February 26, 2024 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the story itself is the stuff of legends...a sunken steamboat, buried treasure, and the drive of a group of AC repairmen to become "rich beyond rich" even if it meant going into over a million dollars worth of debt. Matt Hawley tells the story of his family's quest to dig up the steamboat Arabia from the middle of a corn field.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the
iHeartRadio app, to Apple podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Or wherever you get your podcast up.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Next to story about a modern day treasure hunt that
involves whiskey and in an interesting place, the fields of Parkville, Missouri.
Here to tell the story of the hunt is Matt
Hawley of the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Take it away, Matt, Believe it or not.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
There's not a lot of people looking for steamboats. It
takes a certain blend of crazy to go after steamboats,
and the Hollys have just that right blend. My dad David,
he my uncle Greg, and my grandfather Bob. They worked
in HVAC so they fixed air conditioners, refrigerators, AC units
for people in the Kansas City metro area. Just a
(01:08):
blue collar family. And one day my dad took a
service call to fix an air conditioner.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
He met a unique guy.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
You know, we would probably look at him and say
he's kind of a conspiracy theorist. My dad walked into
this guy's house and passed a room and saw pictures
of Bigfoot on a wall, UFOs on the other, and
tables with maps just everywhere with is scribblings, notes, kind
of just all over the place. And my dad, he
wasn't really interested in Bigfoot or the UFOs, but he's
(01:40):
looking at these maps all over the tables and he
just said, you know, what are all these little dots
that you've vindicated? And the guy says, these are all
steamboats that have sunk in the Missouri River. And if
someone goes down and if they find a boat and
they sell everything they find, they will be rich, beyond rich.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
And my dad thought that was a pretty.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Cool idea that sounded more fun than fixing another furnace
or air conditioner. So my dad fixed the guy's unit,
gets in his truck and calls up my grandpa and
my uncle on their little Seebee radios and says, guys,
meet me at Jerry's.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
I got a story for you. So they all go
to a.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Fast food restaurant named High Boy. It was owned by
a guy named Jerry Mackey. Now, Jerry Mackie and my
grandfather were good friends. They learned to fly helicopters together.
They went on you know treasure hunts together in their
own rights. In Colorado, they'd go through old abandoned, you know,
gold mines. So everyone meets at High Boy and Jerry
(02:40):
comes out from the kitchen and sits down in the
booth with the guys, and my dad kind of recounts
the story of his morning, and they all were pretty
excited about that. They said, Dave, if you go find
a boat, if you find one that you like, will
go dig it. So my dad researched for years learned
the story of stating boats. In the Missouri River. There's
(03:03):
roughly four hundred sunken steamboats. Now, back in the heyday
of steamboats, the Missouri River was notoriously wide and shallow,
which made it very easy for the river to shift
its course one way or the other. Of the four
hundred boats that went down, seventy five percent went down
because of tree snags. So boats would hit these submerged
(03:26):
trees and they would sink very quickly. And around the
turn of the century, the Army Corps of Engineers realized
that we have a problem, like all these boats are
still sinking and the river is still pretty untamed. So
they started judging the river getting rid of snags, and
they made the river consistently narrow, more narrow and deeper,
(03:48):
which took the Missouri River, which is very wide, and
made it considerably more narrow.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
Than what we see today.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
So now all these steamboats are no longer in the
river itself.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
They're all in farm fields. But you can't just start
walking in farm fields. You need to know what you're
looking for.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
So my dad started trying to figure out where these
boats are. Came across the story of the Arabia, and
the story of the Arabia was General Goods in the
eighteen fifties. Sank just a few miles outside of Kansas City.
