The Mittie Stephens steamed out of New Orleans on Feb. 2, 1869 on a pleasure cruise through the inland waterways of Texas that ended in fiery tragedy on Caddo Lake.

The 312-ton side-wheel steamboat was built six years earlier in Indiana.  Used by the Union for a year as a transport and packet (a ship that carried mail, passengers and goods on an established route), the Mittie Stephens later saw less hazardous duty as a private passenger craft on the navigable rivers of Louisiana.  

Paying customers traveled in style on the luxury cruise ship, dining on the finest cuisine prepared by a staff of four-star chefs.  Chamber maids, servants and other employees of the floating hotel waited on the pampered passengers hand and foot.

The Mittie Stephens left New Orleans with 107 passengers and crew in the capable hands of an experienced riverboat captain named Homer Kellogg.  The cargo consisted of 274 bales of hay, ten kegs of gunpowder and $100,000 in gold to pay the post-Civil War occupation troops at the final destination – Jefferson, Texas.  

Thanks to a freak of nature, the East Texas community was the second busiest port in the Lone Star State.  An enormous mass of logs, moss, weeds, vines, dirt and trash known as the Red River Raft made Jefferson accessible to 200 or more steamboats a year.

The six-day voyage to Shreveport was uneventful.  J.W. Lively, who had a ticket all the way to Jefferson, disembarked with several companions and never got back on-board.  “To this day we don’t know, can’t explain why we done it,” Lively told a reporter in 1921.  “But all at once we decided to leave the Mittie Stephens.”

The ship departed Shreveport at four in the afternoon following a five-hour layover.  At dusk the crew lit torch baskets and pine knots, which cast a bright-red glow from metal cages.  At ten o’clock the Mittie Stephens steamed into Caddo Lake on the Texas-Louisiana border and set a course for Big Cypress Bayou and Jefferson.

An hour later, Capt. Kellogg docked at Mooringsport, where James C. Christian boarded the ill-fated vessel.  He had sent his ten-year-old grandson home for a coat, but by the time the boy returned the Mittie Stephens had left for Swanson’s Landing on the south side of Caddo Lake. 

Long-distance greetings were exchanged with the steamboat Dixie, which was waiting for daylight in a sheltered cove.  Capt. Thornton Jacobs was a cautious sort, who did not believe nighttime crossings of the Caddo were worth the risk. 

Pilot William Swain and steersman Joe Lodwick were in the pilot house around midnight, when Lodwick smelled smoke.  Searching for the source, he discovered the hay bales on the larboard or loading side of the deck had caught fire apparently from sparks given off by the pine knots.

The pair quickly sounded the alarm and turned the Mittie Stephens toward land.  Crew members rushed on deck to douse the flames but to no avail as the fire raged out of control.

Twenty feet from shore, the blazing bow hit bottom in three feet of water.  The pilot and steersman kept the paddle wheels turning in a desperate attempt to drive the ship onto land.  With the fire closing in and cut off from the rest of the vessel, Swain and Lodwick jumped into the pitch-black lake and swam the short distance to safety.

In spite of the chaos, the clear-thinking ship’s carpenter remembered the gunpowder in the hold.  He saved countless lives by singlehandedly wrestling the kegs overboard.

Panic-stricken passengers retreated to the stern or rear of the Mittie Stephens, where the lake was eight to ten feet deep.  Most of those that went over the side were crushed to death by the paddle wheels or drowned not knowing how close they were to shallow water and dry land.

Several survivors owed their lives to a passing horse and rider, who saved them one by one from a watery grave.  

The vast majority of fatalities were women and small children that clung to their mothers.  Lodwick later spoke of the women’s “strange infatuation with the burning boat” and how nothing could induce them “to leap overboard, their only means of escape.  Only four were saved, probably from their being on the lower deck.”

Another eyewitness recalled watching “the poor creatures as the flames swept over them, some with out-stretched arms and others meekly yielding to the inevitable death.”

When the Dixie reached the scene, the Mittie Stephens was a smoldering hulk burned to the water line.  Capt. Jacobs transported 43 survivors to Jefferson and returned the next day with grappling hooks to retrieve the bodies.  The official death toll was 61, but estimates ranged as high as 70.  

However, no one had a bad word to say about Capt. Kellogg and his crew, who were praised for their cool-headed courage.  Grasping at straws, one newspaper blamed the tragedy on “the passions of the American people for rapid transit, reckless of life and limb.”

Bartee welcomes your comments and questions at barteehaile@gmail.com or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549 and invites you to visit his web site at barteehaile.com.