A Generative History Film
The Sultana Disasterof 1865
More than 1,800 dead, more than the Titanic, on a river, in peacetime, days after the war ended. And the country looked away in a week.
1,800 soldiers survived the Civil War.
They were finally going home.
Then a man took a bribe, and the boilers blew.
No spoilers
What you'll discover
The bribe
Why an overloaded boat left the dock at all, and the officer whose signature put 2,100 men on a vessel built for 376.
The cracked boiler
A patch job done overnight to save time and money. By dawn it would tear the ship apart.
The cover-up
An inquiry, a verdict, and a name that never faced a courtroom. How the disaster was quietly buried.
The last witness
The survivors who met every April 27 for decades, until only one was left to remember.
The Breakdown
A five-part investigation
The full film, broken into the five turns of the story. Start anywhere, or watch it all in one sitting.
Is this real?
Every word is documented.
On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded just north of Memphis. She carried more than 2,100 people, most of them Union soldiers newly released from the Confederate prison camps at Andersonville and Cahaba, on a vessel legally rated for 376.
The death toll, estimated above 1,800, exceeded the Titanic. Yet it vanished from the headlines within days, buried under the hunt for John Wilkes Booth and the funeral of Abraham Lincoln. Captain Reuben Hatch, the quartermaster tied to the overloading, was never brought to trial.
Our film is built from survivor testimony, the official inquiry, and the historical record, dramatized to put you on the deck that night.
Watch it now
See the night the river caught fire.
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