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The river has granted a partial yielding of the dead.
Weighed 110 tons
The Sea Wing was a stern-wheel rafter, 135-feet long, 22-feet in height — her height was said to make her skittish in wind — weighing about 110 tons.
She was built in 1888 and operated out of Diamond Bluff, Wis., across the river and north of Red Wing.
Powered by a six-piston steam engine, Sea Wing shepherded lumber and other commodities down the Mississippi River.
It was not a unique occupation.
Steamboats had plied the Upper Mississippi for decades and their authoritative whistles were commonly heard even above St. Anthony Falls.
The Sea Wing was captained and partly owned by Capt. David Wethern, 37-years-old, husband and father.
A photograph of Wethern with his family suggests a man of certitude.
Wethern would be accused of “unskillfulness” and temporarily lose his pilot’s license as a result of the disaster, but his loss cut deeper.
His wife Nellie and 8-year-old son Perley accompanied him on the excursion to the National Guard camp at Lake City, and both drowned.
Survivors remember Nellie sitting in a rocking chair outside a stateroom cabin in which Perley was napping after the picnic and military display at Lake City.
Gave contradictory statements
Wethern would later give contradictory statements about July 13, but defended his actions and that of the crew.
The Sea Wing was not unequipped for emergencies.
Wethern testified at an inquest the boat carried more than 300 “floats” and seven life boats.
An advertisement for the Lake City excursion appeared in the Red Wing “Argus” on Thursday, July 10.
It promised a splendid outing.
Besides boasting a string orchestra — a band member later swam to safety by using his bass viola as a life preserver — excursioners could spend time lounging on the covered barge, Jim Grant, which would be lashed broadside to the Sea Wing.
Cost: fifty cents.
Some people paid nothing.
Ten-year-old Gustaf Lenus Lillyblad, of Red Wing, went on the excursion for free by helping to load ice.
The majority of the 98 Sea Wing victims were from Red Wing, and a local undertaker would suffer a nervous breakdown because of the rush of bodies, it’s said.
Disasters often seem leavened with omens and premonitions and the Sea Wing disaster is no different.
According to accounts, an itinerant preacher, a large Greek with a grey beard named Georgas, warned those who would listen against boarding the Sea Wing.
Left shortly after noon
It’s said shortly after noon on July 13, Georgas left Diamond Bluff unable to witness the impending sorrow about to be visited on families and communities.
Humans have a fondness for making man-made disasters into morality plays, so the brooding figure of Georgas seems suspicious.
He may have existed, and assuming he didn’t make calamitous prophecies at every town — sooner or later bound to be correct — perhaps his warning was divinely inspired
Or perhaps not.
Georgas was described as a “walking missionary,” and it might be assumed a person in such employment would be intimately acquainted with the weather.
Sunday, July 13, 1890, was hot, oppressive, close.
It wouldn’t have been too difficult to foresee violent weather had hot, humid weather extended earlier into the week.
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She reached at her destination at about 11:30 a.m. and passengers disembarked.
Weatherwise, it was an active day. A tornado in the vicinity of St. Paul killed several people that afternoon and trees were uprooted and homes damaged in Hastings.
Red Wing, too, was hit by storms later in the day.
Gusts at 60 mph
A local weather observer’s wind gauge measured gusts at 60 mph before being shredded by the wind.
Storms plagued the military review at the National Guard camp, but Sea Wing excursioners were enjoying themselves.
Some were reluctant to leave. Wethern agreed to remain until 7 p.m., though the Sea Wing may not have departed Lake City until about 8 p.m.
Wethern apparently believed the storms were over. Of course, no form of accurate and timely weather reporting existed in 1890.
Rivermen instead relied on the keenness of their weather eye.
Some passengers were less satisfied about the weather than Wethern and no longer relished a slow boat ride upstream.
Samuel Haskell Purdy and his brother William borrowed train fare from friend and fellow Sea Wing passenger, Martin O’Shaughnessy, hoping to catch a train back to Red Wing.
The brothers missed the train.
As the Sea Wing and barge pulled away from the Lake City shoreline, one passenger, Charlie Sewell, seeing or anticipating threatening skies ahead, went to the edge of the barge, said “Goodbye, boys,” and dove into the river.
He swam about 300 feet back to the shore.
Festivities continued
As Sea Wing plowed upriver, festivities continued. Bawdy songs sung by drunken men are said to have prompted some women to forsaken the barge for the Sea Wing.
Other accounts have Wethern ordering women and children into the steamboat cabin — later, back out — as the weather worsened.
The Sea Wing probably had made it less than halfway back to Red Wing when swallowed by storms.
Wethern later testified he had been crossing Lake Pepin to seek shelter beneath bluffs on the Wisconsin side of the river when a “squall” came off the Minnesota shore.
