Pirate (steamboat)
early American expeditionary supply vessel
The steamboat Pirate was an early American expeditionary supply vessel that sank on the Missouri River near what is now Bellevue, Nebraska, in April 1839 after snagging. The sinking of the steamboat was witnessed by Pierre-Jean De Smet and lamented by Joseph N. Nicollet, who was depending on its supplies for his expedition. Pirate was also carrying American Fur Company supplies for Potawatomi Indians displaced from the east, including a village led by Billy Caldwell. De Smet later mapped the location of the wreck.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Pirate (steamboat)” as early American expeditionary supply vessel. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as early American expeditionary supply vessel. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7197780. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1839.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pirate (steamboat)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.