The Great American Steamboat Race

by Benton Rain Patterson

  When the boat was under way, the engineer kept to his station in the engine room, despite fire, collision, grounding or some other emergency, for when the pilot rang the signals, the steamer’s powerful engine, in the hands of the engineer, had to respond as ordered. “The engineer knew his job was as important as any aboard, even if he did do his work in grease and sweat and was usually laboring in obscurity while the captain and pilot were going through the pomp and show of landing and departing,” the Quicks reported. “Let the captain play host and the pilot play lord.... But when she [the boat] drifted down to a shoal, and at just the right instant the pilot rang full steam ahead, it was the engineer on watch below who must know that his engines were ready, who must apply the power that carried her across.”10

  Not quite so dramatic was the role of the boat’s steward. His main job was to keep the first-class passengers fed and comfortable. To help him do so he commanded a staff of assistant stewards, cooks, bakers, waiters, pantrymen and maids, among others, whom he both hired and supervised. Good stewards — and the cuisine they were able to produce for the benefit of passengers and a boat’s reputation — were so valued by steamboat owners that their pay, about two hundred dollars a month, ordinarily equaled that of the chief engineer, the mate and the clerk and sometimes even that of the boat’s captain, who made about three hundred dollars a month.

  The chief steward and two other officers aboard the steamer J.M. White. The steward’s main job was to keep the first-class passengers well fed and comfortable with help from his staff of assistant stewards, cooks, bakers, waiters, pantrymen and maids, whom he hired and directed (Library of Congress).

  It was a demanding job, though. The steward procured all necessary foodstuffs and therefore was required to be acquainted with all sorts of food suppliers in the river’s port cities and obscure communities along the boat’s route as well. He made up the daily menus, supervised the food preparation, oversaw all aspects of the dining service and directed the maids’ care of the cabins and of the passengers’ personal needs. He also planned and directed leisure activities for the passengers and to the passengers was the chief enforcer of the boat’s rules. His guiding principle was, according to one account, to “spare neither pains nor money to make the passengers comfortable.”

  By the middle of the nineteenth century many, if not most, Mississippi River steamboat stewards were black men. It was a job at which they apparently excelled and one that rewarded them not only with handsome salaries but with status, particularly in the black communities along the river. Black stewards, however, sometimes ran into trouble with white workers whom they supervised and with white passengers who refused to accept the steward’s authority, as was the case in one incident when a passenger seated himself at the officers’ table and when told by the steward he was in violation of the rules, the passenger struck the steward in the head with his cane and told him, “No black bastard can tell me where to sit.”

  In a class of his own among steamboat officers was the pilot. “Pilots,” the Quicks commented, “were treated with a great deal of respect by every one aboard a steamboat : captains, waiters, deckhands, clerks, engineers, firemen and passengers. Ashore they were envied for the pay they drew [about five hundred dollars a month, compared to the captain’s three hundred].... They never asked any one for any thing : On all occasions they gave orders. They were, in fact, the accepted aristocrats of the steamboat business.”11

  To many youngsters growing up in towns along the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot was an object of envy and hero worship. He was the person that a boy with a fondness for the river would most like to be. Some who aspired to the position eventually made their dream come true, but only by dint of devotion to the study of the river and a dogged determination to master it. When the Mississippi was low, pilots rarely ventured downstream at night. The danger was too great. The boat at slow speed was hard to steer with the force of the current behind it, pushing it toward whatever obstacle lay before it. Voyages upstream in the dark were somewhat safer, because of better steering against the current. It was important, furthermore, that nothing interfere with the pilot’s vision at night, and pains were taken to prevent any diminution of his ability to see as best he might in the dark. Canvas curtains were draped over the forward part of the boiler deck, where the cabin passengers were, and the forecastle was covered to block the light emanating from the furnace doors. Skylights were also draped, and according to one account, on the hurricane deck, up near the pilothouse, not even lighted cigars were allowed.

  Feeling their way along the river at night, pilots sometimes made use of not only what they could see but what they could hear. A pilot on the Missouri River took notice of a well known dangerous spot by the sound of a barking dog, which always came from the same location along the river, and he blindly steered the boat to avoid the danger by the sound of the barking. One night, though, the dog barked from a different place, and shortly thereafter, the boat ran onto a sandbar and was wrecked.

  The fund of knowledge required of a pilot was enormous, as the Quicks pointed out. “The depth of the channel at every point, at all stages of the river, the amount of water on the bars, the habits of the river in tearing down banks and building up bars, the changing depth of the water between one trip and the next — all these things he had to know; also the marks, the trees, houses, points, bars, posts, hollows — anything by which to lay his course through every mile of the river. And as the river changed, he had to know the new marks, new channels, new bars, new islands.”12

  Pilots had to know not only what was along the river but what was in the river. They had to know how to read the river. A line appearing on the river’s surface, for example, told the pilot, peering ahead through the windows of the pilothouse, that a reef of mud and sand lay just beneath the surface. The wind sometimes made a similar mark on the river, but not exactly, and the pilot had to know the difference. A combination of lines and circles on the water revealed a spot that was developing into a shoal. A dimple on the water indicated a rock below. A streak like a boat’s wake showed that a snag lay hidden right below the surface.

