The Great American Steamboat Race (12 page)

Coincidental to the momentous voyage of the first steamboat on America’s western waters was the strange appearance of a comet that was visible to the naked eye for most of the year (much like the Hale-Bopp comet of 1997), setting off waves of consternation in the hearts of many who saw and feared it. If the comet, known simply as C/1811 F1, was the portent of a coming calamity, as some believed it was, Nicholas and Lydia and the crew of the
New Orleans
would soon enough learn what the calamity was.

As the boat’s only passengers, Nicholas and Lydia had the cabins to themselves, but too excited to sleep, they spent most of the first night on deck watching the forested riverbanks, shadowy in the moonlight, slip by them while the boat proceeded downstream at a speed of eight to ten miles an hour.

During the second night out of Pittsburgh the
New Orleans
reached Cincinnati and dropped its anchor in the stream. A crowd of Cincinnati’s citizens was up waiting for the Roosevelts, many of them having become acquaintances when Nicholas and Lydia stopped there earlier in their flatboat. Some came out in rowboats to greet them, telling Nicholas and Lydia, “Well, you are as good as your word. You have visited us with a steamboat.” But the doubters were steadfast in their belief that the steamboat could not successfully buck the river’s current and move upstream. “We see you for the last time,” some were reported to say. “Your boat may go down the river, but as to coming up, the idea is an absurd one.”
⁷

Keelboat crewmen in Cincinnati were among the most outspoken unbelievers, hurling gibes at the crew of the
New Orleans
. A number of flatboatmen who had watched the
New Orleans
steam past them just upstream of Cincinnati showed a bit more respect for the vessel, proposing that the steamer give them a tow if it passed them again. But they, too, refused to believe the
New Orleans
could make it upstream.

After taking on a supply of wood fuel, the boat steamed off again, headed now for Louisville, which it reached about midnight on October 1, four days out of Pittsburgh. It anchored opposite the town, under a brilliant moon. When the boat’s engineer opened the valve to let off steam and stop the engine, the escaping steam made such a loud and strange noise that it awakened the townspeople, who despite the late hour, came swarming to the riverfront to behold the fire-breathing, floating monster, clearly visible in the bright moonlight. One of the
New Orleans
crewmen later wrote a letter in which he claimed that the people of Louisville had been convinced that the 1811 comet had fallen into the Ohio and was the cause of all the commotion.

Several days after the Roosevelts arrived in Louisville, a public dinner was given for them, and Nicholas was hailed and saluted with toasts in celebration of his accomplishment in building the steamboat and bringing it to Louisville for all to see. It was a heartwarming occasion. However, before the evening passed, comments were inevitably made about the chances of Nicholas’s boat being able to return upstream. Some expressed their regret that this was not only the first but also the last time a steamboat would be seen above the Falls of the Ohio.

Nicholas took it all in good humor and then graciously invited all his hosts to be his guests at a dinner one evening aboard the
New Orleans
. They accepted and gathered for the shipboard
soiree
in the gentlemen’s cabin. Midway through the banquet, the conviviality was alarmingly interrupted by rumblings from below, and the guests felt the vessel begin to move. Suspecting the boat had somehow lost its anchor and was now adrift, headed for the Falls of the Ohio, the diners rushed to the boat’s upper deck to confirm their fears. What they saw, however, was that they were headed upstream, the powerful paddle wheels of the
New Orleans
churning steadily against the Ohio’s current. Within minutes the riverfront of Louisville was downstream of them, fading into the distance. After continuing a few miles up the river, the boat turned around and returned to its anchorage opposite the town. Nicholas had staged a convincing demonstration of what his steamboat could do.

When the Roosevelts were ready to leave Louisville, Nicholas learned that the river at the Falls of the Ohio was not deep enough for the
New Orleans
to get through safely. And so while waiting for the river to rise to a sufficient depth, he took the vessel back to Cincinnati and made more believers of the steamboat’s prowess. He then returned to Louisville, where, while the wait continued, Lydia gave birth. She had expected the baby to be born aboard the
New Orleans
, but during the wait she had accepted the hospitality of Louisville friends, and the baby was born in the friends’ home.

It was not until the last week of November that the river rose enough for Nicholas to risk the passage of the
New Orleans
through the rapids of the Falls. To help get the boat through, Nicholas took on two special pilots, who stationed themselves at the bow of the boat, studying the frothing river before them. Lydia watched from the stern. Hugging the Indiana side of the river, the
New Orleans
sped through the menacing rapids.

