The Great American Steamboat Race

by Benton Rain Patterson

  The harbormaster, R.P. Clark, volunteered a few tall tales, one of them being how his baldness was a result of Indians shooting his hair off with muskets. More laughter and cheers. One of the most senior members of the audience, Captain Reuben Ford, stood and boasted to the audience that in his long career on the river he had held every job known aboard a steamboat. “You were not chambermaid!” Dan Taylor rejoined, drawing huge laughs and howls from the crowd.

  The toasts became all inclusive — to the citizens of St. Louis, the citizens of New Orleans, the chairman of the banquet committee, the proprietors of the Southern Hotel — until at last the celebrants were ready to call it a night and make their way home or back aboard their vessels.14 Captain Cannon and his officers returned to the Robert E. Lee. Captain Leathers found accommodations on his wharf boat.

  Early the next morning, Wednesday, July 6, Cannon and his crew made ready to depart St. Louis, and at eight o’clock the Lee drew in its lines and backed away from its wharf boat as a crowd watched from shore. It steamed upstream to the northern end of the waterfront, then turned about, fired its signal cannon, and with a full head of steam, glided swiftly past downtown St. Louis, headed for Mound City, where it would enter drydock and undergo repairs to overhaul its engines and boilers and restore its stripped upper works and have its hull repainted as well.

  If Cannon thought Tom Leathers might be planning to stage another race with the Robert E. Lee, running downriver this time, he need not have worried. Leathers and the Natchez spent July 6 and 7 taking on passengers and freight for the return trip to New Orleans and did not leave St. Louis until the evening of July 7, well after the Lee’s departure.

  The racing of the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee had indeed ended.

  Epilogue

  While the Natchez was resuming its service between New Orleans and St. Louis, the Robert E. Lee remained in Mound City undergoing repairs and restoration until September 1, then steamed away to New Orleans and on September 20 departed New Orleans, again hailed by a huge crowd on the riverfront, to resume its regular run to Vicksburg, making the first trip of its regular service since the race.

  Tom Leathers, still bent on proving the speed of the Natchez, on October 16 raced against the Lee’s record time from New Orleans to Natchez and beat it by nineteen and a half minutes, winning back the horns. Less than two weeks later the Robert E. Lee reclaimed the horns by bettering the Natchez’s latest best time by fifteen minutes, making the trip from New Orleans to Natchez in sixteen hours, thirty-six minutes and forty-seven seconds.

  On December 2 1, 1870, the steamer Potomac accidentally rammed the Lee at New Orleans, staving in its hull and sinking the Lee, but without any loss of life. While it was being raised, a fire broke out on the New Orleans riverfront on January 1, 1871, destroying four steamers docked there, but leaving the water-logged Robert E. Lee untouched by the new disaster. After it was lifted from the river and refitted, the Lee returned to service, still competing with the Natchez for business if not in races.

  During the cotton season of 1874 the Lee on one voyage to New Orleans hauled a load of 5,741 bales aboard its decks, surpassing the record load of five thousand bales carried by the Natchez on a trip in 1872.

  By 1874, Captain Cannon’s eldest son, William, twenty years old in August of that year, had joined the crew of the Lee.

  In 1876 Cannon took the Robert E. Lee up the Ohio River to Jeffersonville, Indiana, opposite Louisville, on its final voyage. The superstructure was stripped and its parts disposed of, some of the elegant chandeliers from its

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  saloon being donated by Cannon to the Presbyterian church in Port Gibson, Mississippi, and its trophies being transferred to the Lee’s successor, the Robert E. Lee II, larger and even more luxurious than the vessel it replaced. The wornout hull of the old Lee was towed to Memphis, where it served out the remainder of its useful years as a wharf boat. The new Lee was launched on April 25, 1876, with William Cannon as its clerk and John Cannon as its captain.

  After ten years of service, the Natchez was also ready for replacement. In June 1879 Captain Leathers took it on a voyage to Cincinnati, where its successor, the seventh Natchez, was being built. On the way, it ran aground on a sandbar and despite all its efforts and the help of tugboats, it could not be dislodged. “It would be a damn sight more romantic for the old craft to die and be dismantled midstream,” Leathers remarked almost wistfully, “with years rippling around her, and not in the boneyard.” Then, perhaps thinking of the hazard to navigation the abandoned steamer would present — and of his liability for it — he had a quick second thought. “But,” he said, “it’s too damn troublesome.”

  And so Leathers and his crew left the grand old steamboat stuck on the sandbar and waited till the river at long last rose and lifted the Natchez free. Once refloated, it was stripped and dismantled and the remaining hulk was sold for two thousand dollars. Like its former competitor, it became a wharfboat, permanently moored at the Refuge Oil Mill, on the Mississippi River below Vicksburg.

  The glorious old racers had finished their last course.