  At times when it was simply impossible to see or otherwise know what lay ahead, as frequently happened on the lower Mississippi when sugar cane growers burned the cane stalks after the juice had been pressed from them and smoke from the burning heaps of cane spread over the river like a dense fog, prudent pilots put their boats into shore and tied up against the levee until daylight came or the wind shifted and removed the smoke from the river.

  “You can not steer a boat by landmarks ten feet ahead of her,” former pilot Merrick remarked. “The pilot searches for landmarks a mile away, and must be able to distinguish between two kinds of blackness — the blackness of the night below [on the river], and the blackness of the sky above, and from the dividing line between the two must read his marks and determine his course.”13

  Thomas Burns, a native of Boston who grew up in Galena, Illinois, was a pilot on the upper Mississippi just before and right after the Civil War and knew the upper Mississippi so well, it was said, that he could get out of bed on the darkest night, head for the pilothouse to take over his duties and before he reached the pilothouse door could tell in what section of the river the boat was steaming.

  For cub pilots, Burns had a guiding principle to help keep them and their boats out of serious trouble in time of unknown danger. Having learned that a steamboat standing still in the water was less likely to damage itself or inflict damage on any other boat in the stream, he would tell his student pilots, “When in doubt, ring the stopping bell and set her back.” A memorable and merciful golden rule.

  By the 1880s, when Samuel Clemens revisited the Mississippi after a twenty-one-year absence, electricity and navigational aids had reduced the demands on steamboat pilots, as Clemens discovered on his voyage up the river. “As we approached famous and formidable Plum Point,” he wrote, “darkness fell, but that was nothing to shudder about — in th
ese modern times. For now the national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of two-thousand-mile torchlight procession. In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of every crossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp. You are never entirely in the dark now; there is always a beacon in sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast.”14

  Clemens conceded that lighting the Mississippi’s danger spots had made river travel safer and made the pilot’s job easier, but the improvement had come at a cost. “This thing,” he complained, “has knocked the romance out of piloting.”

  Steamboat officers alternated their duties on shifts, or watches. The captain and the mate were on duty six hours and off duty six hours, one relieving the other, around the clock. The chief clerk and the mud clerk also were on six hours and off six. The engineers and pilots generally stood a threehour watch, believed to lessen the monotony of the job and the boredom of off-duty time. The captain and the chief clerk began their first watch of the day at six A.M., right after breakfast. At noon they were relieved by the mate and the second clerk, who were on duty till six P.M., at which time the captain and chief clerk returned to duty. After supper, the mate and second clerk were able to sleep until midnight, when they had to rouse themselves and go back on watch.

  “While each class of officers was on duty the same number of hours each day,” George Merrick pointed out, “the difference lay in the fact that the junior officers were compelled by this arrangement to turn out at midnight throughout the season. It was this turning out at midnight that made the mate’s watch ... very undesirable.... A man can knock about until midnight very agreeably, after a short nap in the afternoon, provided he can have a sound sleep during the ‘dead hours’ from midnight until six o’clock in the morning. To turn out at midnight every night and work until six is an entirely different matter.”15

  • 11 • The Perils

  On the evening of May 4, 1825, the steamer Teche pushed away from the wharf at Natchez, bound for New Orleans, heavily laden with bales of cotton and carrying some seventy passengers, many of whom had boarded the boat at Natchez. Darkness, worsened by a thick haze, quickly descended on the river, and by the time the Teche had traveled but ten miles the boat’s captain decided it was unsafe to proceed farther. He ordered the boat anchored in the stream until conditions improved. About two o’clock the next morning, the haze having dissipated, the anchor was hauled up, and with its steam already raised, the Teche began to move ahead again. Suddenly an explosion that sounded like an artillery bombardment shook the boat, jarring the sleeping passengers from their berths.

  All lights aboard the boat immediately went out, extinguished either by the escape of steam or the concussion of the air. In the darkness that instantly followed, a frightened crowd of passengers assembled on the deck, unaware of exactly what sort of disaster had struck them. Then swiftly came a shout that the boat was on fire, and the crowd broke into pandemonium, the panicked passengers rushing helter-skelter about the deck in the darkness, some leaping overboard to escape the flames.

  The exact number of lives lost in the Teche disaster was never determined, but several persons were known to have been immediately killed by the explosion, and others were so severely scalded or otherwise injured that they died not long afterwards. No fewer than twenty, and perhaps as many as thirty, persons drowned.

