The Great American Steamboat Race

by Benton Rain Patterson

  While in his cabin the captain could monitor his pilot in the pilothouse above him, detecting his movements at the wheel and hearing him pull the bells that signaled the engine room as the boat moved into dangerous water, often giving cause for the captain to return to the deck. During times of emergency, the captain was expected to keep a cool head. He, with the pilot, had to quickly decide where to beach the boat when fire broke out aboard the vessel. Moments of indecision or inaction could mean disaster for the boat and its passengers and crew. “In case of snagging, or being cut down by ice,” Merrick states, “it is his first duty to save his boat, if possible, by stopping the break [in the hull], at the same time providing for the safety of his passengers by beaching her on the nearest sand-bar.”4 The code of conduct that required the master of an ocean-going vessel to be the last man to leave it when it was burning or sinking applied equally to the steamboat captain, and many a steamer captain, according to Merrick, lost his life adhering to that code.

  Among the owner-captain’s prerogatives was the naming of the vessel. The names chosen were often those of individuals, some prominent, such as Robert E. Lee, Tecumseh, Henry Clay, Robert Fulton and John Adams, and some not, such as A. T. Lacy, Henry J. King, Hiram Powers, Fannie Lewis and Grace Darling. Place names were also popular, such as Wyoming, Honduras, Pittsburgh, City of Alton, Denmark and Hawkeye State. Outside those two categories, almost any name was possible — such as Iron Duke, Resolute, Little Giant, Rover, Vixen, Editor, Post Boy, Fairy Queen, Fire Canoe, War Eagle, Harmonia, Greek Slave, Northern Light, Time and Tide and Ocean Wave. There was one group of names, though, that some owner-captains avoided, with what they believed to be good reason. Captain John N. Bofinger, whose Mississippi River experiences extended over forty years, explained the abhorrence of those names:

  I do assert that, with barely an exception, that all steamboats built and run on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, whose names commenced with the letter M, were either burnt, sunk, exploded or unsuccessful as an investment to their owners. You can look over a long list of Missouri, Mississippi, Mary, Michigan, Marie, Monarch, Mediator, etc ., and you will find that they met the fate of one as above indicated.

  Over thirty years ago, Capt. John Pierce built the Metamora. I tried my best to persuade the captain to name his boat some other name, and gave him my reasons, going over a large number of boats whose name had commenced with the letter M. He laughed at what he called a superstitious notion of mine and called his boat the Metamora. She was a great success, but sank above Choctaw island while she was in her prime. Capt. Charley Davis, about the same time, built a splendid Cincinnati and New Orleans boat. Davis, like his old partner, Pierce, would not listen to my idea, launched and christened her the Midas. She sank in the bend above Island 16. Capt. Joe Brown built the Mayflower sometime during the fifties. Long before she was launched I tried to talk him out of calling the boat by that name — no use. She was burned at Memphis.

  Our old townsman, Norman Cutter, Esq., bought a hull that had been built at Hannibal. Her cabin and machinery was put on at St. Louis, where she was finished.... It was the owner’s intention that I should have taken charge of the Charles Belcher, which was the name Mr. Cutter gave her about a month before the Belcher was ready to start on her first trip. I accidentally found out ... that she had been launched and christened Magnolia. That was enough for me. Nothing could have induced me to have taken charge of the Belcher. She was burned on her sixth trip at New Orleans.

  I could name hundreds of instances to show the fatality that seems to shroud the steamboats whose name commenced with the letter M, but will content myself with giving one more instance. I was in New Orleans in May, 1875, where I met Capt. Frank Hicks and his clerk, Mr. Alf. Grissom, who were at that time building a hull at Metropolis, Ill. They talked of calling her the Mary Bell. I did my level best to persuade them not to call her that name or any name that commenced with M; gave them my reason and recited many instances of losses, etc, all to no good; the boat was called Mary Bell, made but a few trips and burnt with a full load at Vicksburg.

