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The steamship Arabia sank in the Missouri River nearly 150 years ago. It is one of the most unusual sunken treasures ever discovered.

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Independence, Missouri native Bob Hawley stands amidst the wreck of the Arabia buried 45 feet deep in a Kansas cornfield.

Just when you're sure you've heard everything, there comes a story to top it all. There are few things that thrill us more than hearing about sunken treasure and the discovery of old shipwrecks long forgotten. Ever since Jacques Cousteau captivated us in the 1960s with his underwater archaeological expedition on the Mahdia, a Roman galley that sank off Tunesia in 1087. Closer to home, local diver Lee Spence publicized in the 1980s that he thought he'd located the site of the Hunley wreck off Breach Inlet. A decade later, the adventure novelist and marine archaeologist, Clive Cussler, did actually pinpoint the wreck of the Hunley in the shallow waters off our coast.

We're no strangers here to shipwreck legends and the lure of sunken treasure. After all, the famed "ship of gold," the side wheel steamer, S.S. Central America was located not far from here, as were a couple of old Spanish galleons and a pirate ship, or two. However, the granddaddy tale of sunken treasure comes to us - not from the Mediterranean coast or some South Atlantic port, but rather, this "believe it, or not" sunken treasure yarn originated 23 years ago in a Kansas cornfield a half mile inland from the Missouri River.

In 1987 there was a lot of buzz among divers and sunken treasure hunters about the efforts to locate and salvage the wreck of the S.S. Central America off the coast of North Carolina. Newspapers began to carry exciting accounts of an underwater search team called Columbia-America Discovery Group. Lead investors Tommy Thompson and Bob Evans had to pioneer new techniques and equipment for a sustained dive in such deep water. Eleven hundred miles west of Thompson and Evans' dive location in 1987 there was a refrigerator dealer from Independence, Missouri, Bob Hawley, who was searching for a sunken treasure ship - the Arabia. It was 170-foot-long paddle wheeler that sank suddenly from a collision with a log on September 5, 1856, just past the stockyards of Kansas City.

There's a curious parallel between the sinking of the steamships Arabia and the S.S. Central America. The Arabia sank in September 1856, whereas the Central America went down a year later in September 1857. Both ships were loaded with expensive cargo - the Central America had 30,000 pounds of gold aboard when she sank, while the Arabia carried 200 tons of general merchandise.

The wrecks of both were discovered within a few weeks of each other and newspapers had a field day in that pre-internet era. Today, web logs sap the vitality from newspaper reporting on events such as the Arabia and the Central America.

Pringle Boatworks on Pennsylvania's Monongahela River was the place where the Arabia's keel was laid back in 1853. The sleek paddle wheel riverboat had a length of 171 feet and a breadth of 29, and she could carry 220 tons of cargo plus crew and passengers. Pringle craftsmen built many of the boats and barges that ferried the "manifest destiny" crowd west. Oak timbers and oak deck planks were thick and sturdy enough to herd mules aboard. It would take a mighty snag to gouge a hole in the Arabia's hull. Yet, the swift moving torrent of silt and debris that is the "Mighty Missouri" has been a riverboat captain's nightmare to navigate since the days of Mark Twain.

Those hardy folks who went west by wagon train or by flatboat roughed it in the wild, but they didn't go without for long. Entrepreneurs from back east saw profits in those prairies of Kansas and Nebraska. Before the first oxen team was set loose to graze at its destination at Fort Laramie, New England speculators had figured a way to bring them luxuries from back home. It's been said that when Hawley and his friends uncovered the 45 feet of silt from the wreck of the Arabia that one of them exclaimed, "This thing was a floating Wal-Mart."

In the 3 years that the Arabia was afloat she plied the waters of the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri hauling people, livestock, and supplies into the western territories.

Investors from the b ig cities made fortunes on the mercantile companies providing wares for the westward migration.

On Friday afternoon, September 5, 1856, the passengers of the Arabia were just sitting down to supper when the flat-bottomed riverboat lurched and angled sideways in the water. It was obvious from the moment that she was going down and that no one had time to retrieve a thing before entering the life boats.

Unlike the S.S. Central America which went down with over 400 souls in a hurricane off Hatteras, the steamship Arabia had just one casualty - a mule that was tethered to the deck. A published account of the last voyage of the ill-fated ship states, "The Arabia departed from St. Louis on August 30, 1856, at 4:00 p.m., en route to Kansas, Weston, St. Joseph, Council Bluffs and Sioux City, with stops at intermediate ports. Seven days later, on September 5, 1856, she left Westport Landing in the afternoon, carrying 150 passengers, and more than 200 tons of freight, bound for her next stop was Parkville, Missouri." Parkville was just down river from Kansas City.

Cargo aboard the Arabia included cases of Belgian-made rifles and great quantities of ammunition. This discovery in 1988 was significant because the steamship sank in waters just 35 miles away from Lawrence, Kansas. Three months earlier a band of pro-slavery raiders sacked Lawrence and drove away a number of the town's abolitionist settlers recently arrived from New England. The mob violence has been viewed as the first sign of the coming of disunion - five years almost to the day. Was the Arabia taking arms to abolitionists, to pro-slavery factions, or merely selling fine, breech-loading weapons on a first-come, first served basis?

Arabia sank to the bottom of the river in minutes leaving just its smoke stacks visible. A day later the smokestacks were washed away and the Arabia sank deep into the silt. Soon the Missouri River formed a sand embankment around the wreck site. Over the next 130 years the river shifted westward a half mile, leaving the wreck 45 feet deep in alluvial soil - soil that made the corn grow tall on Judge Norman Sortor's farm in 1988.

In 1877 rumors that 400 casks of Kentucky bourbon were part of the Arabia's lading induced Kansas City locals to probe the river bottom, but to no avail.

In the 1970s another more sophisticated effort was made in the very same cornfield that Bob Hawley eventually made his find. Hawley used sensitive metal detecting equipment and within a few days the Arabia's big boilers gave off signals loud and clear.

Less than three weeks after George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, there was wild celebration of another sort going on amidst bulldozed corn stubble in a muddy field in Kansas. After sinking his life savings and going to the bank a couple of times, Hawley and his family members had enough pumps and generators to draw 20,000 gallons of water a minute from the excavated wreck site.

What they found was a treasure perfectly preserved at a depth of 45 feet of river silt washed down from as far as Montana. Soon Hawley and crew were pulling up "coffee beans from Brazil; bolts of silk from China; dishes, locks, keys, pocketknives and almonds from England; perfume; porcelain buttons, pins, needles and writing pens from France; gin from Holland; glass Indian trade beads from Italy; tobacco boxes, cigars and coffee beans from South America; pencils from Switzerland, and nutmeg from the West Indies." It is maintained that this find is the largest wet organic collection of artifacts of any archaeological site in the world. The Arabia is one of the world's best preserved time capsules.

It shows that the folks who went west didn't rough it for very long before they demanded the luxuries that money could buy.

The sheer amount of well-preserved 130-year-old merchandise is staggering - 4000 pairs of boots, hundreds of sets of china, bolts of fine silk cloth, and thousands of odds and ends used around a prairie home. Unlike Tommy Thompson and his cache of gold from the S.S. Central America, Bob Hawes decided not to sell off his treasure bit by bit. The entire collection is on display in a special museum in downtown Kansas City.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant).

See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com.