It went down on September fifth, eighteen fifty six, and
(04:25):
it was the perfect steamboat to go for. Sank quickly,
quickly enough that all the cargo was taken down with
the boat, but all one hundred and fifty passengers were
able to get off the boat safely. We didn't want
to have to deal with the people who didn't survive,
so the Arabia perfect. So we figured out who owned
(04:46):
the land. The landowner was an old wyan Dot County judge,
Judge Norman Sorder, and so my dad these guys go
knock on the judge's door and they say, Judge sorder
were not crazy, but we think there's a steamboat buried
in your cornfield. And the judge kind of looks at
him for a second and he says, oh, y'all are
(05:07):
talking about the Arabia.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
Come here, I'll show you where it is. The judge
knew all about the boat.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
His great grandfather had purchased the land from the Wyandot
Indians and they had told him that a great white
ship is buried.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
Under your land.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
And the Arabia was kind of famous because when it
sank in eighteen fifty six, it was reportedly carrying four
hundred barrels of Kentucky's finest bourbon. And when that boat sank,
everyone was writing stories about the Arabia and the whiskey barrels.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
What happened to him? Are they still on the boat?
Who's going to get them?
Speaker 3 (05:41):
And there were several attempts to get the Arabia's whiskey.
So when we showed up, you know, the judge he
was like, all right, now it's another group of you guys.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Come here.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
He took us in the field pretty much showed us
he said, it's somewhere right about here, and so my
dad walked the field with a device called a proton magnetometer.
We call it a fancy metal detector, but he was
able to use this magnetometer to pick up the large
iron boilers on board the Arabia. So we were able
to pinpoint its location in about two and a half
(06:12):
hours of actually walking the field, so pretty quick. We
talked to the judge and we structured a deal, and
he said, if y'all.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Want to waste your time and your money, you.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Go right ahead, but you will never get down to
that boat.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
We know where it is.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
The problem is ten feet below surface. There's an aquifer,
basically an underground river running through this field, and everyone
who's tried to get to this boat they've hit the
water and they've not been able to dewater the field
enough to get down to the boat, which is forty
five feet beneath the surface.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
So we said, well, we'd like to give it a shot.
So he said, you guys go right.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Ahead, and you're listening to Matt Hawley tell the story
of these crazy men trying to dig up the steamboat Arabia.
And it took crazy men to endeavor to do that,
as you just heard. And why when we come back,
what happens next? Do they dig it up? Don't they?
The story of Steamboat Arabia with Matt Hawley continues here
(07:14):
on our American Stories. Folks of you love the great
American stories we tell and love America.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Like we do.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
We're asking you to become a part of the our
American Stories family. If you agree that America is a
good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly
gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast
becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American
Stories dot com now and go to the donate button
and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
(07:54):
our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our
American Stories. And we returned to Matt Holly and the
(08:16):
story of the Steamboat Arabia. When we last left off,
Matt's dad and a group of fellow blue collar workers
had decided they wanted to dig up buried treasure. Buried
treasure in the form of a sunken steamboat called the Arabia.
And by the way, sunken on a farm. Let's continue
with a story.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
So word got out that this group of guys were
wanting to dig up a steamboat here in Missouri, and
our fifth partner came along, a guy named Dave Latrell.
He owned a construction company here in the area, and
Dave Latrell got ahold of us. He called Jerry on
the phone one day and said, you know, I read
about y'all story in the newspaper and I own a
(08:59):
construction company, but I've always wanted to do one crazy.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Thing before I die.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
And he said, I heard about you guys, and I
think that's exactly what I want to do. I want
to dig up a steam boat with you guys. Can
I come on board? And Jerry was, you know, it
was a Sunday. Jerry was talking to him on the phone.
He's like, actually, I'm on my way out the door
to a Chiefs game. Can I call you later after
the game?
Speaker 4 (09:18):
We'll talk.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Then Dave said, what section do you sit in? Turns
out Dave and Jerry were both season ticket holders. They
sat in the same section. They were like three rows
away from each other. So Dave and Jerry got together
in a Chiefs game some Sunday afternoon and that's when
Dave Watrell became the fifth partner. So the guys started
in the winner of nineteen eighty eight guys ever played.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
The game Battleship my family.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
They played Battleship in a cornfield for about three days,
and what they would do is they would drill down.
