Approximately 311 Creek (Muscogee) people died in a steamboat crash on the Mississippi River. This tragedy occurred on October 31, 1837, when the steamboat Monmouth collided with another vessel near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, leading to the worst transportation disaster on the Mississippi River before the Civil War. The Creeks were being forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands at the time. Some sources report slightly varying death tolls ranging from about 240 to over 400, but the commonly cited figure is 311 deaths.