St. Louis once managed to set itself on fire with a steamboat. Not metaphorically. A literal boat drifted down the Mississippi in flames and turned the riverfront into a civic nightmare.

On the night of May 17, 1849, the steamer White Cloud caught fire at the levee. Its moorings burned through, and the boat floated downstream like a malicious lantern, igniting other steamers as it went. Twenty-three steamboats were eventually lost. Then the fire jumped ashore and started eating the city block by block. It tore through the levee, crossed streets, and gutted a large section of downtown while volunteer fire crews tried to keep up with hand engines and exhaustion.

This was already a bad year. Cholera was in town. The population was swelling. St. Louis was booming in the way frontier cities boom: fast, rich, combustible. The riverfront was crowded with wooden buildings, cargo, and boats loaded with the exact substances one would rather not see introduced to open flame.

At one point, firefighters and citizens tried to create a firebreak by blowing up buildings in the path of the flames with black powder. One of the men doing that work, Captain Thomas Targee, was killed. Which is a grim reminder that when nineteenth-century St. Louis said it was improvising, it meant explosives.

By morning, roughly 15 blocks of the city had burned, along with hundreds of buildings and a huge slice of the river economy. The fire forced St. Louis to rebuild in brick and stone and helped push improvements in water infrastructure. Disaster, in classic civic fashion, became planning.

The city likes to think of the river as its beginning. In 1849, the river briefly looked more like an accomplice.