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Missouri River

In 1865, the riverboat hit a snag in the Missouri River and sank on the way to goldfields in Montana. Its hull, discovered in a Nebraska cornfield, gave up over 200,000 artifacts.

It would be a risky trip for the two young mothers, each of them bringing along two young children. On a beautiful spring morning, the first of April, 1865, Caroline Millard and Mary Atchison boarded the steamboat Bertrand at the docks in Omaha, Nebraska.

A present-day adventurer canoes the Upper Missouri to find that time and fortune have erased signs of its later history, restoring the wilderness the Corps of Discovery penetrated nearly 200 years ago

She lived only six years, but it was a history-packed career

Old rivermen used to talk of the first time the steamboat Yellow Stone reached the fur-trading posts on the upper Missouri.

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