If they tapped on the boat, that hole would get
an orange surveyor flag and they would move over a
few feet repeat the process. If you missed, you'd get
a white flag.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
So after a few days.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Of doing it, you've got enough orange flags surrounding the
boat you can make a chalk outline to determine not
only where the hotspot is, but how the boat is
laying in the field itself. So sure enough, ten feet
down we hit river water and so at that point
we knew you can't just start digging.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
You have to get rid of the water.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
So we set up a series of wells. We bought twelve,
and each well could pump out one thousand gallons of
water a minute, and we thought, oh, surely that'll be
enough to get you know, the water table down.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
We'll get to the boat no problem. It ended up taking.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Twenty to get us down to the boat itself, each
pumping one thousand gallons of water every sixty seconds.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
So for the.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Duration of a four and a half month dig, we
were pumping twenty thousand gallons every sixty seconds, and that
was enough to get you down to the main deck
of the Arabia. And once we got into the dig,
you know, these guys were walking around sometimes in you know,
waste high water, and they said, if one pump went down.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
They were all diesel fuel generated.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
So they said, if one of those things ran out
of fuel and just shut off, you could feel the
water start to rise back up on your chest. So
we were truly at that tipping point. But now we
pumped down the water, we got down into the boat
and we started pulling up its cargo. Being in eighteen
fifties what we call general store collection. A lot of
(11:24):
these things are just the everyday things that people on
the frontier needed, general supplies, food, construction, building materials.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Things to put in the homes. And these boats are
kind of like.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
You know ups and FedEx trucks today. You know, they
carry some nice things, but not like probably a gold
chest of coins and you know, rubies and diamonds, and
we weren't expecting to find things like that. We were
looking for everyday American history. And the first barrel of
things we found we opened up the top and underneath
(11:59):
were the these beautiful china dishes, dishes from England. So
during the dig, these five guys are all married, and
you know, all the wives are pretty good sports letting
their boys go out and dig up steamboats. You know again,
blue collar guys through and through. So the idea of
digging up a steamboat.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
Is kind of different.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
So all the wives are a little nervous when you're
spending thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to get down
just to maybe find something. You know, is there really
something on board this boat.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
We don't know.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
But when we got down there and opened up this
first barrel and found these dishes right off the bat,
that's when all the moms and wives were like, you
know what, boys, this is a good idea. You keep digging.
I think this is gonna be an okay thing. So
that set off a four and a half month dig
that pulled up things that truly can't be found anywhere
(12:52):
else in the world. Nature had preserved the collections so
remarkably well we found food on board that was still edible. Again,
Jerry is a restaurant owner, and these guys are notorious
for eating just about anything. Jerry tried pickles, butter, cheese,
salt pork. We actually found bottles of shampain still had
(13:14):
carbonation inside them. Not surprisingly, four of the guys we're
willing to try that one. So again, just an incredibly
well preserved collection and just a story of American history
that you can't find anywhere else. Now, when you get
together with your buddies and you say, you know, let's
go on, let's go on this adventure together, you know,
(13:35):
of course, the conversation becomes, how are we going to
pay for this? You know, what is it going to
cost to dig up a steamboat? No one's really done
it before, so what do we think? And they're all
again blue collar guys. They work with their hands, you know,
they have tools. And Dave Latrell owns a construction company,
so this guy owns bulldozer.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
So we're thinking, oh.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Between all of us, if we each chip in ten
thousand apiece fifty thousand total, that's.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Going to be all the money in the world.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Fifty thousand lasted a week and a half of the dig,
so we just had to start borrowing from a bank.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
The dig ended up costing about.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
A million dollars all borrowed at that point, and then
of course we're thinking, well, once we got in the collection,
we realized we can't sell these things the story, you know,
the idea originally of selling it making a bunch of money,
that was the driving force at the beginning. But when
we found those dishes and we got into the collection,
(14:31):
we were finding all these just incredible stories. We said,
you can't sell something like this. You've got to keep
the story together. But we just borrowed a million dollars
to do it. So how are we going to recoup
our money from this? And a museum was just the
logical choice. So we had to go to the bank
and borrow another sum of money, about half a million
(14:53):
to build the museum that we currently reside in. So
we opened the doors three years to the day that
we started the excavation November thirteenth, nineteen eighty eight, we
started the dig. We opened the doors here at the
museum November thirteenth, nineteen ninety one, about one point five
million in debt, but we are proud to say we've
(15:14):
paid back all loans and we've kept the museum open
one hundred percent on ticket sales. We brought up two
hundred tons of lost cargo, and we looked at all
this stuff, and these guys are saying, you know, we're
fast cleaners, you know, so we'll get through everything. We'll
have it clean, preserved on display. It won't take more
than eight or nine years to do. We have been
(15:35):
now cleaning the Arabia collection for about thirty three years,
and at this point, I think I heard a little
while ago, we have somewhere I think between forty and
fifty tons still to go, and at this rate, we
think that'll take probably another ten, maybe twelve years of
NonStop preservation. The question of what happened to the whiskey
(15:55):
or where's the whiskey? I get that every single day,
and I always kind of laugh at folks say, sad story.
