Mystery of missing Civil War submarines resurfaces

John Andrew Prime | The (Shreveport, La.) Times

SHREVEPORT, La. — A local historian and urban archaeologist thinks he's solved a mystery: What happened to four Confederate submersibles known to be in Shreveport during the last two years of the Civil War, but missing in action since then.

Marty Loschen, director of the Spring Street Museum in downtown Shreveport, thinks he's found remnants of the hand-propelled craft in the banks of a branch of Cross Bayou about a half-mile west of where the Confederate Navy had a shipyard. At Cross Bayou's mouth on Red River, it was home to the leaky ironclad CSS Missouri and a fast packet, the Webb, whose presence overshadowed the humbler underwater vessels.

Several months ago, before recent rains raised water levels on Cross Bayou and its feeder streams, Loschen and his brother found decades-old rusted metal and some oddly formed tree roots whose shape suggested they had grown over something curved that had rotted or rusted away. The site was on a bank revealed by low water on Bowman's chute.

"It's breathtakingly beautiful out there," says Loschen, who spends much of his time exploring the more remote, forgotten and forbidding parts of old Shreveport. He points to the 1864 Venable map of the defenses of Shreveport which shows several small buildings near where he found the artifacts.

"There's your sub base," he said. "On the Venable map there's an island out there. My theory is if you're going to have a clandestine sub base, you're going to put it out there. Look, there are structures out there, near what I found out beached — it has to be."

He's waiting for another period of low water.

"It's under at least 10 feet of water now," he said. "I'm trying to wait for the water to go down to go see those subs."

Diver Ralph Wilbanks, who found the wreck of the submarine CSS Hunley off Charleston Harbor in 1995, visited Shreveport twice in the last 15 years to search for the local submarines at the behest of best-selling author Clive Cussler, who also drove the search for the Hunley.

Wilbanks and a team of well-known fellow diver-researchers performed sonar and magnetometer searches of Red River and parts of Cross Bayou and Cross Lake, finding traces of old trucks from the flapper era, a dock that once served as a ferry link between Shreveport and Bossier City before bridges were built across the Red, and the remains of a Civil War gunboat, the Iron Duke.

But Wilbanks never went as far back into the murkier and shallower waters of Cross Bayou. Loschen's sub site is just west of where Wilbanks' surveys stopped.

Loschen is a former student and protege of Louisiana State University Shreveport history professor and author Gary Joiner, who worked with Wilbanks and whose research over the last three decades revealed official records of the submarines' existence. Joiner thinks that while Loschen might have stumbled onto something, it isn't the lost subs.

"He's wrong," Joiner says, noting that metal straps aren't stiffening ribs. He pointed to the Hunley, predecessor to the Shreveport subs, built by the same engineers but incorporating improvements.

"(The local subs) had the same everything except they had one hatch instead of two on the Hunley," Joiner said. "They didn't have ribs. They were done in the fashion of a boiler."

There's evidence the Shreveport subs existed. Reports of Union spies in Shreveport, as well as Confederate reports, detail the appearance and dimensions of the submarines as well as operations to put mines in Red River for a Union invasion that never came. Five submarines were built, with one sent to the Houston/Galveston area in Texas, and lost in transit. The late historians and authors Eric Brock and Katherine Brash Jeter did considerable research on the subs and the Confederate Navy Yard and found documentation that a number of machinists and engineers who had built the Hunley and other submarines for the South were in Shreveport the last year of the conflict.

There have been similar significant archaeological discoveries in area waters.

Several decades ago, a fisherman on Red River in north Caddo Parish noticed something sticking out of a crumbling bluff. It turned out to be a wooden dugout canoe many centuries old, and one of the area's richest historical finds.

Known wrecks of Civil War-era vessels include the transport Kentucky, just south of the LSU-Shreveport campus, and the Union ironclad USS Eastport, sunk during the Red River Campaign of early 1864 near Montgomery, in Grant Parish.

Joiner thinks the lost subs are still under land or mud, probably in good condition, much like a Union ironclad that was in the Yazoo River for eight decades only to be salvaged in pretty good condition.

"If the subs are still around ... they would be in perfect condition if they have not been interfered with. Sandy mud is one of the best preservatives," he said.