  A group of steamboat owners in St. Louis organized a corporation to consolidate their assets and strengths and chose Cannon to be its chief executive. He never lived to take the job, though. Plagued by a series of colds and poor health but unwilling to alter his schedule or work habits, Cannon contracted pneumonia and died at his home in Frankfort, Kentucky, on April 18, 1882 at age sixty-one. His body was buried in Frankfort. E.W. Gould, one of Cannon’s fellow steamboat captains, summed up the life of the gallant old steamboatman:

  Laudable ambition was his peculiarity. Honesty and integrity marked his course through life. Kindness, generosity and suavity were prominent virtues in his character.

  His great ambition to excel all competitors involved his health and his fortune. And although a man of remarkable physique and good judgment, his ambition probably destroyed both.15

  Tom Leathers continued to operate the seventh Natchez and later the sternwheeler T.P. Leathers, but ran into bad luck with both. The hull of the seventh Natchez sprang a leak at Stack Island in the Mississippi and sank on New Year’s Day 1889. In November 1890 the T.P. Leathers, loaded with 1,700 bales of cotton and 8,757 sacks of cottonseed, also sank, about three miles above Natchez. He then built another T.P. Leathers and another Natchez, but turned the running of them over to his sons Frank and Bowling. The old captain remained a partner in the firm of Leathers and Hoey, steamboat agents in New Orleans, and took another son, Tom Jr., into the firm with him.

  On the evening of June 1, 1896, a week after celebrating his eightieth birthday, Leathers set out for a walk from his big brick house at the corner of Carondelet and Josephine streets in New Orleans and as he was crossing St. Charles Avenue, one block from his house, he was struck and knocked to the ground by a bicycle speeding through the darkness. Bystanders carried him back to his house, where he died twelve days later, on June 12, 1896. His body was buried in the city cemetery in Natchez.

  A eulogy by the New Orleans Daily States marked his passing. “There are many who regarded Capt. Leathers as the greatest of steamboaters,” it said with carefully chosen words. “Certainly no captain, in the history of the river, achieved greater success, was more widely known or more highly respected, and few men ever presented such a picturesque and commanding appearance.”16 At the funeral, the officiating minister, the Rev. Dr. B.M. Palmer, saw historic significance in the end of Leathers’s life. “He is one whose death,” the minister declared, “is like the death of the century.”17

  Death for the Mississippi River steamboat itself was not long to follow. Ever since the Charleston & Hamburg line of South Carolina had run the first steam locomotive in December 1830, followed by the Baltimore & Ohio in the summer of 1831, railroads had been spreading across the country like vines. In 1835, just five years after the Charleston & Hamburg had carried some two hundred passengers on its historic first steam-locomotive run, there were 1,098
miles of track upon which steam railroads were operating in the United States. By 1840 there were an estimated 3,000 miles of track. Only four of the nation’s twenty-six states had no tracks laid by 1840— Vermont, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. By early 1837 at least two hundred railroads were either already in operation or were being built, planned or being considered.

  The United States postal service quickly saw the possibilities for moving mail by railroad. By 1834 it was using trains to send batches of mail in pouches. In 1838 the U.S. Congress enacted a law making all railroads postal routes, and having the mail sped along by rail became an ordinary occurrence.

  By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 most of the country, particularly east of the Mississippi, was laced with railroad lines. The numbers revealed the trend. In 1850 total track mileage in the United States was 9,000 miles (up from 3,000 miles in 1840). By 1860 the total had risen to 30,000 miles. In 1870 the total was 53,000 miles, and by 1880 it had swelled to 93,000 miles and was still growing. The crowning achievement of the railroad builders came on Monday, May 10, 1869, when, in an act that was both the symbol and the deed of the railroad’s conquest of America, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads met at Promontory, Utah, and joined their tracks into a transcontinental rail route that stretched from New York to California.

  Over time, a great deal of effort was put into making railroad passengers more comfortable. The cars’ interiors were decorated to resemble hotel rooms, with curtains, upholstered seats and varnished or painted woodwork. The most elaborate cars came to resemble ornate Victorian parlors, and by the 1860s passenger cars came equipped with toilets. In 1863 George M. Pullman, a cabinet and coffin maker turned building contractor and inventor, patented a sleeping car with upper berths that folded out to make a bed and, below them, seats that could be extended to form a lower-berth bed, all of his invention. In 1867 Pullman introduced another revolutionary innovation, a sleeper car to which was attached a car that was a rolling restaurant, with a compact kitchen and a gracious dining room included.

  Trains then became hotels on wheels, and railroads sped into a whole new era of transportation, one in which steamboats became a dangerously threatened species.

  For a time, showboats helped keep the Mississippi River steamboat a presence in the lives of people in communities along the river, even while railroads were thinning out the number of packets on the Mississippi. The steamboat had been adapted as a floating theater as early as 1836, when the Chapmans — a nine-member family of traveling actors — bought their first steamer and took it and their performances to communities on the Mississippi and its tributaries. Later showboats, some of them towing barges on which arenas had been built, were little more than floating circuses, with extensive menageries of exotic animals. The showboats lasted into the twentieth century. One, the Goldenrod, was operated by a succession of owners through the 1980s. In the 1990s it was renovated and operated as a dinner theater, docked at St. Charles, Missouri. It still survives as a National Historic Landmark, a museum piece, the last of the old-time Mississippi River showboats.