Wether turned the Sea Wing into the approaching squall and held course for several minutes.
The Sea Wing was likely abreast of Maiden Rock, a landmark on the Wisconsin shore.
Wethern reportedly ordered passengers to don lifejackets sometime earlier. This was a change of heart and policy for the captain, for shortly after leaving Lake City he rebuked some young people who were putting on life jackets.
“Take that off — you will frighten the ladies,” Wethern reportedly said.
People were genuinely frightened as the squall bore down on the Sea Wing. Mabey recalled many women and children praying as wind and wave tossed the boat and barge.
The clouds looked black and twisting, said Mabey.
Funnel cloud spotted
Crewmen Ed Niles reportedly spotted a funnel cloud crossing the lake about 500 yards ahead of the Sea Wing, though one contemporary meteorologist suggested that Wethern was correct — it was a squall.
And a quick moving squall line appearing over the Minnesota bluffs probably was no more than five to ten minutes’ distance from the boat, he opined.
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Survivors remember the boat momentarily listing at about a 45 degree angle before Sea Wing, its cabin filled with passengers, keeled over.
“The Sea Wing rolled over like an old water-soaked log,” said Mabey.
Purdy, who for years after the disaster could not endure staying indoors during a storm, caught a glimpse into the cabin as the boat capsized and remembered the sight of the girls and women.
There may have been 100 or more passengers on the boat.
Sequence of events in question
The exact sequence of events of the disaster are still in question.
That is, how did the barge — which in the end proved a sanctuary for perhaps everyone aboard it — become separated from the steamboat.
And did the separation doom Sea Wing.
One theory — a theory Wethern adhered to as an old man, anyway — suggests the barge lashed to the side stabilized Sea Wing as an outrigger stabilizes a Polynesian canoe.
Wethern said decades later Sea Wing would not have capsized had the barge not been cut loose.
But did he or another crew member order that done? Did passengers, some reportedly crying out to cut loose the barge, do it themselves?
Or did the storm break the Jim Grant loose?
In a letter to the St. Paul Dispatch three days after the disaster, Wethern wrote that the barge had not been cut loose until after the steamer had capsized and then only to save it from being swamped, too.
He may not have been the best witness.
Wethern escapes
Wethern was fighting for his life after the Sea Wing turned-turtle. Trapped underwater in the pilot’s house, he escaped by bracing his legs against the pilot’s wheel and pushing out a window with his back.
Wethern swam for shore, saying he intended to seek help. But he succumbed to exhaustion once ashore, he later explained, and spent the night in a nearby home.
At any rate, whether purposefully cut or broken loose, the barge drifted away from the Sea Wing.
Perhaps 25 passengers clung to the keel of the capsized boat, a task possibly made more difficult because survivors report the Sea Wing unrighted herself and capsized several times.
The weather was appalling, something out of purgatory. Besides violent wind and rain, egg-sized hail pelted the living and dead.
One survivor ascribed the bruises he noted about the head and shoulders of Sea Wing victims the result of the bodies being battered by hail.
Flashes of Lightening painted a horrifying scene for survivors on the barge as it drifted away from the wreck.
George Reeves, one of the perhaps 50 passengers on the barge, said he heard no screams from the people clinging to and splashing about the capsized steamboat but saw them.
As the lightening flashed, he remembered seeing the white dresses of the ladies on the surface of the lake as they struggled in the water.
The long dresses women wore in the 1890s must have swimming extremely difficult.
57 women on board
It’s believed some 57 women were on the Sea Wing and barge on the return voyage and few survived.
The disaster affected people differently.
Reeves, who later found refuge in a nearby home once ashore, said a boy, perhaps, 12-years-old, entered the house shortly he arrived.
The boy took off his drenched coat and shook it, coolly explaining that he had just swum ashore from the Sea Wing.
That meant swimming about a mile in churning water while being guided by lightening flashes, Reeves admiringly noted.
Others young people in the water emerged no doubt less composed.
Frank Way, of Trenton, attempted to swim ashore while towing little sister but became exhausted and the girl drown.
The barge drifted downstream and eventually nudge the Minnesota shore north of Lake City.
Survivors began jumping off, Mabey having someone jump on top of him as thrashed ashore.
Mabey, who appears to have been a man of action that night, later said after alerting townspeople he and others went back to the Sea Wing on a skiff and ferried about 18 survivors ashore.
At one point the overloaded skiff sank but fortunately in only about three feet of water, said Mabey.
In the hours following the Sea Wing disaster, the extent of the tragedy slowly became known.
While the fears of a few friends and families of Sea Wing passengers were vanished early Monday by the sight of a brother or friend wearily trudging into town, it soon became apparent scores had died.
