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Authors: Benton Rain Patterson

The Great American Steamboat Race

BOOK: The Great American Steamboat Race
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Steamboat Race
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Steamboat Race
The
Natchez
and the
Robert E. Lee
and the Climax of an Era
B
ENTON RAIN PATTERSON
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

 

L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS
C
ATALOGUING
-
IN
-P
UBLICATION
D
ATA

Patterson, Benton Rain, 1929–
The great American steamboat race : the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee and the climax of an era / Benton Rain Patterson.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-4292-8
softcover : 50# alkaline paper

1 . Natchez (Steamboat) 2. Robert E. Lee (Steamboat) 3. Steamboats — Mississippi River — History — 19th century. 4. River steamers — Mississippi River — History — 19th century. 5. Paddle steamers — Mississippi River — History — 19th century. 6. Marine engineering — Mississippi River Region — History — 19th century. 7. Shipbuilding — Mississippi River Region — History — 19th century. I. Title.
VM625.M5P37 2009
797.12' 5 — dc22 2009011919

British Library cataloguing data are available ©2009 Benton Rain Patterson. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover:
The Great Mississippi Steamboat Race: From New Orleans to St. Louis, July ¡870
(Library of Congress) Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

To the memory of
Robert Townsend Patterson, chief engineer on the New Orleans steamer
New Camelia

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Table of Contents
Introduction
1

Part One. The Big Event
1•The Start 3
2 • The Course 19
3 • The Early Going 35

Part Two. The Origins
4 • The Pioneers 49
5 • A Different Kind of Boat 65
6 • Captain Shreve’s Design 77
7 • The Proliferation 89

Part Three. The Circumstances
8 • The Sweet Life on the Mississippi 101
9 • The Hard-Working Life 117
10 • Owners and Officers 129
11 • The Perils 145

Part Four. The Outcome
12 • On to Cairo 167
13 • The Fog 178
14 • Celebration in St. Louis 183

vii viii Table of Contents

Epilogue
194
Chapter Notes
199
Bibliography
203
Index
206

Introduction

“Nothing,” the nineteenth-century steamboat historian E.W. Gould asserted, “so much interests the average American as rapid motion, and it is not confined to our nationality altogether either. The fastest sailing vessel, even a merchantman, always got the preference in the early days, if known to excel in speed. Then followed the clipper ships, which excited the admiration of the civilized world because of their speed.

“Steam had no sooner been applied to navigation than the genius of the best mechanical skill was challenged to produce the best results in speed from a combination of steam power and model of vessels.... The principal question to be determined by all who had embarked in steam navigation was how much speed could be obtained.”
1

And what better way was there to demonstrate how much speed could be obtained, to show which was the fastest vessel, than to race the very fastest against each other?

In the days following America’s Civil War two of the very fastest steamboats were the
Robert E. Lee
and the
Natchez
, both operating on the lower Mississippi River, each with a large following of customers and friends. The personal rivalry of their owner-captains and the public partisanship that the boats engendered grew so intense that a match between the two became inevitable. The resulting race won both boats a fame so widespread and enduring that no other steamboats would ever equal it. The race itself became so famous that it became a milestone in the history of America.

The
Natchez
and the
Robert E. Lee
were quintessential Mississippi River steamboats, elegant specimens of the breed, built to tempt aboard passengers who could afford to travel in style, much like twenty-first-century cruise ships. Travel aboard a Mississippi River steamboat was, for those who could afford to go first class, an esthetic experience, providing days and nights of pleasure in an opulent floating palace.

2 Introduction

But unlike modern cruise ships, Mississippi River steamers had an indispensable practical function, far more important than pleasure or recreation. During many years of the nineteenth century, until the spread of railroads, the steamboat was the major means of transportation for both passengers and freight. The steamboat opened America’s mid-continent to settlement by providing access to the roadless western territories, carrying on its often crowded, boisterous main deck those courageous, hardy, sometimes desperate people who settled mid–America, the polyglotinous, multi-ethnic immigrants from abroad as well as restless and hopeful Americans moving westward from states along the eastern seaboard, all seeking new opportunity in a land of opportunity. For them the promise of America lay within its immense interior, which was reachable only on foot, through and across largely trackless woods and plains, or by boats steaming through the growing nation’s intricate network of rivers.

The steamboat was the way in and the way out. Once on their land, the settlers, farmers and planters depended on the steamboat to take the fruits of their labors to market centers where they could be sold, and to bring from those market centers what people needed to survive or simply to make their lives better. People of the mid-continent turned the Mississippi River into a vibrant thoroughfare, and the steamboat was the vehicle that traveled upon it, transporting them and their goods. A common sight in communities along the river, the steamboat became an integral part of ordinary life in the nineteenth century.

The
Natchez
and the
Robert E. Lee
were only two of the many, but because of the race they ran and the fame it gained them they have become symbols of all Mississippi River steamboats and of the steamboat’s time in history. Their story, their vying for pre-eminence, is not merely the story of two of the thousands of steamboats that plied the Mississippi’s muddy waters. It is the story of the Mississippi River steamboat itself, the vital, majestic creature of an American era.