We never found the whiskey. We believe all those barrels
had been stored on the main deck of the boat,
so when it started to sink, the.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
River wiped them all downstream.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Now I hope, my genuine hope is some good old
boy farmer was just downstream fishing that night, kind of
relax and doing his thing, and he saw one barrel
float by and he's like, well that's interesting, looks up.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
So he's four hundred more coming down right behind, and
he had one heck of a party. That's what I
hope happened.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And a special thanks to Katrina Hine and to Monty
Montgomery for gathering that story and producing it. And a
special thanks to matt Hawley, who is the self described
and glorified museum tour guide. And the museum is the
Deanboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. If you're ever
in that neck of the woods, drop by. This is
the kind of Americana that we love to tell stories about.
(16:53):
We've done a story about the Toaster Museum, the Salt
and Pepper Shaker Museum, the Neon Light Museum, course, our
lawnmower racing show, our tank collector. We have a guy
who collected tanks. I'm talking tanks, like real military tanks.
And my goodness, what a story this is. As Matthew mentioned,
it takes a lot of crazy could want to collect
(17:14):
steamboat and my goodness, the story of how the Missouri
River well it led to a lot of sinking in steamboats.
Was fascinating in and of itself, four hundred sunk in steamboats.
And then the Army Corps of Engineers went to work,
narrowed that river, deepened it and the next thing you know,
those sunk in steamboats were sunken.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
In farm Field.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
And my goodness, one and a half million dollars later,
this little adventure, well it turned into this museum. And
how the wives managed to stay on board, and how
these guys kept their marriages in tech.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Maybe that's another story.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
The story of the steamboat Arabia Museum.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Here on our American story
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the
iHeartRadio app, to Apple podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Or wherever you get your podcast up.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Next to story about a modern day treasure hunt that
involves whiskey and in an interesting place, the fields of Parkville, Missouri.
Here to tell the story of the hunt is Matt
Hawley of the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Take it away, Matt, Believe it or not.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
There's not a lot of people looking for steamboats. It
takes a certain blend of crazy to go after steamboats,
and the Hollys have just that right blend. My dad David,
he my uncle Greg, and my grandfather Bob. They worked
in HVAC so they fixed air conditioners, refrigerators, AC units
for people in the Kansas City metro area. Just a
(01:08):
blue collar family. And one day my dad took a
service call to fix an air conditioner.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
He met a unique guy.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
You know, we would probably look at him and say
he's kind of a conspiracy theorist. My dad walked into
this guy's house and passed a room and saw pictures
of Bigfoot on a wall, UFOs on the other, and
tables with maps just everywhere with is scribblings, notes, kind
of just all over the place. And my dad, he
wasn't really interested in Bigfoot or the UFOs, but he's
(01:40):
looking at these maps all over the tables and he
just said, you know, what are all these little dots
that you've vindicated? And the guy says, these are all
steamboats that have sunk in the Missouri River. And if
someone goes down and if they find a boat and
they sell everything they find, they will be rich, beyond rich.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
And my dad thought that was a pretty.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Cool idea that sounded more fun than fixing another furnace
or air conditioner. So my dad fixed the guy's unit,
gets in his truck and calls up my grandpa and
my uncle on their little Seebee radios and says, guys,
meet me at Jerry's.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
I got a story for you. So they all go
to a.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Fast food restaurant named High Boy. It was owned by
a guy named Jerry Mackey. Now, Jerry Mackie and my
grandfather were good friends. They learned to fly helicopters together.