  I do not pretend to give any reason why a steamboat’s name commencing with the letter M should be any more unlucky than one commencing with any other letter, but the fact still remains, superstitious or not.5

  There were, of course, M-named steamers that escaped the supposed M curse and lasted the normal life span of a Mississippi River steamer. Some that did so were the Majestic, Mary Hunt, Music, Mary Foley and, perhaps the most outstanding exception to the rule, the Mollie Mohler, the double M of its name proving no bane as it operated successfully for many years, and after its superstructure was dismantled, a new boat was built on its hull.

  Another superstition among steamboatmen was that a name with six letters in it was also unlucky.

  The job of Mississippi River steamboat captain was not for men only. Women could take the rigorous examination administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce Steamboat Inspection Service, the same test that was required of men, and if they passed, they became qualified and licensed to operate steamboats on the river. Blanche Douglass Leathers, wife of Bowling Leathers, the son of Natchez owner-captain Thomas P. Leathers, was one of the most colorful and most written about women to captain a Mississippi River steamboat. Blanche married Bowling in 1880, moved into the captain’s cabin with him — rather than wait on land for him to return from his steamboat runs — and by 1894 she had earned a pilot’s license and her own captain’s license. Bowling, who succeeded his father as captain of the Natchez, was Blanche’s mentor. “He taught me everything I know,” Blanche claimed. “I would stand beside him at the wheel and repeat to him each snag, each bank, each plantation, each landing place.... I was constantly having my turn at the wheel, learning to take soundings, learning the signals, in fact all the intricate details that form part of a river captain’s training.

  “At times my husband was being called away, and breaking in a new man was always a troublesome process. So it was decided that I should apply for a captain’s license.” Blanche was at the helm of a new Natchez, her first command, when it steamed out of New Orleans in November 1894. She became something of a celebrity — and a character — along the Mississippi and became known as “the little captain.” “I have done everything [on a steamboat] but marry people,” she told a newspaper reporter. “You see, the captain has full authority on board over everyone, from the first mate to the cat. It is perhaps the only job in existence where there is no one to answer to. And if you own your own boat, you are answerable only to God.”6

  Blanche was the daughter of a Tensas Parish, Louisiana, cotton planter and had grown up beside the river. Her father was one of Tom Leathers’ regular shippers and a friend as well. A newspaper reporter described Blanche : “A slight figure, five feet five inches in height, with the contour of charming womanhood, small, white, well-kept and perfectly molded hands ornamented with two handsome diamond rings; a face, grand, true, and ennobling to look upon, a fair skin glowing with the pink hue of health, perfect teeth, and a full red-lipped mouth that tells the story of a woman born to love, to feel, and to act kindly toward all humanity.... Captain Blanche is the angel of the Mississippi.”7

  Blanche’s brother, Allan Douglass, was somewhat more straightforward in speaking of her: “Aw, she never did all that stuff, the actual running of the boat. Sure, she had licenses all right. But she let Bowling and the men do that. She tended to the buying and the service. She watched the bills and the cash. Maybe you call that running the boat after all.”8 Blanche, along with Bowling, retired from running steamboats in 1901. She died on January 25, 1940.

  Mary M. Miller, Mary Becker Greene and Callie Leach French, all wives of Mississippi steamboat owner-captains, were other women who were licensed captains. Mary Miller received her license in 1884, making her perhaps the first woman captain and authorizing her to command steam vessels on the Mississippi, Red, Ouachita and other western rivers. She was married to George “Old Na
tural” Miller, who owned the steamboat Saline, which she also captained.

  Callie French’s husband was Augustus Byron French, who over a span of years operated five Mississippi River showboats, all of them named New Sensation. At least two of them operated at the same time, Augustus captaining one and Callie the other. Callie already held a pilot’s license when she received her captain’s license in 1895. Extremely versatile — and useful — she was much more than a steamboat captain and pilot. She wrote jokes for the showboat’s players and on occasion even joined the troupe as one of the actors. When necessary, she cooked, sewed and did whatever nursing was required. Unlike Blanche Leathers, Callie — known as Aunt Callie to thousands who were the New Sensation’s patrons — did “all that stuff ” that constituted the actual running of a steamboat. What’s more, she did so without ever having an accident.

