Replying to a message of Joe Bruchis to Bob Ackley:

 JB> Bob Ackley -> Joe Bruchis wrote:

 BA>> The same is true for the Missouri River.  Here the river basin is
 BA>> nearly five miles wide but the river itself is only about 100-200
 BA>> yards wide. It used to meander all over the basin, and the channel
 BA>> moved quite a bit - it still changes (slowly) down in the
 BA>> southeastern corner of Nebraska with a process known as 'accretion.' 
 BA>> Accretion happens when silt is dropped at the inside of a curve and
 BA>> eroded away from the outside; the riverbed moves ever so slowly.

 JB> Rivers left alone, provide a lot of new and fertile soil. Most of
 JB> Southeast Louisiana was formed from by silt moved in by the River.

There are undoubtedly still some steamboat carcasses buried under farm
fields in the Missouri River basin.  30-35 years ago a fellow dug one up
north of Omaha.  There's a museum and park at the site now and it has
pictures of the whole project, including a lot of the preserved cargo that
was aboard that steamboat (the Bertrand) when it sank.  The museum is just
off US-30 at Desoto Bend, which is about five miles west of Missouri 
Valley, IA (I-29).  Desoto Bend itself is an oxbow lake that used to be part
of the Missouri River.  Unfortunately the wood that made up the remains
of the steamboat was too far gone to save and after everything was cleaned
out of the wreck it was reburied.

There may have been as many as 100 steamboats that sank in the Missouri
River north of Kansas City.  What records there are are incomplete and, of
course, the river channel has moved a lot since the boats sank.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+