The Great American Steamboat Race
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The greatest growth in steamboat numbers, however, was on the Mississippi and its tributaries. Between 1811, when Nicholas Roosevelt set out for New Orleans aboard the New Orleans, and 1820 at least sixty steamboats were either built on the western rivers or sent to them to begin operations. An early twentieth-century record4 shows the increase and the total steamboats in service and compares the western-water numbers with those elsewhere. It also reveals the increasing size of the vessels.
Number of Steamboats Year on the Mississippi 1834 231
1840 225
1843 672
1844 686
1845 789
1847 958
1849 1,000 (probable)
Approximate
Tonnage
39,000
49,000
134,400
144,150
157,713
200,000
250,000 (probable) Steamboat tonnage by sections and cities of the United States, operating in 1842.
Southwest :
New Orleans 80,993
St. Louis 14,725
Cincinnati 12,025
Pittsburgh 10,107
Louisville 4,618 Nashville 3,810
Total Southwest 126,278
Northwest :
Buffalo 8,212
Detroit 3,296
Presque Isle 2,315
Oswego 1,970
Cuyahoga 1,859
Total Northwest 17,652
Seaboard:
New York 35,260 Baltimore 7,143 Mobile 6,982 Philadelphia 4,578 Charleston 3,289 Newbern 2,854
Perth Amboy 2,606
Apalachicola 1,418
Norfolk 1,395
Boston 1,362
Wilmington 1,212
Georgetown 1,178
Newark 1,120
Miscellaneous 4,767
Total Seaboard 76,064
Grand Total 219,994
Those statistics show that in 1842 steamboat tonnage on the Mississippi and its tributaries accounted for more than 57 percent of the total steamboat tonnage of the nation. In 1842 Pittsburgh alone had more steamboat tonnage than Philadelphia, Boston and Charleston combined. The tonnage of steamboats operating out of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati together exceeded the total tonnage of all Great Lakes ports combined by five thousand tons. In 1842 the steamboat tonnage on the Mississippi and its tributaries exceeded by forty thousand tons the total 1834 tonnage of steamers in England, Scotland, Ireland and the then-British dependencies combined. As far as steamboats were concerned, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Mississippi and its tributaries were definitely where the action was.
All those steamboats represented a busy and growing boat-building industry. Cincinnati, which led the towns of the Ohio River valley in the number of steamboats built, in 1843 employed some seven hundred and seventy persons in boat-building, constituting a significant proportion of its then meager population. The statistics clearly show the steamboat’s growth. In 1820 the Ohio valley boat-building towns built fifteen steamboats, with a total tonnage of 2,643 tons. In 1830 those towns built thirty-three boats, totaling 4,881 tons. In 1840 they built sixty-three steamboats, totaling 9,224 tons. In 1850 they built one hundred and nine steamboats, with a total tonnage of 20,911 tons.
In 1843, a single year, Cincinnati alone produced forty-five steamboats, with a total tonnage of 12,035 tons; Pittsburgh produced twenty-five, totaling 4,347 tons; and the clustered towns of Louisville, Kentucky; New Albany, Indiana; and Jeffersonville, Indiana, together produced thirty-five steamboats, totaling 7,406 tons. Boatyards along the Ohio River were hard-pressed to keep up with the demand. They put on extra work crews that worked at night by torchlight for double-time wages. Machine shops and foundries as well toiled furiously to keep up with orders.
Some of those vessels did not add to the size of the steamboat fleet but were replacements for boats that wrecked or burned or were otherwise lost or those that simply wore out after several years of service, the average lifespan of a steamboat then being only about five years. Steamboat owners who lost their vessels to accidents or obsolescence usually were quick to replace them. So eager were owners to keep their steamboat business humming, and the cash returns flowing, that they often would order new vessels from the boatyards within twenty-four hours of having lost a boat to a snag, fire or explosion.
