On February 2, 1866, as the steamer approached Vicksburg and the ancestral “Gibson neighborhood,” Randall could barely sleep. He stayed up until midnight talking with an old friend and then awoke in his stateroom at half past two. Hart was also awake, so they chatted until three. Randall “concluded to make one more effort to sleep,” and his brother went outside to smoke. Randall shut his eyes and drifted off.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Just an hour later Randall was jolted from bed, gasping for air. The doors, windows, and floor planks of his room burst apart in a “tremendous explosion,” and the room filled with “scalding steam.” The ship’s massive boilers had blown, and with “wonderful rapidity,” Randall observed, “the flames swallowed up everybody and everything.” Suffocating and blind in the “intense smoke and darkness,” Randall “made a desperate lunge” to get outside. He could hear nothing but screaming. Two men rushed past him, calling for him to join them as they leaped off the deck. Randall hesitated, and for a moment “a gust of wind blew the steam and smoke aside.” To his horror, Randall saw that the men had not jumped overboard – instead they had fallen “into a crater, where many others were vainly struggling, but being rapidly burned to death. They had jumped right on the red hot boiler.” Randall lost his footing but grabbed a rope and swung past what he called the “devouring crater of flames.” “I thought the spectacle surpassed any description of Hades i had ever read or seen,” he later wrote. “The cries of desperation, of despair… were heart-rending.” It was worse than what he had seen at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Spanish Fort as a General during the Civil War.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Randall Gibson during the Civil War<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Just past the crater, a fellow passenger grabbed Randall, yelled, “Is that you, General? God bless you!” and pulled him to the edge of what remained of the ship. With flames at his back, Randall plunged into the Mississippi. In a river “so cold that it burned like fire,” pulled by its “irresistible” current, Randall grabbed at a bobbing cotton bale.Although it was four in the morning, the inferno cast a great light that could be seen miles away. Dozens of burning and drowning men and women were shrieking for help, as a deadly barrage of bolts, bars, stovepipes, and planks pierced air and water. Randall saw a half-submerged lifeboat. As he swam toward it, he saw it was holding four scalded men. Randall climbed in, bailed the boat out, and fought the current with a stray plank.\u00a0 Slowly the boat made its way to shore, but it was taking on water. For half an hour Randall paddled as hard as he could, trying to get close enough to the shore that no one would drown when the lifeboat sank. When they finally abandoned the boat, there were roots to grab on to, and people on land soon pulled them to safety.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Soaking wet, dressed only in a flannel nightshirt, Randall watched the\u00a0W. R. Carter<\/em>burn to the waterline. Everything was gone – clothes, money, watches. He could not find his brother.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n A boat came to shore, carrying people and corpses pulled from the river. Randall climbed on board, looking for Hart among the survivors. Calling his name and asking for help, he was guided to a body among the dead, “wrapped up in a blanket, wholly unconscious and insensible, and in a rigid state.” The skin on Hart’s hands had been burned off. His feet were bare. Randall knelt by his brother and touched his chest – frozen. If Randall’s mind emptied as felt his loss, he was jolted back by a beat under his hand. And another. Hart lived.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Hart Gibson<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Randall told several men to start rubbing his brother’s body, and they covered Hart’s feet with hot water bottles. [Where did they get hot water bottles at the edge of the river at dawn? – The Puzzled Comtesse<\/em>] He plied Hart with an all-purpose remedy during the war, brandy and camphor. For an hour Randall knelt over his brother, working, giving orders as if he were still a general. Slowly, he would remember, Hart “came to himself.” After feeling utterly powerless, Randall had used his hands – his touch- to bring his brother back from the dead. The two men picked themselves up from the slick wet floor of the boat. They sat side by side as night turned to day.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/403dfa28-31a0-4926-a516-d293e6cab820.jpg\")
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