They went on you know treasure hunts together in their
own rights. In Colorado, they'd go through old abandoned, you know,
gold mines. So everyone meets at High Boy and Jerry
(02:40):
comes out from the kitchen and sits down in the
booth with the guys, and my dad kind of recounts
the story of his morning, and they all were pretty
excited about that. They said, Dave, if you go find
a boat, if you find one that you like, will
go dig it. So my dad researched for years learned
the story of stating boats. In the Missouri River. There's
(03:03):
roughly four hundred sunken steamboats. Now, back in the heyday
of steamboats, the Missouri River was notoriously wide and shallow,
which made it very easy for the river to shift
its course one way or the other. Of the four
hundred boats that went down, seventy five percent went down
because of tree snags. So boats would hit these submerged
(03:26):
trees and they would sink very quickly. And around the
turn of the century, the Army Corps of Engineers realized
that we have a problem, like all these boats are
still sinking and the river is still pretty untamed. So
they started judging the river getting rid of snags, and
they made the river consistently narrow, more narrow and deeper,
(03:48):
which took the Missouri River, which is very wide, and
made it considerably more narrow.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
Than what we see today.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
So now all these steamboats are no longer in the
river itself.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
They're all in farm fields. But you can't just start
walking in farm fields. You need to know what you're
looking for.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
So my dad started trying to figure out where these
boats are. Came across the story of the Arabia, and
the story of the Arabia was General Goods in the
eighteen fifties. Sank just a few miles outside of Kansas City.
It went down on September fifth, eighteen fifty six, and
(04:25):
it was the perfect steamboat to go for. Sank quickly,
quickly enough that all the cargo was taken down with
the boat, but all one hundred and fifty passengers were
able to get off the boat safely. We didn't want
to have to deal with the people who didn't survive,
so the Arabia perfect. So we figured out who owned
(04:46):
the land. The landowner was an old wyan Dot County judge,
Judge Norman Sorder, and so my dad these guys go
knock on the judge's door and they say, Judge sorder
were not crazy, but we think there's a steamboat buried
in your cornfield. And the judge kind of looks at
him for a second and he says, oh, y'all are
(05:07):
talking about the Arabia.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
Come here, I'll show you where it is. The judge
knew all about the boat.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
His great grandfather had purchased the land from the Wyandot
Indians and they had told him that a great white
ship is buried.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
Under your land.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
And the Arabia was kind of famous because when it
sank in eighteen fifty six, it was reportedly carrying four
hundred barrels of Kentucky's finest bourbon. And when that boat sank,
everyone was writing stories about the Arabia and the whiskey barrels.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
What happened to him? Are they still on the boat?
Who's going to get them?
Speaker 3 (05:41):
And there were several attempts to get the Arabia's whiskey.
So when we showed up, you know, the judge he
was like, all right, now it's another group of you guys.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Come here.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
He took us in the field pretty much showed us
he said, it's somewhere right about here, and so my
dad walked the field with a device called a proton magnetometer.
We call it a fancy metal detector, but he was
able to use this magnetometer to pick up the large
iron boilers on board the Arabia. So we were able
to pinpoint its location in about two and a half
(06:12):
hours of actually walking the field, so pretty quick. We
talked to the judge and we structured a deal, and
he said, if y'all.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Want to waste your time and your money, you.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Go right ahead, but you will never get down to
that boat.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
We know where it is.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
The problem is ten feet below surface. There's an aquifer,
basically an underground river running through this field, and everyone
who's tried to get to this boat they've hit the
water and they've not been able to dewater the field
enough to get down to the boat, which is forty
five feet beneath the surface.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
So we said, well, we'd like to give it a shot.
So he said, you guys go right.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Ahead, and you're listening to Matt Hawley tell the story
of these crazy men trying to dig up the steamboat Arabia.
And it took crazy men to endeavor to do that,
as you just heard. And why when we come back,
what happens next? Do they dig it up? Don't they?
The story of Steamboat Arabia with Matt Hawley continues here
(07:14):
on our American Stories. Folks of you love the great
American stories we tell and love America.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Like we do.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
We're asking you to become a part of the our
American Stories family. If you agree that America is a
good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly
gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast
becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American
Stories dot com now and go to the donate button
and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
(07:54):
our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our
American Stories. And we returned to Matt Holly and the
(08:16):
story of the Steamboat Arabia. When we last left off,
Matt's dad and a group of fellow blue collar workers
had decided they wanted to dig up buried treasure. Buried
treasure in the form of a sunken steamboat called the Arabia.
