This week: America’s greatest maritime disaster, all but forgotten, and then the river disappeared.

Next week: the Supreme Court decision that sets all of America’s state borders formed by rivers, and gave us the other side of our river.

I’ve written about both of these things before, but the recent focus on the river we sometimes forget — amazingly — makes these historical precedents timely.

The recent retreat of the Mississippi created a lot of interest in what was left behind, in what we could see and find when the mighty river lifts the curtain to reveal what lies on the lowest stage, the bare stage.

Mississippi River basin’s record-breaking drought beginning to ease

No river in America’s maritime history has seen greater drama. No river in America’s maritime history has seen greater tragedy. And no drama on the Mississippi has been as dramatic, no tragedy as tragic, as what occurred right here.

There is a wreck where that disaster occurred, but there is no longer a river. There is a settlement and a city from whose banks rescue boats were launched, but there are no longer riverbanks or a riverport.

Jimmy Ogle is a former Shelby County historian and a Memphis history savant. He now lives in Knoxville to be closer to family, but he is Memphis through and through and knows things about Memphians that even they didn’t know.

Going somewhere with Jimmy is a trip, and he called and asked me to join him on one a few years ago.

He navigated and I handled my car’s tiller in America’s greatest river — on dry land. I plowed upstream in the main channel of the Mississippi — in a plowed field.

Conaway: To see the wonder, all you have to do is look

In the surreal light of fire on water, I weaved my way through hundreds already dead and heard the desperate screams of hundreds still alive — as I passed the faux Georgian facades of a brand-new subdivision.

In the dusty reality of today’s all-but-forgotten Mound City, I remembered that day’s Mound City and its citizens throwing together rafts to save all the souls they could. I saw her go down, a spectacular tragedy at the end of a spectacularly tragic war, her fiery gunwales disappearing — 40 feet below a farmer’s field.

I steered to the landing at Marion, a bustling Mississippi port — and parked my car in front of a still Southern swamp.

It was a late afternoon in March, but Jimmy and I were spending quality time with the ghosts of an early morning in April of 1865.

Conaway: We have models; what will we be?

Before the levees, the river was many miles wide in the spring. Then, the channel north of the Desoto Bridge was the Tennessee Chute, choked with sandbars. Then, the chute we now see against the river’s west bank was the main channel, sweeping eight miles west and then north, placing Mound City and Marion on the Mississippi.

Before the Titanic, there was the Sultana.

The Titanic carried 2,229 when she hit that iceberg. The Sultana had a capacity of only 376, but carried more than 2,400 people, and hundreds of animals, when her boiler exploded on April 27, 1865, igniting the dawn off Marion and Mound City, visible from Memphis eight river miles south.

The Titanic lost 1,517, capturing the attention of the world then and even now. The Sultana lost at least 1,700 souls, the greatest maritime disaster in American history, and she couldn’t even capture a regional headline.

Conaway: She ran for a friend, she ran for a city

Her news was lost in the wave of mourning for Abraham Lincoln, awash in the gunshots that killed his assassin John Wilkes Booth in a Virginia barn the day before.

She carried the human detritus of war, Union prisoners heading home after somehow surviving the infamy of the Confederate prison at Andersonville only to die in hot, bright flames or beneath cold, dark water.

Where their hope sank, where there was once a great river, a great tragedy and a singular marker in the nation’s history and ours, that place should be properly marked and always remembered.

There is a small monument to the Sultana on a shady hill in Elmwood Cemetery.

Folks in Marion and around the country, and descendants of those aboard the Sultana started The Sultana Historical Preservation Society and opened a modest museum in Marion. Jimmy and I visited.

A small monument. A modest museum.

Conaway: ‘Opportunity doesn’t exist if you can’t get to it’

A recent story in The Daily Memphian said the group has finally raised enough money to begin a repurpose of the old Marion High School gymnasium to house a permanent museum. They are halfway to their $13 million goal.

They broke ground on Veterans Day. At least 1,700 veterans died in that explosion.

When I visited the current museum with Jimmy, I was told by more than one society member that the exact location of the wreck is known and that the depth below that field is assumed to be known within a couple of feet.

Conaway: You might want to sit down for this

If people got excited about the skeleton of a fishing boat, or the wreck of a minor steamboat, revealed with the drop of the river, just imagine what might be discovered in the remains of our nation’s greatest maritime disaster.

Imagine what we might discover about us in an earnest examination of the corruption that put 2,400 on board a vessel designed for 376. Imagine what we might discover about us in the honest examination of why this historic tragedy remains largely unknown.

Books and movies about the Titanic have been made. We had a Wonders Series exhibition here about the Titanic, and I wrote and produced an award-winning video about that exhibition. A Titanic replica sits on dry land as an attraction in Gatlinburg. A greater tragedy sits beneath dry land just eight miles from here.

Conaway: A note from the Tennessee-Alabama game: Georgia matters

If the fact that those tortured souls who have gone so long unrecognized, who died an even more tortured death, has anything to do with the fact that they were Union soldiers, then it is we who must be haunted by those ghosts.

Jimmy knows — and he taught me — if you travel the road that once was a river and stop and listen, you can hear bits and pieces of 2,400 stories washed away by a forgotten current. It’s a haunted voyage worth taking.

I’m a Memphian, and I see — and hear — ghosts.