, thinking there may still be some remnants of the Columbia still on the river bottom. They were disappointed when they got there, finding out that they could not dive due to barges that were frequently parked along the shoreline. Even so, John (one of the divers) was more that happy to share the coordinates with me and I wished luck on my journey.

It was a cold day with a scatter of snow still on the ground when I arrived at the site. I turned off Route 9 onto Old Wesley City Road (which still exists) and turned out to be little more than a

narrow, worn, road; nothing like the main artery it had once been between Pekin and East Peoria. Barley wide enough for two cars to pass, I traveled the full length of what was left before realizing that I had somehow passed the location. John from Mudwater told me if I got to a restaurant called “Kuchie’s on the Water” I had gone to far. But the location was close, just south of the restaurant. So I parked the car there and set off on foot.

The night before I went over all my pictures and newspaper clippings to see if I could identify certain landscape characteristics in the background of the pictures that might pin point the actual location of the accident. When I arrived I saw the train tracks running along the other side of Wesley City road, just as they had back in 1918. Unfortunately, a train had stopped directly across from where I thought the site might be, and the tracks were so close, it made it nearly impossible for me to see the hillside beyond. None-the-less, I feel like I found where the Columbia went down. To my surprise, there was no marker there, no plaque, no anything.

Standing on that prosaic, indistinguishable little postage stamp of shoreline I remembered my conversation with John from Mudwater when I told him I planned to visit the site. I thought he, being a scientist and historical archeologist, might not understand or even appreciate why I wanted to go there. To my surprise he understood perfectly. “When you’re there, close your eyes and just listen to the river. You can almost feel the presence of the Columbia and what happened there,” he said.

I thought of what happened that night. From the moment the ship’s alarm bell began ringing, when small boats from the village started dotting the river headed for the wrecked Columbia. Fishermen and miners who lived in Wesley City rushed out into the black starless night, in their small skiffs and johnboats, fighting the fast current of an angry river, risking their lives to save total strangers. They would become the real heroes of the day, and had they not been there, the death toll would have been far more than the 78 people.

I looked at my surroundings. The area had changed, but not a lot. Wesley City Road is paved, but back in 1918 it choked with mud after the rains complicating the rescue efforts. The dead were brought ashore where I now stood, lined up on the shoreline before transporting them to Pekin landing, where they could be transported to the local morgue. There is a plaque at the Pekin landing commemorating the sinking of the Columbia and the aftermath, but surprisingly, there is nothing at the location where it actually happened.

In the days immediately following the accident people came from all over to watch the spectacle and for some there was almost a festive air to it, but for others, the trauma was too much. They left trying to forget what they had seen. Trains stopped at the location unloading hundreds of onlookers, having come by way of the same bridge that the Columbia had passed beneath in its rendezvous with fate. It was reported that Wesley City Road had become overcome with thousands of people, which hardly seems possible given the narrow road and the lack of places where hundreds of cars were reported to have parked.

Hundreds of harrowing stories came from the survivors, and for a while they dominated the local newspapers, but only for a short time, and then, they were gone, disappearing in the news of a world at war. The sunken hull of the Columbia remained for months, her broken and twisted body, dead in the water, a testament to the dangers of trusting fate, before finally being dredged up and hauled away. Now only a few artifacts remain, mostly in local museums, along with the stories passed down over the years to people who have grandparents or friends old enough to remember the disaster. Not until the Pekin Memorial Service in 2018 commemorating the hundred year of the anniversary of the disaster, did her story resurface. Along with a PBS Video on the Wreck of the Columbia, and probably the best memorial of all, the book written by Ken Zurski, “The Wreck of the Columbia; the rest has all but passed from the collective memory of a town and region that lived an unimaginable tragedy.

As I stood on the banks overlooking where the Columbia gasped her last breath, I closed my eyes-- a moment of silence just to remember, as John from Mudwater suggested. Like ripples on the water that have long forgotten the stone that caused them, I could still feel her, just beyond the shoreline, removed by time but still part of timeless life of the river.

I opened my eyes to look out on the water, remembering the one story that I heard so long ago: how for years after the accident, people would come to the river on the Fourth of July to lay flowers on the water. They came to remember their lost loved ones: mothers and fathers, children and grand parents, friends and neighbors. They came, like me, to find the “hope” in remembering; and to say a little prayer that might somehow cross the span of time to find the ones that they had lost.

On July 4th, 2018, the city of Pekin held a memorial service at the river’s edge to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the Columbia disaster. They came, as many had come in the past, to lay flowers on the water and remember. And as they laid flowers on the water, the last survivor of the Columbia, Lucille Bruder Adcock passed away at the age of 106 in a nearby nursing home, and with her, the last living remembrance of the Columbia passed from collective memory to the pages of history.

I don’t know why the story of the Columbia affected me so deeply, why this journey had become so important, but it did. Perhaps learning to cherish what we have lost, helps us to more fully appreciate the true providence of life and what we have been given. At any rate, I did what I set out to do. I found the place where the Columbia went down. As I stood there in those last minutes, I wished I had thought to bring a flower with me. It would have been a fitting end to my journey, to lay a flower on the river....I wish I had.

SOURCES

Thanks to the “Murphy Library Special Collections, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Wisconsin for Photo Contributions of the Columbia.

Thanks to Pekin Public Library for photographic and historical documentation.

Thanks to Peoria Journal Star for historical articles and photographs.

Author Note: The Wreck of the Columbia by Ken Zurski is an amazing book. If you enjoyed this article, I recommend taking some time to read his book. There is far more to the story of the Columbia than what I have written about here.

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SEARCHING FOR THE COLUMBIA