Near you, the Arabia Steamboat Museum houses one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries in American history. On September 5, 1856, the steamboat Arabia was making her way up the Missouri River loaded with 200 tons of frontier merchandise — boots, clothing, hardware, tools, bolts of fabric, canned goods, and whiskey — when she struck a buried walnut tree snag and sank in minutes. All 130 passengers and crew escaped, along with the mule.
The cargo went to the bottom. Here is where the story gets extraordinary: over the next 132 years, the Missouri River shifted course nearly half a mile, and the Arabia slowly sank deeper into the sediment. By 1988, she lay buried 45 feet underground in a Kansas soybean field — 15 miles from the current riverbank.
A family of treasure hunters located the wreck with metal detectors and old survey maps, then excavated it through a bitter winter, pumping out 160,000 gallons of groundwater a day. What they found was perfectly preserved by the anaerobic river mud: leather boots still soft enough to wear, pickles still edible, and French perfume still fragrant. The Arabia's cargo is a time capsule of 1856 America that you can reach out and almost touch inside this museum.