The U. S. Treasury Department reported that in 1842 steamboat tonnage on the Mississippi and its tributaries amounted to 70,033 tons, and in 1851 that tonnage doubled. The rise in total tonnage during the second quarter of the nineteenth century of course came from increases in size and carrying capacity as well as in the number of steamboats. The following table shows the increase in capacity.5
Years Average Capacity Average Capacity in Tons (Downstream) in Tons (Upstream)
Before 1820 110 55
1820–1829 232 116
1830–1839 310 155
1840–1849 496 248
1850–1859 630 315
Through improvements in construction techniques during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Mississippi steamboats, built almost entirely on the Ohio, not only got bigger but much more efficient as payload carriers, boosting the amount of freight they could carry in proportion to their size, more than tripling the ratio of their carrying capacity to their tonnage, from 0.50 to 1.75. That increase, pure joy to steamboat owners, meant that a boat of two hundred tons, for example, built before the 1820s, could carry no more than 100 tons of freight, but a steamboat of two hundred tons built in the 1850s could carry 350 tons.
Paddle wheels on sidewheelers and sternwheelers alike evolved over the same period, becoming larger in diameter, thereby increasing the speed of the boat without significantly increasing the amount of fuel consumed.
Another important technological advancement in steamboat construction was the use of high-pressure engines, which were developed more or less through trial and error over a period of years on the western rivers. The highpressure engine presented a number of advantages over the low-pressure, condensing engine. For one thing, important in the relatively shallow Mississippi and other western waters, it was some 60 percent lighter than a comparable low-pressure engine, making the steamboat lighter and its draft shallower. Not only was the high-pressure engine more powerful than its low-pressure counterpart, it was also a simpler machine, simpler to manufacture, and thus it cost steamboat owners about 60 percent less than the more complicated low-pressure engine. It was more easily maintained and repaired, usually requiring no more skilled a mechanic than was the boat’s engineer — a big advantage when mechanical trouble occurred on the river, miles from a machine shop. It was also less susceptible to problems arising from the boats’ use of siltladen river water to make steam.
Steamboat designers soon figured out that longer boats made better boats, and the marked increase in tonnage was a logical result of that conclusion. A longer hull increased the boat’s buoyancy and speed, giving it a shallower draft and making it faster than a boat of similar tonnage but with a shorter hull.
By the late 1830s the design of Mississippi steamboats had become settled and remained standard for years to come, even for boats built in the late twentieth century. They were shallow-draft, flat-bottomed, multi-decked vessels with tall, twin chimneys, or smoke stacks. There was no mistaking them for anything else when they appeared, riding majestically upon the waters of the Mississippi.
Some steamboat owners, out to get as much service as possible from their investment, operated boats smaller than the average Mississippi steamboat, which in 1851 was two hundred and seventy-five tons. Those smaller boats were light enough to run on the Mississippi and Ohio during dry periods when the water was low and on small tributary streams when the water there was high.
A typical Mississippi sternwheeler at that time would be two hundred feet long and thirty feet in the beam and would measure around two hundred tons. Its carrying capacity would be three hundred tons of freight, and its passenger capacity would b
e about two hundred persons in its staterooms and about one hundred on its main deck. The tables below give an idea of the revenue a typical Mississippi steamboat produced from the freight and passengers it carried. They are the actual rates6 on the upper Mississippi in 1857.7
Freight rates per ton, going upstream —
Less than 30 miles 30 to 60 miles
More than 60 miles 6 cents per mile 5 cents per mile 4 cents per mile
Freight rates per ton, going downstream —
Less than 30 miles 30 to 60 miles
More than 60 miles 5 cents per mile 4 cents per mile 3 cents per mile
Passenger rates, going upstream — Cabin Deck
Dunleith, Illinois, or Galena, Illinois, to: Miles Fare Fare Cassville 30 $ 2.00 $1.25 Prairie du Chien 66 3.50 2.00 La Crosse 150 6.00 3.25 Red Wing 256 10.00 5.00 St. Paul and Stillwater 321 12.00 6.00
Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to:
St. Paul, Minnesota 255 10.00 5.00
La Crosse, Wisconsin, to:
St. Paul, Minnesota 175 7.00 4.00
Passenger rates, going downstream —
St. Paul or Stillwater to:
Hastings 32 $ 1.50 $1.00
Red Wing 65 2.50 2.00
Winona 146 4.50 2.50
La Crosse 175 5.00 3.00
Prairie du Chien 255 7.00 3.50
Dunleith or Galena 321 8.00 4.00
The average upstream trip produced total receipts estimated at $4,450. Of that total, $3,000 came from freight. An average of a hundred and fifty cabin passengers, paying an average fare of eight dollars each, yielded a total of $1,200, and an average of fifty deck passengers, paying an average fare of five dollars each, yielded $250, for a grand total from passenger fares of $1,450.
