Red River Wreck Update: July 22

More Dives, More Discoveries.

Sunday, July 22, 2001.

The Red River Wreck field school officially began today, with all students and staff having arrived by Sunday evening. Work continued on setting up the camp and completing other preparations for the field work.

At the project base camp at Fort Towson State Historic Site, crew members continued preparing equipment. Project diver Rick Talley, a recent graduate of the University of Puget Sound in Washington, spent much of today on a team constructing a sieve raft. This is a floating platform used to screen out small objects from the sand and other material dredged from the river bottom. "We used state-of-the-art technology," Talley joked, "to create an ergonomically advanced tool of nautical archaeology." Daniel Seib, another team member and a graduate student in Anthropology at Indiana University, interrupted, "what we really did was take some plastic vinegar barrels and build a wood frame around them to support a sifting screen."

Annalies Corbin, John Davis and Howard McKinnis returned to the wreck site today. They had two goals, to position additional barges for docking the project boat and further to determine the extent and exposure of the sunken steamboat.

The barges were put in place quickly. Then, working as a pair, Corbin and Davis set out lines of polypropylene cord between key points of the wreck. These will allow students to find their way around the site in low visibility. Corbin explained, "this is a complex wreck. If these students can learn, work on and understand this wreck, there’s nothing they won’t be able to do in their future careers."

Corbin and Davis discovered that the timbers used to construct the Red River Wreck are much larger than anticipated. Later steamboats generally used much smaller pieces of timber to save weight and allow the boats to go further upstream. Initial observations suggest that some deck beams in the Red River Wreck measure as much as a foot across the top, and some of the hull planking may be as wide as eighteen inches. "The preservation of this hull structure is just remarkable. You’ve got sections where you not only have complete decking, but also inner and outer hull planking and full framing intact." The preservation of the hull is extremely unusual, Corbin says, given that we know from historical records that the course of the Red River has changed frequently, and exposed the wreck a number of times.

The temperature on the river today was 105 degrees. The menu for supper was fegeujada with tossed salad and pineapple upside-down cake.

This update is sponsored by the PAST Foundation and the Oklahoma Historical Society. It may be freely redistributed without modification for non-commercial purposes.

Dr. Sheli Smith (right) discusses principles of sift barge construction with Bob Piper and Daniel Seib.	Progress made on the barge -- almost there.	Rick Talley thinks deep thoughts about sift barges.