The steamboat Monmouth disaster of October 31, 1837, killed approximately 311 Muscogee people who were being forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland in the southern United States to the Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. The deaths were the result of a nighttime boat collision on the Mississippi River just north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Monmouth was one of seven steamboats transporting roughly 3,000 Muscogee and enslaved Blacks who were part of what historians call Detachment 6 during Creek Removal.
Collision The U.S. Army ("the Alabama Emigrating Co. through the agency of Col. W. A. Campbell") hired three steamboats at New Orleans, the Yazoo, the John Newton, and the Monmouth, to move the "Upper Creeks" band of Muscogee to the Great Plains. Some 700 passengers were put on board the Monmouth. En route from New Orleans to the Arkansas River, near Prophet Island (now Profit Island, ), in drizzly dark conditions, the negligently crewed Monmouth collided with a steamer called Warren that was towing a ship called Trenton or Tremont. The steamboat was apparently violating traditional navigation rules of the river and veered unexpectedly into the path of the Warren. Casualties According to a contemporary report "the hull sank and the cabin floated downstream in two parts." The destruction of the Monmouth resulted in the drowning deaths of the ship's fireman, the ship's bar-keeper, and an estimated 311 passengers. The owners of the steamboat said there were 693 passengers aboard and the loss of life was only 230 with "many of the survivors badly injured." The survivors were picked up by the Yazoo, the John Newton, and the Warren. The bodies of the Muscogee dead were buried in mass graves near Port Allen.
The Monmouth was reportedly a little over a year old, meaning she was launched sometime in 1836. The death toll from the Monmouth would stand as the Mississippi River's worst transportation disaster until the American Civil War. The loss of life in the Monmouth disaster contributed to the overall death toll of the Trail of Tears. Oral history The WPA Indian-Pioneer Project project recorded in the 1930s collected a retelling of the disaster:
See also Jim Boy Carey A. Harris 1837 in the United States List of disasters in the United States by death toll
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