TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of ...

Holly Messinger, the textiles conservator at The Arabia Steamboat Museum, carefully laid out the pieces of a frock coat, an 1850’s relic recovered from the bottom of the Missouri River.

A steamboat known as the North Alabama sank in 1870, heading to the bottom of the Missouri River near Goat Island, between Nebraska and South Dakota. But the river, dwindling under a drought that ...