Downstream trips were not so profitable, the big reason being that there was less freight to carry. The only significant cargo going downstream from St. Paul was wheat, which was shipped in two-bushel sacks, each weighing one hundred and twenty pounds. Boats going downstream carried an average of five thousand sacks of wheat at an average rate of 12 cents per sack, making their total freight receipts $600. They also carried an average of eighty passengers at an average fare of eight dollars each, making a total of $640 in fare receipts and bringing total receipts for the downstream trip to $1,240.
The round trip therefore produced a total of $5,690 on average. During the five-month season for navigating the upper Mississippi a steamboat would make four round trips a month, earning an average of $22,760 per month. Crew salaries and wages totaled an estimated $5,850 for a month. Food supplies, figured at $75 a day for thirty days, totaled $2,250. Wood for fuel, estimated at twenty-five cords per day at $2.50 per cord for thirty days totaled $2,000, and miscellaneous other expenses were estimated at $1,400
The steamer Imperial arrives at New Orleans on July 16, 1863, reopening the Mississippi River to unimpeded passage during the Civil War. The Imperial left St. Louis on July 8, four days after Union troops had captured the strategic Mississippi River city of Vicksburg and eliminated the last major barrier to free commerce on the river (Library of Congress).
for a month. The monthly total for all expenses, not counting depreciation, was $11,500.
And so for the five months that the average boat operated during the year on the upper Mississippi, it returned to its owner $56,300 in profits. During the middle of the nineteenth century, an average Mississippi River steamboat cost between $20,000 and $50,000 to build or buy, substantially less than a year’s profits from its operation. A boat would more than pay for itself in its first year of service.
On the lower Mississippi cotton was the predominant cargo. A steamboat of three hundred and fifty tons, which might cost as much as $50,000, could carry five hundred tons of freight, or some fifteen hundred bales of cotton, stacked high on its decks. Cotton generally was shipped to New Orleans from the two major ports of the Mississippi valley’s cotton-growing areas — Memphis and Natchez. In 1846 the shipping charge for cotton from Memphis to New Orleans was $2 a bale; from Natchez, $1 a bale. On the return trip, the freight rate from New Orleans to Natchez was 75 cents per one hundred pounds, more to ports more distant, on a steamboat that could carry from the wharves and warehouses of New Orleans five hundred tons of everything needed or wanted by the people of America’s burgeoning interior.8
Doing the arithmetic on those numbers shows just how lucrative Mississippi River steamboating was for boat owners and helps explain the proliferation of steamboats on western waters.
It was the nation’s westward expansion, however, that was the real and irrepressible force driving the demand for transportation and increasing commerce on the big river and its tributaries. The population of the United States grew from 5,306,000 in 1800 to 23,192,000 in 1850, or 33 percent every decade. West of the Alleghenies and Appalachians, in the valleys of the Mississippi’s tributaries, the population increase was even more remarkable. From a total of 560,000 in 1800 the population there swelled to 10,520,000 in 1850, an average increase of 182 percent in every decade in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the same period that steamboats were proliferating on the Mississippi and its tributaries.
The Mississippi steamboat both served and helped cause that population growth. It opened up the middle of the country for settlement and it brought in the new immigrants who would do the settling. The population increase in the major ports along the Ohio and Mississippi gave evidence of the steamboat’s role in the western expansion. In the years between 1820 and 1850 the population of Pittsburgh increased from 4,700 to 46,000. Cincinnati’s population jumped from 9,600 to 115,000, Louisville’s from 4,000 to 43,000, and St. Louis’s from 5,000 to 77,000.
