Salt Lake City broke down, their oxen died, and precious supplies were lost. Flour was in short supply in Virginia City, and its price shot up to $150 for a 100-pound sack. When rumors circulated that people were hoarding flour, the Flour Riot broke out. A group of vigilantes searched every business and house, confiscated 125 sacks of flour, and stored it in Leviathan Hall for safekeeping.

Merchants and riverboat companies back east saw opportunities for huge profit in trading with frontier outposts. At the time, about three-fifths of Montana's groceries, supplies, and equipment came up the Missouri on steamboats. In turn, gold came back down river and riverboats literally became treasure ships. In 1865, the St. Johns carried $200,000 in gold dust and 200 bales of furs and robes downriver from Fort Benton, and the Yellowstone carried $250,000 in gold dust, as well as 3000 buffalo robes. The next year, six boats from Fort Benton transported over $1 million in gold.

Caroline and Mary may have been comforted when they boarded the Bertrand and met her skipper, Horace “Lightning” Bixby, one of the most experienced captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. When Samuel Clemens, who later took the name of Mark Twain, travelled down the Mississippi in 1857 he was so impressed by Bixby, the captain of the riverboat he was traveling on, that he paid $500 to apprentice with him as a cub pilot. The young man studied for 18 months with Bixby.

The Bertrand was, in many ways, a typical steamboat modified to navigate the shallow reaches of the upper Missouri. Between 1831 and 1860, steamboat design changed dramatically to accommodate the needs of different river systems. By the mid-1860s, this evolution gave rise to fast, shallow-draft “mountain boats” with a nearly flat bottom and extra width in proportion to its length. They extended commercial navigation farther and farther up the Missouri River. 

The Bertand’s hull had been built in the summer of 1864 in Wheeling, West Virginia, an important boat-building center strategically located on the Ohio River near abundant supplies of white oak - a hard, flexible, and water-resistant wood. Bertrand was then rowed to Pittsburgh, where master carpenter Peter Dunlevy built her cabins and superstructure. River pilots respected Dunlevy for building fast and light boats. They said that all you had to do to launch a Dunlevy boat was to pour a keg of beer over the bow and it would float on the foam. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer reported that the Bertrand was "a nice, trim little steamer, and it

sits upon the water like a duck."

Even on a well-built boat, the first of April was early in the season to brave the cold, muddy water of the Missouri River, swollen by spring runoff. But time was not to be wasted. Transportation companies took great risks with their boats, cargo, and passengers. Captains pushed high-pressure engines and boilers to their limits. The first boats to reach Montana would reap enormous profits for their owners and for the merchants whose goods they carried to the winter-starved mining camps.

Prices in Virginia City had rocketed so high that a single melon could sell for $1.50, about $30 today. Wheat sold for five to eight dollars a bushel; barley and oats for 12-15 cents per pound. One newspaper observed that, “If the farmers can't make their piles at these prices – in gold, remember –  they had better sell out to somebody that can." 

The Bertrand pushed off at daylight and by 3:00 had reached 25 miles north of Omaha. “It was a beautiful afternoon, and we were sailing along in hopes of a quick passage,” recalled Caroline’s father, Willard Barrows, who was traveling with the family. “Most of the passengers at the time were lounging on their berths, or sitting about the boat, reading and conversing.”

But, when the steamboat hit a snag on the port side, “our peaceful little home was changed into a fright, confusion, and almost despair,” recalled Barrows; “Our plans for the future were all changed, and each was eager to save himself from the muddy waters of the Missouri. The chairs, tables, and other furniture were thrown to one side; glass ware, crockery, skylight windows, and glass doors of the cabin were broken and creaking; the laboring vessel was parting and straining her timbers in rolling over. The screams of the women and cries of the children for a time passed description.”

Captain Bixby ran the boat toward the riverbank, but it took on water and the “pretty little Bertrand” sank in five minutes in ten feet of water. While “no goods stored on the boiler deck or in the ladies’ cabin were wet, except as rolled off when the boat careened,” recalled Barrows, “the freight on the main deck, and in the hold of the vessel, about 200 tons, mostly groceries, was nearly a total loss.”

