This is fascinating as it provides a glimpse into history!

There is a steamship museum downtown near the Missouri river in KC Mo. named The Seamship Arabia Museum, which has excellent displays of the laborously recovered sunken ship AND its contents, which was excavated from deep under a cornfield, as the river had changed course long ago, leaving the ship buried intact. The restored goods & supplies which the pioneers moving west BEFORE the Civil war needed, -tools, dishes, eye glasses, boots, clothing, canned goods, etc., all the supplies you would have found in a good general store back then are awesome to see. This museum and the film showing it´s story there are just fascinating. I believe the museum also has a web site to explore. ...And as mentioned in this article, it too sank when it hit a huge log, ´snag,´ on the river.

The only glimpse they included in the story was a postage stamp sized image that looks like it was screen-grabbed from google earth. The story is about what can be seen, but all we get are words, not images.

#2 Thanks! That saves me from having to download the article.

In a related move, the EPA announced in December 1855 that it has banned boats of all kinds from US rivers. "These man-made machines leave a trail of contaminants for generations to come," said an unidentified EPA spokesperson. "We must protect our waterways from the ravages of commerce, over-development and urban sprawl. This will protect the sources of drinking water for a half million people from the ill effects of unregulated commerce."

//Sarcasm off.

Huh?!? No obligatory reference to anthropogenic ´climate change´ (nee ´global warming´) in this article? AP must be losing a step when they miss (or pass-up) an opportunity to further manipulate the public´s perception that human blame is unquestioned.

These periods of ultra-low water are part of a cycle. When I was a kid, my cousin and I had a duck blind on the Kaw River for several years. In a year when the water was very low after the sun was well up and the ducks were gone, we´d wade out along the mud flats scavenging for whatever we could find.
Commonly, we´d find petrified skulls of Pleistocene Epoch bison. They roamed the prairies in the millions and millions and their petrified bones were plentiful. Those "treasures" plus the fact that I grew up in Kansas where the inland sea left behind gazillions of fossils when it dried up fueled a lifelong hobby. I have a shed on the ranch filled with fossils.