Andes: The Ghost of the Loucinda

Time has glamorized paddlewheel riverboats, but some were anything but glamorous. The Andes was one of these boats that had a life of hardship and misfortune rather than romantic glamour. She went through several names and even more owners, and seemed to float from one mishap to the next. River folk can be rather superstitious, and this boat had her share of bad luck.

Originally built in 1897 by the Middleport, Ohio boatyard owned by Captain Benjamin Taylor Flesher, the 140-foot wooden-hulled sternwheeler was owned initially by the Carr Milling Co. and named the Speedwell. Carr (originally the Carr & Brown Milling Co.) was a flour milling concern in Hamilton, Ohio, on the Great Miami River, just north of where it joins the Ohio River. It is likely that Carr Milling thought that by owning their own riverboat, they could bring wheat in, and ship product out without be at the mercy of a shipping company. There is some indication that the boat also operated on another Ohio River tributary, the Kanawha.

Carr didn't keep the boat long, selling her in 1902 to Captain Sam Parsons who renamed her the Helen M. Gould (the wife of railroad magnate Jay Gould, who made a name for herself as a philanthropist) and began packet trade between Cincinnati and Portsmouth, and later between Louisville and Madison. The choice of the name was actually an odd one, as was the original. Sailors, including riverboat crews, are highly superstitious, and this trait extends to their captains. Having a name that begins with S (the worst-ever riverboat disaster happened to the Sultana) or contains the letter M is considered by some a sign of bad luck. For instance, the Greene family had boats named after just about every member of the clan, and yet no boat was named for the matriarch, Mary Greene (the only female captain on the Ohio), because of the M. That being said, the Helen's eight-year career with Parsons passed quite routinely, with only minor incidents occasionally occuring. Rivers, after all, are a dangerous place, even without superstitions.

In 1910, she was bought by the Lousiville and Cincinnati Packet Company, and completely rebuilt. When she emerged, she was essentially a new boat, other than keeping the Gould's engines, ten feet longer and had a new name, the Loucinda (derived from LOUiville, CINcinatti, iDianA). Now free of a name beginning with S or containing an M, things started going badly for the boat. Barely back in the water after her refit, on September 2, 1910, the Loucinda ran down an unattended launch three miles above Louisville, sinking it. Charges were pressed against pilot Gilbert Brasher for negligence and inattention to duty, and he lost his license. On October 12, 1912, a drunken passenger fell overboard and drowned, never a good sign to the highly superstitious riverboat crews. And that was just the beginning of her woes.

Then on April 25, 1913, Loucinda had a close brush with disaster. She had broken down at Louisville, Kentucky, and so the steamer Monterey was tasked with towing her to Jeffersonville, Indiana, for repairs. The Monterey was only half of the Loucinda's tonnage (107 to 197 tons), and when the pair pulled away from the warf, a south wind caught them and was more than the Monterey could handle, and the two were pushed into the main current of the river, heading straight for the Falls of the Ohio, a series of rocky rapids and waterfalls in which the river drops 26 feet, the only non-navigable part of the Ohio. The master of the Monterey tried to back towards the warf, but this just served to swing the pair so that they were now heading directly downstream. The Annual Report of the United States Life-Saving Service for FY 1913 describes what followed:

The power of the towing vessel [the Monterey] was not sufficient to offset the force of the current, and she was swept down through one of the openings between the Kentucky and Indiana chutes of the falls and over Backbone Reef.  In striking the reef she broke her rudder. She also started to leak from stem to stern, and filled so fast that her three steam pumps were unable to hold the inrushing flood in check. Passing under the Pennsylvania bridge, she was borne into the Big Eddy where the water in her hold set her to rolling. In a short time she turned entirely over and the fierce current tore away her upper works, letting her boilers and machinery drop out. Then the upturned hull floated off and plunged over the falls.

The danger in which the two vessels found themselves after leaving their warf was promptly observed from the life saving station. The service crew in two boats put out into the river and separated the line between them, then took off the five men composing the crew of the Monterey, and placed_them on the Loucinda. They next dropped an anchor from the vessel last named and carried two of her lines to the Indiana shore. With the lines firmly secured the men on the Loucinda slacked away on the anchor line and she swung into the quieter water near the bank. Later a harbor tug took her through the canal and on to Jeffersonville. Only two men were aboard the Loucinda.

In 1914, the Loucinda was chartered to the Louisville and Evansville Packet Company, but at some point during that summer, she hit a sandbar and became so stuck that she was not freed until that December when the river level rose. That many months without income was a difficult time for the steamer's operators.

The final and fatal bit of hard luck came three years later when, on January 30, 1918, she was wrecked in the Cincinnati ice gorge disaster that wrecked a number of riverboats. In the spring, the owners tried to salvage what they could. The hull was repairable, and in 1919 the Louisville and Cincinnati had a new boat was built on the hull, named the Andes. She was, but all reports, a bare-bones vessel, "cheaply built" according to one report. However, the bad luck seems to have been shaken off. She was even chartered off to the Greene Line for a time, and then sold, in March 1927, to Captain Oliver F. Bradford.

And then, on July 1, 1931, the good luck ran out. While approaching Plaquemine Lock, about 13 miles south of Baton Rouge, the Andes was wrecked and sank.