Here is that story, from the beginning.
P
ART ONE. THE BIG EVENT

1 •
The Start

It was the most massive crowd on Canal Street since Mardi Gras, despite the summer heat, which afternoon clouds and a light shower failed to abate. The
Daily Picayune
reporter covering the event observed that the city seemed to empty itself onto the levee, thousands of onlookers thronging to where New Orleans’s famous thoroughfare meets the mighty river. The
St. Louis Republican
reporter in town for the event said the levee in the area of Canal Street was so densely packed with people that there was practically a solid human mass from the river back a hundred yards or so to the first row of buildings.

In upper-floor windows, on rooftops and on lacy iron balconies people assembled to watch the spectacle. Seven blocks away from the river, on St. Charles Street, as many as a dozen desperate onlookers climbed atop the dome of the St. Charles Hotel to get a clear view of the expected action. As far as the eye could see and farther, from Canal Street all the way uptown to Carrollton and beyond, eager spectators spread themselves out along the river’s edge, standing or sitting, squatting or lying wherever they managed to find viewing space, passing the time with food and drink bought from street vendors, suffering the crush gladly, knowing they were about to witness one of history’s great moments.

Some spectators, bent on a close-up view of the racers, boarded steamers that had scheduled special excursions to carry paying customers as far as twenty miles up the river, following the boats as the race proceeded. The steamer
Henry Tate
had moved to an upriver vantage point, carrying on board a load of passengers, who had shelled out a dollar apiece for tickets, and a brass band to further enliven the festive atmosphere. A half dozen or so other steamers had joined the
Henry Tate
, all providing the river’s equivalent of ringside seats.

Through the courtesy of the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company, the
Picayune
reporter became one of the passenger-spectators aboard

 

The New Orleans riverfront in the mid– 1800s. By 1860 New Orleans had become the largest export shipping point in the world. In 1870, at the time of the historic steamboat race, it was still the No. 1 steamboat port in the nation (Library of Congress).

the steam tug
Mary Alice
, which, like the other vessels, stood in the river waiting for the race to begin. Looking out over the broad expanse of water and across it toward the clusters of buildings in Algiers on the west bank, and noticing where the river lapped the muddy edge of the east bank nearby, the reporter could see that the river was low, as it had been for the past several days. He reported it at six feet and four inches below the high-water mark set eight years earlier.

Steamboat activity at the New Orleans riverfront on this day was not so bustling as it once had been, during the bygone golden days of Mississippi River steamboats, but activity was not exactly languid. Steamboats — and cotton — had helped New Orleans become, by 1860, the largest export shipping point in the world, and in 1870 it was still the No. 1 steamboat port in the nation. Eight packets — as mail- and passenger-carrying steamboats were called — had arrived in the past twenty-four hours and were docked bow-first into the wharves, side by side, like gigantic animals feeding at a trough. The
Mayflower
and the
Wade Hampton
had come from the Ouachita River, the
Bradish Johnson
from Shreveport, the
Hart Able
and
W.S. Pike
from Bayou Sara, the
John Kilgour
from Vicksburg, and the
Enterprise
and
B.L. Hodge
from the Red River. Other packets, including the
Mary Houston
and the
Great Republic
, having arrived earlier, still lay at the wharf, taking on passengers and freight and due to depart on Saturday.

Three departures were scheduled for this day: the
Robert E. Lee,
which had advertised that it was bound for Louisville, but which no one believed it was; the
Natchez
, bound for St. Louis, as everyone knew; and the
Grand Era
, bound for Greenville, Mississippi. The
Natchez
’s usual run was between New Orleans and St. Louis. The usual run of the
Robert E. Lee
was between New Orleans and Louisville. Ordinarily those two boats never left New Orleans on the same day. But on this day, Thursday, June 30, 1870, they were going to do something out of the ordinary.

The customary departure time for steamboats leaving New Orleans was between four and five
P
.
M
., and their leaving invariably created a riverfront scene that, having once been witnessed, remained a vivid impression on those who had experienced it. The onetime steamboat pilot Samuel L. Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, who quit steamboating and became author Mark Twain, long remembered the sights and sounds of the New Orleans waterfront departure scene and described them for the readers of his classic work,
Life on the Mississippi
:

From three [
P
.
M
.] onward they [the steamboats] would be burning rosin and pitch-pine (the sign of preparation), and so one had the picturesque spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long, of tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which supported a sable roof of the same smoke blended together and spreading abroad over the city.

Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the verge-staff astern. Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than the usual emphasis; countless processions of freight barrels and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard the stage-planks; belated passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle companionway alive...; women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted with carpet sacks and crying babies...; drays and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now and then getting blocked and jammed together...; every windlass connected with every fore-hatch, from one end of that long array of steamboats to the other, was keeping up a deafening whizz and whir, lowering freight into the hold, and half-naked crews of perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as “De Las’ Sack! De Las’ Sack!”... By this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the steamers would be packed black with passengers. The “last bells” would begin to clang, all down the line...; in a moment or two the final warning came — a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs, with the cry, “All dat ain’t goin’, please to git asho’!”... People came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard. One more moment later a long array of stage-planks was being hauled in....

Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide gaps in the serried rank of steamers.... Steamer after steamer straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes swinging by, under a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying, black smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck-hands (usually swarthy negroes) massed together on the forecastle ... all roaring a mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom and the multitudinous spectators wave their hats and huzza! Steamer after steamer falls into line, and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river.
1

As five o’clock approached, the clamor of departure on this day seemed even more boisterous than what Clemens remembered. Two of the steamboats about to shove off from the wharf were going to commence the most

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