  By 1875 it was obvious the Mississippi River steamboat was in its death throes. “The direct and immediate cause for the great decline in this important branch of commerce,” the former captain and steamboat historian E.W. Gould publicly complained in January 1875, “is, of course, the construction of so large a number of railroads.” What was not being constructed then, he pointed out, were steamboats. Whereas in the years shortly prior to 1874, an average of one hundred new steamers were built each year, Gould wrote in the Nautical Gazette, “in 1874 there was but a single boat built of any considerable capacity, of the usual kind, for freight and passengers, and but very few tow-boats, or any other character of [steam] boat.”18

  With the spread of railroads, which could transport passengers and freight faster, cheaper and to more destinations than could river-bound steamboats, the public’s demand for steamboat service had simply vanished. Samuel Clemens charmingly captured the turn of events in his Life on the Mississippi, written in 1883, quoting from his conversation with an old-time steamboat clerk :

  “Boat used to land — captain on hurricane roof— mighty stiff and straight — iron ramrod for a spine — kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind — man on shore takes off hat and says:

  “‘Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap’n — be great favor if you can take them.’

  “Captain says: ‘I’ll take two of them’— and don’t even condescend to look at him.

  “But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow, which he hasn’t got any ramrod to interfere with, and says:

  “‘Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you — you’re looking well — haven’t seen you looking so well for years — what you got for us?’

  “‘Nuth’n’, says Smith, and keeps his hat on and just turns his back and goes to talking with somebody else.

  “Oh, yes! Eight years ago the captain was on top; but it’s Smith’s turn now. Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain.... But it’s all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below.... they’ve gone where the woodbine twineth — and they didn’t go by steamboat, either; went by the train.”19

  Clemens lived long enough to see the end of the steamboat era — and to lament it. “Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812,” he wrote, as if penning its obituary; “at the end of thirty years it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.”20

  Truly it was.

  Chapter Notes

  Introduction11. This time is reported in The Great 1. E.W. Gould, Gould’s History of River Steamboat Race Between the Natchez and the Navigation

  , pages 527, 529.

  Robert E. Lee, by Roy L. Barkhau, page 21. Other sources vary.

  Chapter 1 12. This time is from Barkhau. Other 1. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippisources vary.

  (New York : Harper & Row), pages 100–101.Chapter 22. Herbert Quick and Edward Quick,

  Mississippi Steamboatin’, page 207. 1. Francis Parkman, LaSalle and the Dis3. New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 2,covery of the Great West (Boston: Little,1870, page 1. Brown, 1903), page 308.4. The New York Times, July 2, 1870. 2. Ibid., page 35.5. Julian Street, American Adventures, 3. Thomas Fleming, The Louisiana Purpage 513. chase, pages 37–38.6. According to Henry Clay Warmoth, in 4. John Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense,his book, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, page 6.pages 157–158, the Robert E. Lee was financed 5. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi,and owned by two Northern businessmen, page 233.Oakes Ames of Massachusetts and Ames’s 6. Ibid., page 228.representative in New Orleans, Asa S. Mans7. George P. Kelley, “Mouth of Arkanfield. I found no other source to confirm sas — Napoleon,” www. rootsweb.com/~ardeWarmoth’s claim, which includes his statesha/napoleon.htm.ment, “But only a few knew that the ‘Lee’ was

  owned by Mansfield and Ames.”

  7. Frederick Way Jr., “Cannon Took a Chapter 3 Poke at Leathers,” Waterways Journal, July 31,

  1943. 1. “The Great Race,” Picayune, July 1,

  8. Henry Clay Warmoth, War, Politics, 1870, page 1.

  and Reconstruction, pages 158–159. 2. St. Louis Republican, July 6, 1870, page

  9. These specifications are attributed to 1.

  the Directory of Western River Packets, by 3. Details of the repair surmised in Frederick Way Jr. and quoted in Manly Wade Manly Wade Wellman, Fastest on the River, Wellman’s Fastest on the River, page 186. pages 21–22.

  10. This quote is reconstructed from the 4. Warmoth, page 160. account given to Alfred Pirtle by John Wiest 5. Details of the boiler leak’s repair, posand published in the Louisville Courier-Joursibly exaggerated but considered plausible, nal in 1916, a
n undated clipping of which is were provided by John Wiest in a newspaper in the New York Public Library Science and interview published in 1916 in the Louisville Technology section. Courier-Journal and archived as an undated

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  clipping in the New York Public Library Science and Technology section.

  6. Picayune, July 6, 1870, page 2.

  7. St. Louis Republican, July 6, 1870.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Memphis Appeal, June 26, 1870. 10. Picayune, July 3, 1870.

  11. St. Louis Republican, July 2, 1870. 12. Picayune, July 6, 1870.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid., July 2, 1870.

  15. Street, page 154.

  16. George Devol, Forty Years as a Gambler on the Mississippi, pages 239–240. 17. Picayune, July 3, 1870.