Quick work by the crew enabled a gangplank to be swung over to the shore, and passengers were able to walk to safety. A runner was sent to the nearest town, De Soto, about four miles away, and a

few of the women and children were taken by wagon to shelter before nightfall. The Bertrand’s crew erected temporary shelters with carpet and furniture from the boat for other passengers who were forced to spend the night.

Insurance underwriters had a difficult time that season on the Upper Missouri. Of the 20 boats that left St. Louis that year, only six made it to Fort Benton in Montana Territory. Salvagers worked feverishly to recover the Bertrand’s cargo, but, when the Cora sank in shallower water a couple of miles away, they switched to its cargo. Shortly after that, on May 29, 1865, the A.E. Stanard wrecked in the snag-infested water between Florence and De Soto, Nebraska, and sank in deep water in five minutes, taking with it a large cargo of mining equipment.

Willard Barrows, Caroline Millard and their family eventually returned to St. Louis and boarded another riverboat on May 2 to head upstream again. “We passed the wreck of the Bertrand this afternoon, May 14th, and also the wreck of the steamer Cora, snagged five days since, and a total loss,” Barrows later recalled.

Eventually, they made it to Virginia City, but Mrs. Millard had no taste for the Montana frontier, and two weeks later, she returned east. When it came to a choice between business and family, Joseph Millard decided that the latter was more important. Allen and Millard sold the business in 1866, and Millard returned to Omaha with 100 pounds of gold in his wife’s clothing trunk. The following year, he would be one of the incorporators of the Omaha & Northwestern Railroad. He served as mayor of Omaha in 1870 and 1871, then as a director of the Union Pacific Railroad, and later, as a U.S. senator from Nebraska.

Mary Atchison and her children joined John Atchison in Virginia City and remained in Montana. But most of their possessions never made it. When the Bertrand wreck was excavated, we found two boxes labeled “TO J.S. ATCHISON, V. City,” and “TO ATCHISON, VIRINGIA CITY, MT.” Among the items were women’s shoes, children’s gloves, picture frames, mirrors, a wicker sewing basket, a blue dressing gown, almonds, wall lamps, curtains, small lettered toy blocks, and a cast-metal toy horse cart.

Transition – Bertrand’s hull covered with mud. How the boat was discovered.

Text about excavation
 

When I was a teaching fellow at the University of New Mexico working on conserving water-logged pre-Eskimo artifacts from Alaska, the Chief Archeologist of the

National Park Service came to my lab and asked me to take a look at the Bertrand cargo. I wrote a report on how to preserve the cargo and they offered me a job as Laboratory Director at the Bertrand site. When I got there cargo was being removed from the Bertrand at a rapid rate and put in canvas water tanks added with fungicide.

We had to do something fast because sunlight, air exposure and temperature were beginning to take their toll. I arranged. With the chief of DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge to use garage bays equipped with window air conditioning to house the cargo until something more permanent could be arranged. I traveled to the Fish and Wildlife headquarters in Minnesota and help design a conservation lab to be jointly funded by USFW and NPS. Meanwhile we set up temporary labs in other garage bays.

Construction moved swiftly and the lab had water treatment facilities and air conditioned storage. I haired a crew, none of whom had any experience and taught them initial processes. There were no precedents so I had to experiment with preservation methods. I traveled to the Leathef Tanners Research Council in Ohio, the Forest Products lab in Minnesota and Corning Glass in New York for advice. I also arranged for the lab at Lincoln to take the 5000 cubic feet of textiles and taught the crew how to wash and preserve and store the textiles.

After 2 1/2 years we were able to complete the bulk of the work, but some work is still going on at the refuge museum. In those days the use of polyethylene glycol as a wood and leather preservative was unknown. We got galvanized water tanks from Offit Air Force Base in Omaha and surplus barrels of industrial alcohol. Cargo was immersed in alcohol until the weight stabilized and then was placed in tanks of polyethylene glycol to replace the alcohol until the weight stabilized.

There is much more to say about the preservation effort, not the least of which was the air drying of boat timbers in snickered piles. I suggested a way to raise the hull but it was adopted.

 

What was surprising, interesting in the cargo? Champagne from France, etc.

How did Switzer and his colleagues clean, preserve the materials?

How were the fabrics and foodstuffs preserved? Clothing, butter???

Concluding paragraph about the importance of the collection, what we can learn.