In early April 1852, the aging side-wheeler steamboat Saluda traveled up the Missouri River from St. Louis toward Kanesville, Iowa, but ice floes and strong currents stopped it at Lexington's Upper Landing. Among the 175 passengers still aboard were travelers bound for upriver towns, men headed to the California gold fields, and about 75 Mormon emigrants, mostly Europeans, hoping to join wagon trains to Utah Territory. On Good Friday morning, April 9, Captain Francis Belt declared that he would round the bend or blow up the boat. At about 7:30 a.m., the Saluda left the landing, and before its paddle-wheels made three revolutions, its red hot boilers exploded. The blast, heard two miles away, hurled passengers, crew, baggage, timbers, chimneys, and boiler fragments onto the shore and into the river; the bell landed high on the riverbank, and a 600 pound safe with a leashed yellow spotted dog landed there as well. Two-thirds of the vessel, everything above the lower deck and extending back to the wheelhouse, was blown away, and currents pushed the remains back against the levee with the stern under several feet of water. Estimates of the dead and missing ranged from 26 to 135, but the best eyewitness accounts held that about 75 were killed or lost and presumed dead, with three dozen injured. Captain Belt was killed, and only three officers survived. Lexington's citizens responded by rescuing victims, caring for the wounded, raising funds for those who had lost everything, and finding homes for orphans, while 21 victims were buried there that Friday. Most survivors soon found other transportation and continued on. The Saluda disaster became one of the worst, and perhaps the worst, steamboat tragedies on the Missouri River, and it helped prompt the U.S. Congress later that year to enact new operating rules and stricter inspection standards for steamboats.