Cannon fired
Searchers fired a cannon over the surface of the lake hoping the concussion would dislodge submerged bodies. Dynamite, too, was exploded underwater with the same purpose in mind.
The Sea Wing was towed near shore and National Guardsmen, hacking a hole in the hull, pulled free about 15 bodies from inside the wreck.
On Tuesday only one body was recovered.
But on Wednesday some 31 bodies floated to the surface of Lake Pepin.
The last body, the 98th, that of an 11-year-old Red Wing girl, was found on Thursday.
Ten-year-old Gustaf Lenus Lillyblad, the boy who had won a free ticket by helping to load ice, numbered among the dead.
So did Martin O’Shaughnessy, the friend who lent the Purdy brothers train fare.
An entire family, the seven-member Gerken family, perished. George Gerken, age 5, may have been the youngest child to die.
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One young couple who both perished, A.O. Anderson and Randina Olson, were to be married on Wednesday, July 16.
Instead Olson’s body was pulled from the lake.
Knute Peterson, of Red Wing, was to be married on July 20 but was found dead in a life vest, his watched stopped at 11:50.
Conditions on the lake may have been so extreme life vests were no guarantee of safety. Oren Oskey, 17, of Red Wing, jumped off the Jim Grant wearing a life vest but was found dead.
5,000 attend memorial
On Friday, July 25, 5,000 people crowded the streets of Red Wing for a memorial service honoring the victims of the Sea Wing disaster.
How bad was the disaster?
In April of 1865, a grossly overloaded steamboat, the Sultana, blew a boiler and burned on the Mississippi River above Memphis, Tenn., perhaps killing 1547 people, many of them returning Union soldiers, some wounded, some just released from Confederate prison camp.
If the death toll is true, it’s the greatest maritime disaster in American history.
But the Sea Wing disaster may be the worse on the Upper Mississippi.
Capt. Wethern lived to be 74, but the Sea Wing disaster dodged him to the end. When he died in April of 1929, an Associated Press story detailed the disaster on Lake Pepin.
Wethern himself perhaps sought to exorcise the shadow.
An intermediary, acting on his behalf, wrote a Wisconsin lawmaker sometime after the disaster requesting that Wethern be allowed to change the name of the boat to the P.F. Ritchie.
Nothing became of the request.
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Sea Wing rebuilt
Wethern did rebuild the Sea Wing and the boat was in service for a number of years.
Post-disaster photos of Sea Wing artifacts show life vests and a curious chair with springs attached to the bottom of the legs.
Perhaps this was for rough weather.
The last surviving Sea Wing survivor was perhaps a Mr. Schenach who died in 1962 at the age of 96.
He belonged the string orchestra who serenaded the 215 Sea Wing passengers as they once gracefully travelled the surface of Lake Pepin on a delightful summer’s day excursion.
Schenach was the musician who used his instrument as a life preserver.
There is a old picture of the bass viola.
It’s a telling relic.
Information cited in story from a collection of related materials at the Goodhue County Historical Society plus from the Rochester Post-Bulletin Online, which has an excellent Web site about the Sea Wing disaster.
All photos courtesy of the Goodhue County Historical Society.
2004 steamboat flotilla heads upriver in late Juneby T.W. Budig Eyes will turn to the Mississippi River later this month as a water-borne spectacle slowly works its way upriver to the Twin Cities. The 2004 Grand Excursion commemorates a grand of excursion of 1854 when President Millard Fillmore, 13th president of the United States and under-the-radar national figure, boarded a steamboat at Rock Island, Ill., and travelled upstream into the wilds of the Minnesota Territory. A throng of dignitaries and journalists accompanied Fillmore as anxious business and civic leaders at stops along the river extolled the wonders and promise of the “West” to the visiting Eastern elite. The 2004 steamboat flotilla heading upriver beginning June 25 with planned Independence Day stops at St. Paul and Minneapolis will find the nervous predictions of 150 years ago have largely come true. The 2004 Grand Excursion is billed as the biggest steamboat flotilla assembled in a century, with the Delta Queen, built in 1925, one of its stars. The 2004 Grand Excursion will make its first stop in Minnesota at Winona on June 30. Lake City will be visited on July 1, with Hastings and Red Wing greeting the flotilla on July 2. Three days will be spent in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Events are planned for each stop. Gov. Pawlenty will take on Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle in a steamboat race scheduled for June 30 in La Crosse, Wis. St. Paul will boast the world’s largest balloon arch designed to cross the Mississippi and containing some 1200 balloons. Many other events are scheduled. For more information, try to Grand Excursion Web site at www.grandexcursion.com. |
Helpful Links
Goodhue County Historical Society
Mississippi River series by Tim Budig