And by the way, sunken on a farm. Let's continue
with a story.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
So word got out that this group of guys were
wanting to dig up a steamboat here in Missouri, and
our fifth partner came along, a guy named Dave Latrell.
He owned a construction company here in the area, and
Dave Latrell got ahold of us. He called Jerry on
the phone one day and said, you know, I read
about y'all story in the newspaper and I own a
(08:59):
construction company, but I've always wanted to do one crazy.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Thing before I die.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
And he said, I heard about you guys, and I
think that's exactly what I want to do. I want
to dig up a steam boat with you guys. Can
I come on board? And Jerry was, you know, it
was a Sunday. Jerry was talking to him on the phone.
He's like, actually, I'm on my way out the door
to a Chiefs game. Can I call you later after
the game?
Speaker 4 (09:18):
We'll talk.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Then Dave said, what section do you sit in? Turns
out Dave and Jerry were both season ticket holders. They
sat in the same section. They were like three rows
away from each other. So Dave and Jerry got together
in a Chiefs game some Sunday afternoon and that's when
Dave Watrell became the fifth partner. So the guys started
in the winner of nineteen eighty eight guys ever played.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
The game Battleship my family.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
They played Battleship in a cornfield for about three days,
and what they would do is they would drill down.
If they tapped on the boat, that hole would get
an orange surveyor flag and they would move over a
few feet repeat the process. If you missed, you'd get
a white flag.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
So after a few days.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Of doing it, you've got enough orange flags surrounding the
boat you can make a chalk outline to determine not
only where the hotspot is, but how the boat is
laying in the field itself. So sure enough, ten feet
down we hit river water and so at that point
we knew you can't just start digging.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
You have to get rid of the water.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
So we set up a series of wells. We bought twelve,
and each well could pump out one thousand gallons of
water a minute, and we thought, oh, surely that'll be
enough to get you know, the water table down.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
We'll get to the boat no problem. It ended up taking.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Twenty to get us down to the boat itself, each
pumping one thousand gallons of water every sixty seconds.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
So for the.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Duration of a four and a half month dig, we
were pumping twenty thousand gallons every sixty seconds, and that
was enough to get you down to the main deck
of the Arabia. And once we got into the dig,
you know, these guys were walking around sometimes in you know,
waste high water, and they said, if one pump went down.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
They were all diesel fuel generated.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
So they said, if one of those things ran out
of fuel and just shut off, you could feel the
water start to rise back up on your chest. So
we were truly at that tipping point. But now we
pumped down the water, we got down into the boat
and we started pulling up its cargo. Being in eighteen
fifties what we call general store collection. A lot of
(11:24):
these things are just the everyday things that people on
the frontier needed, general supplies, food, construction, building materials.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Things to put in the homes. And these boats are
kind of like.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
You know ups and FedEx trucks today. You know, they
carry some nice things, but not like probably a gold
chest of coins and you know, rubies and diamonds, and
we weren't expecting to find things like that. We were
looking for everyday American history. And the first barrel of
things we found we opened up the top and underneath
(11:59):
were the these beautiful china dishes, dishes from England. So
during the dig, these five guys are all married, and
you know, all the wives are pretty good sports letting
their boys go out and dig up steamboats. You know again,
blue collar guys through and through. So the idea of
digging up a steamboat.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
Is kind of different.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
So all the wives are a little nervous when you're
spending thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to get down
just to maybe find something. You know, is there really
something on board this boat.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
We don't know.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
But when we got down there and opened up this
first barrel and found these dishes right off the bat,
that's when all the moms and wives were like, you
know what, boys, this is a good idea. You keep digging.
