Revilee Foster's father, William Jesse Dill was aboard the USS Conestoga when it left Mare Island, California bound for American Samoa in 1921.  It was never heard from again.  For nearly a century, what happened and where the Conestoga and its 56 crew members came to rest remained a mystery. 

Originally built in 1903 for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company, Conestoga was purchased by the U.S. Navy in 1917 following the United States’ entry into World War I. After several years of service, the Conestoga was ordered to duty as a station ship at Tutuila, American Samoa in 1920. The ship was traveling to its new post from Mare Island Naval Shipyard on San Francisco Bay when it vanished.

The Conestoga was due to stop over in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and would have arrived around April 5, 1921. It never arrived, and in mid-May 1921 the Navy realized something had gone wrong.

In response, the Navy launched an extensive sea and air search. It was the largest sea and air search in history up until the search for Amelia Earhart and her plane in 1937.

But the Conestoga was presumed lost off the coast of Baja California or close to Hawaii based on estimates of how long it would have taken to steam into the Pacific, and due to the discovery of a drifting lifeboat believed to have come from the missing tug discovered by a passing steamship off the Mexican coast. What the Navy didn’t realize was that the tug had never made it that far.

In 2014, the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries Maritime Heritage Program investigated a multibeam sonar target detected in 2009 during a survey for NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey in Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary that was thought to be a shipwreck. The 2014 Maritime Heritage cruise confirmed that it was a wreck -- specifically, an unknown vessel of late 19th or early 20th century vintage whose characteristics matched none of the ships known to have been lost in the sanctuary. 

Using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), maritime archaeologists conducted three survey dives to characterize the target, which proved to be a 170-foot-long steel-hulled steam-powered ocean-going tug. After announcing the discovery of this unidentified shipwreck, the team then turned to solving the mystery.

After assessing historical accounts of tugs that had departed under the Golden Gate and were never seen again, and a detailed analysis of the mystery tug’s features, the wreck was finally identified -- solving a much bigger mystery. The team had found the USS Conestoga.