"[1] Kentucky, a New Orleans to Vicksburg packet steamboat of the Confederate-occupied Mississippi River, exploded around 4 a.m. on May 19, 1861, killing at least 22 people and injuring five more, with likely additional unidentified dead and wounded.
[1][2][3] The boat either tore a drum-head,[3] or blew her mud-receiver, and thus her steam boilers exploded, shortly after pulling back from the dock at Columbia, Arkansas, near Helena.
)[5] Among the dead were three slave traders,[2] two of whom were brothers traveling back to their home state of Tennessee to enlist in the Confederate Army.
[8] Kentucky hit a sunken log near Eagle Bend on the Red River between Shreveport and New Orleans around 9 p.m. on the night of June 9, 1865.
[9] (As the Mississippi ebbed and flowed, and as riverside soil was eroded due to 19th-century agricultural practices, trees along the banks would eventually topple into the river and form underwater snags, also known as sawyers).