I think this is gonna be an okay thing. So
that set off a four and a half month dig
that pulled up things that truly can't be found anywhere
(12:52):
else in the world. Nature had preserved the collections so
remarkably well we found food on board that was still edible. Again,
Jerry is a restaurant owner, and these guys are notorious
for eating just about anything. Jerry tried pickles, butter, cheese,
salt pork. We actually found bottles of shampain still had
(13:14):
carbonation inside them. Not surprisingly, four of the guys we're
willing to try that one. So again, just an incredibly
well preserved collection and just a story of American history
that you can't find anywhere else. Now, when you get
together with your buddies and you say, you know, let's
go on, let's go on this adventure together, you know,
(13:35):
of course, the conversation becomes, how are we going to
pay for this? You know, what is it going to
cost to dig up a steamboat? No one's really done
it before, so what do we think? And they're all
again blue collar guys. They work with their hands, you know,
they have tools. And Dave Latrell owns a construction company,
so this guy owns bulldozer.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
So we're thinking, oh.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Between all of us, if we each chip in ten
thousand apiece fifty thousand total, that's.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Going to be all the money in the world.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Fifty thousand lasted a week and a half of the dig,
so we just had to start borrowing from a bank.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
The dig ended up costing about.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
A million dollars all borrowed at that point, and then
of course we're thinking, well, once we got in the collection,
we realized we can't sell these things the story, you know,
the idea originally of selling it making a bunch of money,
that was the driving force at the beginning. But when
we found those dishes and we got into the collection,
(14:31):
we were finding all these just incredible stories. We said,
you can't sell something like this. You've got to keep
the story together. But we just borrowed a million dollars
to do it. So how are we going to recoup
our money from this? And a museum was just the
logical choice. So we had to go to the bank
and borrow another sum of money, about half a million
(14:53):
to build the museum that we currently reside in. So
we opened the doors three years to the day that
we started the excavation November thirteenth, nineteen eighty eight, we
started the dig. We opened the doors here at the
museum November thirteenth, nineteen ninety one, about one point five
million in debt, but we are proud to say we've
(15:14):
paid back all loans and we've kept the museum open
one hundred percent on ticket sales. We brought up two
hundred tons of lost cargo, and we looked at all
this stuff, and these guys are saying, you know, we're
fast cleaners, you know, so we'll get through everything. We'll
have it clean, preserved on display. It won't take more
than eight or nine years to do. We have been
(15:35):
now cleaning the Arabia collection for about thirty three years,
and at this point, I think I heard a little
while ago, we have somewhere I think between forty and
fifty tons still to go, and at this rate, we
think that'll take probably another ten, maybe twelve years of
NonStop preservation. The question of what happened to the whiskey
(15:55):
or where's the whiskey? I get that every single day,
and I always kind of laugh at folks say, sad story.
We never found the whiskey. We believe all those barrels
had been stored on the main deck of the boat,
so when it started to sink, the.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
River wiped them all downstream.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Now I hope, my genuine hope is some good old
boy farmer was just downstream fishing that night, kind of
relax and doing his thing, and he saw one barrel
float by and he's like, well that's interesting, looks up.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
So he's four hundred more coming down right behind, and
he had one heck of a party. That's what I
hope happened.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And a special thanks to Katrina Hine and to Monty
Montgomery for gathering that story and producing it. And a
special thanks to matt Hawley, who is the self described
and glorified museum tour guide. And the museum is the
Deanboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. If you're ever
in that neck of the woods, drop by. This is
the kind of Americana that we love to tell stories about.
(16:53):
We've done a story about the Toaster Museum, the Salt
and Pepper Shaker Museum, the Neon Light Museum, course, our
lawnmower racing show, our tank collector. We have a guy
who collected tanks. I'm talking tanks, like real military tanks.
And my goodness, what a story this is. As Matthew mentioned,
it takes a lot of crazy could want to collect
(17:14):
steamboat and my goodness, the story of how the Missouri
River well it led to a lot of sinking in steamboats.
Was fascinating in and of itself, four hundred sunk in steamboats.
And then the Army Corps of Engineers went to work,
narrowed that river, deepened it and the next thing you know,
those sunk in steamboats were sunken.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
In farm Field.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
And my goodness, one and a half million dollars later,
this little adventure, well it turned into this museum. And
how the wives managed to stay on board, and how
these guys kept their marriages in tech.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Maybe that's another story.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
The story of the steamboat Arabia Museum.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Here on our American story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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