I won't quote your whole reply but will go to all your links. I need to work on refining my searches. I would love to find the transport steamer Ewing, but when I was searching last night I found hundreds(?) of items from a collection donated by an entity with the name "Ewing" in it. Realistically I'd like to know a little about what it was like on them for the soldiers being moved from one place to another (not prisoners and not injured). Sometimes they had to stay on them while their commanders decided what to do with them. I really appreciate your help--I just hate to ask for it. And I do enjoy the detective work myself. Glad to find a kindred spirit!
It's like a disease although kindred spirit sounds
much better. Sometimes downloading one of those tifs from LoC is entertainment for an entire night. They're just so huge you can pick out and enlarge details all the way down to a cat on the shore, someone fishing from a pontoon bridge, women standing in doorways on board one of those transports and best- ship's names either on the pilot house or the side wheel.
Quite a few soldier accounts speak of their time on those transports- there's a crazy amount of post war journals, collections and memoirs in various archives. Hathitrust, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archives, LoC. You know the kind, for some reason obscure in 2019 and you can't figure out why? From day of enlistment to Appomattox, men recounted their war, some amazing stuff.
Those transport steamers were a little plentiful- although really, what was called a transport steamer seems to have varied? Guessing your
Ewing was of this class?
Kingston, on the Tennessee from a veritable series of steamer transports photographed there.
And a woman and a small boy!
Ewing does sound familiar- like I said, it's frequently possible to crop and enlarge some of those shots from Belle Plain Landing, White House Landing, City Point and a few others and make sense of the ships there including names. OK, it's also just, plain fun.