  Mary Greene, known as Ma Greene on the river, received her captain’s license in 1897 and with her husband, Gordon C. Greene, operated the Bedford, which they owned. She later captained the sidewheeler Greenland from Pittsburgh to St. Louis for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

  The captain’s right-hand man in running a steamboat, the officer in charge of the nitty-gritty of boat operations, was the first mate, who on many steamers was the only mate. As the boat’s second in command, he was responsible for running the boat when the captain was off duty and he did all that the captain did while in command. He was, though, first of all, boss of the deck crew, a job that often required him to be a stern disciplinarian and manager of men. Deckhands could be an unruly, willful, lazy, irresponsible and even mutinous lot, and it took a tough taskmaster to handle them. The veteran pilot Merrick described a mate who served with him and told how he handled his job. He was Billy Wilson, from Pennsylvania, smooth-shaven, redfaced, about five-foot-eight and about a hundred and sixty pounds, a wellread and ordinarily quiet man. The crew that Wilson managed comprised about forty deckhands, men hired off the riverfront at St. Louis, Galena, Dubuque and St. Paul, riffraff who would get drunk whenever they could get whiskey, which was not infrequent. It took Wilson’s constant vigilance to prevent the deckhands from drinking too much and fighting among themselves, def ying the boat’s officers in the process. Wilson was, like other mates, a driver of men.

  He made a habit of carrying with him a paddle fashioned from a barrel stave, with one end forming a handle and the other end flattened like a canoe paddle, into which had been bored holes a quarter inch in diameter. “When the case was one of mere sluggishness on the part of one of the hands,” Merrick reported, “a light tap with the flat part of this instrument was enough to inspire activity. When the case was one of moroseness or incipient mutiny, the same flat side, applied by his [Wilson’s] powerful muscles, with a quick, sharp stroke, would leave a blood blister for every hole in the paddle; and when a drunken riot was to be dealt with, the sharp edge of the paddle on a man’s head left nothing more to be done with that man until he ‘came to.’ With a revolver in his left hand and his paddle in his right, he would jump into the middle of a gang of drunken, mutinous men, and striking right and left would intimidate or disable the crowd in less time than it takes to tell it.”9

  Over time, the deckhands who worked under Wilson learned to fear him. On a cold, rainy night on the upper Mississippi Wilson’s boat put into a woodyard to take on fuel, and Wilson ordered the deck crew to turn out and carry the wood aboard, shouting, “All hands! Wood up!” Most turned out, but Wilson saw that ten or so hands were missing and went looking for them, paddle in hand. He first searched their bunks and failing to find them there, moved on to the boilers, under which, he knew, the men sometimes slept in cold weather, to keep warm and to dry out their clothes. He crawled under the boilers and started swinging his paddle blindly in the dark, striking whomever the paddle found, and issuing a loud stream of profanity as he did so. The shirkers quickly scooted out from under the boilers and fell into line with the other hands, carrying the wood aboard. At the next wooding stop, there was no one found soldiering, hiding out to escape work. Wilson’s technique was to speak softly and carry his big paddle — until provoked into strong language. Other mates drove the men with the force of their voices, backed up often by the force of their physique. Merrick recalled one, a second mate, a big man with a big voice, who “roared and swore at the crew all the time.” Merrick claimed that in those days men who hired on as deckhands were at the very bottom of the social scale, men who, whether black or white, were used to being driven. “They would not work under any other form of authority,” he said. It was the mate’s duty to exercise the necessary authority, whatever it took to have the deck crew do their jobs, and mates were determined to do their duty. Eventually, however, after many reports of abuse of crewmen by steamboat officers, the United States Congress as well as some states, such as Louisiana, enacted legislation to regulate river navigation and define the powers of steamboat officers. Brutal treatment of crewmen was thus outlawed, and public outcry demanded the laws be enforced.

  Handling some of the steamboat’s more tranquil responsibilities was its chief clerk, who was in charge of the boat’s business office, as a purser is today. He issued passenger tickets, received payments for passage and for the shipment of freight, kept the account books, made out the boat’s payroll, answered passengers’ questions, showed them around the boat, acted as cashier and generally made himself helpful to first-class passengers. The chief clerk usually had an assistant, officially designated the second clerk but commonly known as the mud clerk. He got the dirty work. One part of his job was to go ashore and oversee and record the receipt and delivery of freight, a duty that required working outdoors in all kinds of weather, including cold and rainy. Rain frequently turned earthen levees into muddy mounds, up and along which the clerk trudged to get his job done, after which he returned to the boat well muddied. Hence the term mud clerk.

