Sandra Olivetti Martin had nary a clue beyond the whispered words of an elderly cousin, Cora Smith:
The river took my brother.
Decades passed, Martin wrote hundreds of stories and ran a Maryland newspaper until she set about to discover what happened to Cora's brother, James Smith.
The results of her investigation became a story in her 2023 book—Fire at the Stymie Club: Stories From the Mississippi River to Chesapeake Bay.
Martin may need to add a second epilogue for the next printing.
Before her reading and book-signing in Calhoun County, Illinois on July 23, pictured above, Martin (left) inspected a newly discovered gravesite that appears to hold James Smith’s remains.
“I stood right on top of him, actually,” said Martin, publisher and editor at New Bay Books,
That evening, Martin told Smith’s story to the Calhoun County Historical Society at the Fill Inn Station Restaurant, in Batchtown, (pop. 200) Smith’s hometown along the Mississippi River.
It is a story that begins and ends with America's big rivers: James Smith lived and died near where the Illinois, the Missouri and the Mississippi unite.
A 20-year-old seeking to make his way in the world, Smith landed in St. Louis on St. Patrick’s Day, 1894, in time to witness a murder and have the the killer turn a pistol his way.
“I saw a man killed Sunday night, just beat to death,” the young man wrote, in letters Martin read from to her audience.
Martin had no clue when she started her research on which river James Smith had perished—or how. Over a period of months, she plumbed libraries in Missouri and Illinois digitally and on foot, interviewed shippers and the Army Corps of Engineers, and finally determined that Smith drowned while working on the Mississippi River, likely on a barge.
The last, vital morsel of information in her quest testifies to the loss historians will feel with the ongoing death of small newspapers: A history buff in a Mississippi River town found a brief obituary for Smith in an October, 1894 issue of the Troy (Mo.) Free Press.
Smith was a watchman on the boat and is said to have been a most exemplary young man. He was to be married to a young lady and she is almost prostrated at the sad event, the obit read.
One of the missing pieces in the story was the fate of Smith’s remains. Martin solved that mystery with the help of Emerson Retzer, longtime president of the Calhoun County Historical Society.
Retzer, 86, said something clicked when he read in Fire at the Stymie Club that Smith was buried next to his father.
Retzer recalled a tiny pile of gravemarkers near a Knights of Columbus Hall along River Road, No marker in the unkept plot showed James Smith’s name. But other marker’s bore faint names of Smith ancestors, and records showed his father, Andrew James, buried there.
Retzer said that to reach the conclusion that James Smith lies beneath in Hardin he applied common sense buttressed by an investigative method rooted deeply in local folk culture: witching or dowsing.
Dowsing tools used to gauge what's deep in the ground — from water to metals to organic mass — might be branches or forked copper wires like Retzer deploys while walking a plot of earth.
"If the left one pulls to the right," it's a male, Retzer said. And vice versa for a female. All told, Retzer's method found at least nine bodies—more than the gravestones strewn on top.
It so happens that the tiny graveyard is situated just down the road from the Koster Site in Kampsville, an archaeological site with an estimated 25 human occupations over 9,000 years. The fame of the Koster Site is such that it sprouted the Center for American Archaeology and a museum at the site.
Retzer said he will be seeking assistance from the Center in terms of sonar equipment. There's discussion, too, about seeking funds to rehabilitate the shabby graveyard.
Recounting the story of James Smith to her audience, Martin said "she hoped she had done justice to the dead. Of course there's not much logic to that. But I believe at least I have answered questions about what ended his life and broke his mother's, sister's and finance's hearts."