  On August 12, 1828, the steamboat Grampus, carrying passengers and towing three sailing brigs and a sloop up the Mississippi to New Orleans, was rocked by an explosion that blasted the captain and a passenger from the wheelhouse and landed them fifty feet away on the forward deck, severely bruised but alive and whole, surrounded by debris. The pilot who had been

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  standing at the wheel was thrown into the river and drowned. The boat’s other pilot, who had been walking on the deck just outside the wheelhouse, suffered a broken leg and other injuries and subsequently died. The brig in tow on the larboard side of the Grampus had both topmasts cut off by flying fragments of the Grampus’s machinery, and the brig being towed on the steamer’s starboard side had her bottom penetrated by a piece of the Grampus’s boiler.

  Altogether, nine persons lost their lives, some killed instantly by the blast, some who died later of their injuries. Four others survived.

  The Grampus explosion was determined to have been the fault of human rather than mechanical failure. The assistant engineer who was in charge of the engine room while the chief engineer was off duty had fallen asleep after partly shutting off the water supply to the boiler, which soon overheated. Awaking, the assistant engineer quickly noticed that gauges showed the water at a dangerously low level in the boiler and immediately turned on the pump to resupply water to the boiler. When the new water entered the white-hot boiler, it was instantly turned into steam, creating an excess of pressure that burst the boiler.

  On February 24, 1830, one or more boilers of the steamer Helen McGregor, on its way from New Orleans to Louisville, exploded while the boat was tied up at the wharf in Memphis. A section of deck near the boilers was crowded with people, all of whom were either killed or injured. As many as sixty persons were believed to have died from the blast, including an unknown number whose bodies were hurled into the river and never recovered. The Helen McGregor explosion was the deadliest in the history of steamboats up till that time.

  On June 9, 1836, near Columbia, Arkansas, the Rob Roy, en route from New Orleans to Louisville, stopped its engine long enough for the engineer to oil part of its machinery, and in the two minutes or so that the engine was stopped, the steam in the boiler accumulated so rapidly that it burst the boiler. Immediately following the blast, the boat was run ashore, allowing passengers and crew to escape lest they drown as the boat burned and sank. The only lives lost were those of the victims of the explosion itself.

  Just after 5 P.M. on November 15, 1849, the Louisiana, an elegant new steamboat captained by John Cannon, was backing out of its berth at the foot of Gravier Street in New Orleans, two blocks from Canal Street in the heart of the business district, when a horrific blast shattered it and blew the superstructure off the two steamers on either side of it. Human bodies, persons who had been aboard the Louisiana, were blown two hundred feet into the air, one of them flew like a projectile through the pilothouse of the Bostona, one of the steamers docked beside the Louisiana. People standing as far as two hundred yards from the boat were struck by flying debris. With little time for its passengers to escape to shore, those who had survived the explosion, the broken remains of the Louisiana quickly sank into the river. An estimated eighty-six persons lost their lives, including several who were aboard the two boats beside the Louisiana.

  Captain Cannon and his chief engineer, John L. Smith, were ashore on business at the time of the explosion and came in for much criticism for their absence. The coroner’s jury that investigated the disaster determined that the boat’s second engineer, Clinton Smith, was “grossly, culpably, and criminally neglectful and careless of his duty.” The jury also reported that Cannon was “highly culpable” in allowing Clinton Smith to be in charge of the engine room and blamed Cannon and his chief engineer as the “cause and causes of said explosion.” In a later hearing, however, both Cannon and the chief engineer were acquitted of a charge of manslaughter in connection with the accident.

  Starting when the boiler on Henry Shreve’s Washington blew apart in June 1816, the list of steamboat explosions was long and grim. An estimated seventysix steamboat explosions on the Mississippi and its tributaries occurred between 1836 and 1848, a rate of about one every six months. In the years 1846 to 1848 steamboat explosions on the western waters were reported to have caused 259 fatalities.

  As destructive and deadly as explosions were, fire was the most fearsome danger. In the early-morning darkness on May 8, 1837, the Ben Sherrod, running between New Orleans and Louisville and racing with the steamer Prairie, fell victim to one of the Mississippi’s worst steamboat fires. About one o’clock in the morn
ing the boat was about fourteen miles above Fort Adams, Mississippi, racing to pass the Prairie, just ahead of it. The firemen were shoving in pine knots and sprinkling rosin over the coal, doing their best to raise more steam. The boilers became so hot that they set fire to the sixty cords of wood on board, and the Ben Sherrod was soon completely enveloped in flames.

  The boat’s yawl was finally launched, but it was so overloaded with fleeing crewmen that it sank, and nearly everyone in it drowned. Passengers desperate to escape the fire leaped into the river, still in their night clothes. Ten women passengers jumped overboard, some of them quickly drowning once in the water, others finding floating debris to which they could cling. Only two of the ten survived.

  The Prairie, which the Ben Sherrod was trying to overtake, continued on up the river without stopping or turning about to try to save those aboard the stricken vessel. When the Prairie reached Natchez, its captain reported

  The Ben Sherrod (the name misspelled by the artist) ablaze on the Mississippi, near Fort Adams, Mississippi. The boat was racing the Prairie when its boilers overheated and set off a fire that consumed the vessel in the early-morning darkness of May 8, 1837. Many of its passengers and crew drowned after leaping into the river to escape the flames (Library of Congress).