  In the middle of a gloomy night a lantern might be spied waving along the shore, signaling the steamer to stop for passengers or freight, and after the boat had pulled up to the riverbank, the mud clerk, by the light of iron torch baskets, filled with bright-burning pine wood or oily rags set alight and suspended from long poles aboard the vessel, would jump ashore to find out what business there was for the boat, while the mate shouted to the roustabouts to wake up and run out the landing stage to receive whatever was about to come aboard. When the boat needed refueling, it was the mud clerk who got the task of measuring the cords of wood taken aboard at wooding stops, to make sure the boat was getting all that it was paying for.

  Along with its captain and pilots, a steamer’s engineers — there were usually two aboard, the chief engineer and the second engineer — carried a certain prestige in the steamboat community. Engineering was considered a profession, and those who mastered it earned status — and a good deal of job security — among steamboat operators and fellow officers. Engineers ordinarily worked their way up to the position of chief engineer through years of learning the mechanics of propelling a steamboat. In the early days of steamboating engineers were not much more than engine tenders and were usually firemen who had graduated from stoking furnaces to running the boat’s machinery, which at that time was not terribly complicated. As engines and mechanical systems became more sophisticated, though, more preparation for an engineer’s job was demanded, and in order for an engineer to become licensed, considerable knowledge and skill were required.

  The usual starting point for a steamboat engineer was as a striker, or cub, whose work was both taxing and constant. One of the most onerous chores of the beginning striker on the Mississippi was cleaning the accumulated mud from the boat’s boilers, the thick sediment that had been unavoidably pumped into the boilers along with the river water. When the boat put into a port for a day or two, while other members of the crew were enjoying themselves ashore, the striker entered the boiler, from which the water had been drained, through a manhole, an opening in the boiler not much larger than the striker
himself, and with a hammer and chain began pounding on the two flues and the sides of the boiler to dislodge the mud, which was then washed out of the boiler with a stream of water pumped through a hose. On a good-sized steamer there could be as many as eight boilers to be cleaned periodically.

  Engineers were expected to be not only mechanics, able to repair the boat’s machinery, but also skilled ironworkers, able to fabricate missing or broken parts of the machinery and make miscellaneous metal devices (including bolts, nuts, hog chains and chimney guy wires) from wrought-iron bars that were kept on board for such purposes. Steamboats were equipped with a blacksmith’s forge and anvil, and the needed parts were beat out by the engineers with a twelve-pound striking hammer and a two-pound shaper.

  Continuous maintenance was a large part of an engineer’s job. The boat’s boilers, its propulsion engines, its hoisting engine that was used for warping the boat over sandbars, and its doctor — the small engine used to pump water from the river into the boilers and into the boat’s hoses — had to be repeatedly overhauled to keep them in perfect operating condition. Engineers went through a long checklist of things to do in preparation for each trip, so that when the signal came from the pilothouse to get under way, the big paddle wheels would actually start turning and the boat would begin moving.

  The engineer received signals from the pilot by way of a set of gongs and jinglers, little tinkling bells that were attached to cords extending from the pilothouse down to the engine room. The pilot would pull on the appropriate bell cord to give a specific order to the engineer. Side-wheelers had a set of bells for each of its two engines. The boats also had a pipelike speaking tube that ran from the pilothouse down to the engine room on the main deck, ending in a flared opening, like the bell of a trumpet, mounted above the engineer’s head. According to Mississippi River steamboat historians Herbert and Edward Quick, messages on the tube sometimes got a little heated: “When the signalers needed more expression than was afforded by the bells, the bells being unable to curse, no matter how furiously jingled, the speaking tube was used to good purpose.” Engineers, however, were at a disadvantage when those tube exchanges took place, for the big end of the tube, in the engine room, was designed for listening, the small end, in the pilothouse, for speaking, making the conversation mostly one way. The engineer had a bell pull of his own, which he used to signal the firemen when he wanted them to open the furnace doors to help decrease steam pressure.