In 1830, New Orleans, yet to experience the full effect wrought by the steamboats that came to its wharves, had a population of 46,000. Ten years later, in 1840, with steamboat commerce surging, New Orleans had become the third city in the nation, after New York and Baltimore, to reach 100,000 population.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, steamboats on the Mississippi had introduced into American history a whole new age. And there was more to come.
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PART THREE. THE CIRCUMSTANCES
•8• The Sweet Life on the Mississippi
The man first boarded the steamboat at Natchez and took one of the vessel’s best cabins. When the boat arrived in New Orleans, he notified its officers that he would not be disembarking but would keep his cabin and stay on the boat on its return trip to St. Louis. When it reached St. Louis, he again declined to get off and made arrangements to take it back to New Orleans. At New Orleans, he bought passage back to St. Louis. For two months he stayed on the steamer as it voyaged between New Orleans and St. Louis, which raised vexing questions in the captain’s mind. Elderly and friendly, the man jovially mingled with the other passengers, warmly greeting them, offering them cigars, buying them drinks, sitting with them and talking and apparently enjoying their company. The captain decided the mysterious passenger was not a gambler, to whom destinations were also unimportant. Nor was he, as passengers occasionally were found to be, a thief or a murderer hiding out from the law. He just didn’t seem that sort. The captain couldn’t stop wondering about the man.
At last, with as much tact as he could manage, he asked the man if he would mind telling him why he was making the repeated trips.
“Of course, sir, I’ll tell you,” the old gentleman answered. “It’s the finest way to pleasure myself that I know. No hotel in America can equal this. The finest food — your wild game, your glazed fish, your roasts, sauces and pastry! My cabin — it’s as finely equipped, as well decorated, as any room I’ve enjoyed in my life. The bar, the cabin, the promenade — nothing to match them, I tell you. And the company! I meet all my friends, the best people in the world. Why should I want to leave?”
Beaming with satisfaction, the captain treated his happy passenger to a drink at the bar.
That is a story out of Miss
issippi River steamboat lore which has in it enough truth to make it believable. Samuel Clemens, whose charming pow
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ers of observation of his fellow humans, augmented by his experience as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot, provided him broad knowledge of steamboats and their passengers, was among others who agreed with that traveler. People, Clemens wrote, compared Mississippi River steamboats to other things they had seen, “and, thus measured, thus judged, the boats were magnificent.... The steamboats were finer than anything on shore. Compared with superior dwelling-houses and first-class hotels in the [Mississippi] valley, they were indubitably magnificent, they were ‘palaces.’ To a few people living in New Orleans and St. Louis they were not magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but to the great majority of those populations, and to the entire populations spread over both banks between Baton Rouge and St. Louis, they were palaces; they tallied with the citizen’s dream of what magnificence was, and satisfied it.”1
Clemens’ intimate knowledge of Mississippi River steamboats dated back at least to 1856, when he decided he would become a pilot, a job that he officially began when he got his pilot’s license in 1858 and that ended when he quit it at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. He described the Mississippi River steamboat as he knew it :
When he [the passenger] stepped aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world: chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes — and maybe painted red; a pilot-house, hurricane-deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished with white wooden filigree-work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolical picture on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy boiler-deck, painted blue, and furnished with Windsor arm-chairs; inside, a far-receding snow-white “cabin”; porcelain knob and oil-picture on every stateroom door; curving patterns of filigree-work touched up with gilding, stretching overhead all down the converging vista; big chandeliers every little way, rainbow-light falling everywhere from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a long-drawn, resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisf ying spectacle! In the ladies’ cabin a pink and white Wilton carpet, as soft as mush, and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers. Then the Bridal Chamber ... whose pretentious flummery was necessarily overawing.... Every stateroom had its couple of cozy clean bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet; and sometimes there was even a wash-bowl and pitcher, and part of a towel which could be told from mosquitonetting by an expert — though generally these things were absent, and the shirtsleeved passengers cleansed themselves at a long row of stationary bowls in the barber shop, where were also public towels, public combs, and public soap.