A Sultana Survivor Remembers the Disaster
Life on the Civil War Research Trail
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13m
On April 26, 1865, on a wharf at Helena, Ark., photographer Thomas W. Bankes captured the steamboat Sultana packed with about 2,130 souls—almost 2,000 of them Union ex-prisoners-of-war. Soon, about 1,200 of them would be dead. One of the survivors, Corp. Erastus Winters of the 50th Ohio Infantry, tells the story.
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