The danger and fright of the Falls of the Ohio were now behind the voyagers. Peril even more terrif ying, however, lay ahead of them.
First there was an attempt by Indians to catch the boat. A large canoe, fully manned, suddenly darted out from the woods beside the river and quickly came up behind the
New Orleans
, the Indians paddling furiously to overtake it in a race that the steamboat won when the Indians, their arms eventually tiring, issued a barrage of wild shouts and quit the chase.
Then there was the fire aboard the boat. One of the servants had stacked wet wood near the stove in the forward cabin in an effort to have it dry quickly. The wood was placed so close to the stove that it overheated and caught fire, spreading flames to the woodwork in the cabin, which were soon extinguished by the crewmen before major damage could be done to the vessel.
When the
New Orleans
reached the spot on the Indiana side of the river where Nicholas had noticed the coal vein, which he had in the meantime purchased from the government, the vessel pulled over to the shore to dig out the coal and take it aboard. They found that a large quantity of the coal had already been dug out of the vein and had been piled up near the river bank. Since the coal actually now belonged to Nicholas, he had his crewmen load it onto the boat. While the loading was being done, several people, described by one nineteenth-century account
⁸
as “squatters of the neighborhood,” apparently frightened, came up to Nicholas and his workers and asked if they had heard strange noises on the river and in the woods during the day before. The squatters reported that they had repeatedly felt the earth tremble beneath them and had seen the bank of the river shake.
Those aboard the
New Orleans
evidently
had
felt a tremor as the boat came down the river, but it was not until the day after they had stopped for the coal that, with repeated shocks, they realized something horrific was happening. The weather turned oppressively hot, the air misty, the mid-day sun a copper-colored ball that shone but dimly on the surface of the river, as if at twilight. Sitting on the upper deck as they resumed the voyage, the Roosevelts and their fellow travelers could hear an occasional rushing sound and then a violent splash and they saw great chunks of the shore rip away and fall into the river. And yet, except for the occasional splashing of earth into the water, an eerie silence enveloped the river and nearby woods. Everyone aboard the boat seemed stricken with fright and wonder.
The next day was the same. The pilot, Andrew Jack, confessed he had no idea where they were on the river. Alarmed and confused, he reported that the Ohio’s channel was completely changed. Landmark trees and bluffs that had been his guides along the course of the river were now gone, vanished into the Ohio’s muddied, yellow waters. Where there had been deep water there were now uprooted trees lying thick in the stream. Islands in the river that had served as guides had disappeared or had been turned into unrecognizable shapes. Menacing reefs and bars had suddenly appeared where the current had once flowed unobstructed. The
New Orleans
was steaming in uncharted waters, through a mysteriously altered landscape.
There was, however, no alternative but to press on. As evening approached on that second day from the coal vein, the voyagers sought a place where they could find shelter from the river’s current and tie up safely for the night, as they had been doing. Now they could find no such place. They could see flatboats and rafts that had similarly sought a place to tie up and were partly covered by falling earth where bluffs had caved in and slid on top of the vessels, now abandoned by their crews. The pilot, Jack, decided to continue on to a large island with which he was familiar, one that stood in mid-channel and that offered places to tie up. He could not find it, though, it evidently having disappeared. Tensely they proceeded onward, the passing hours slowly taking them into darkness. Finally they came upon a small island and moored the
New Orleans
at the foot of it. There they passed a nervous night, sleeping little, listening to the river rush past them and the sounds of earth and trees falling into the stream, and watchful of the furniture being sent skidding across the deck of the cabin as the boat was violently struck and jarred by debris floating in the river.
When the reassuring light of morning came at last, the voyagers could see that they were very near the mouth of the Ohio and that the Mississippi lay not far in the distance, even though the banks of the river and the river channels were now completely changed. Soon the
New Orleans
made a wide southward turn and entered the Mississippi’s flow. Not long after that, the voyagers reached New Madrid, which in 1811 was the most important town on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Natchez.
At New Madrid the Roosevelts and their fellow travelers aboard the
New Orleans
got some idea of the nature of the calamity into which they had haplessly sailed. New Madrid was very near the epicenter of an awesomely powerful and far-reaching earthquake, the biggest ever to hit North America and which has become known as the New Madrid Earthquake. It was felt as far away as Washington, D.C.; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia, as well as in many places in between.
The earthquake caused a large section of forested land in the northwestern corner of Tennessee to sink below the level of the river, and the Mississippi rushed backwards for hours to fill the enormous hole. Once the giant depression had been filled with water, the river resumed its southward flow. The depression, still filled with water, remains a natural feature of the land in northwest Tennessee, about twenty miles from present-day New Madrid, and is called Reelfoot Lake.
The earthquake had left New Madrid in ruins. Many of the houses and other buildings had been swallowed by the earth as fissures opened up or had been swept away after the land beneath them had fallen into the river. The town’s cemetery had also fallen into the river. At one site, according to one account, the earth’s upheaval had uncovered the fossilized bones of a mastodon. Some of the town’s residents had felled trees perpendicular to the cracks in the ground and were clinging to them in hopes the fallen trees would bridge the fissures and prevent them for falling into the chasms. Some residents had fled the town, seeking higher ground, but many were still there as the
New Orleans
approached, giving some of them a new fright. Many others among the quake’s survivors hailed the boat and begged to be taken aboard to escape the town. Lacking provisions sufficient for a large increase in passengers, however, Nicholas had to refuse them.
The
New Orleans
proceeded down the swollen Mississippi, fallen trees floating all around the boat, the pilot trusting more to luck than to an ability to read the altered landscape and current patterns, choosing the flow’s strongest current in his efforts to find the changed channel of the river.
At the end of the first week of January 1812, the perils of the earthquake’s effects behind them, the intrepid voyagers reached Natchez. Then came a happy occasion. During the voyage from Pittsburgh the boat’s captain and one of Lydia’s maids had fallen in love, and she had accepted his proposal of marriage. When the vessel docked at Natchez, Nicholas hunted up a clergyman, and a hastily arranged wedding ceremony was held for the couple. Before it left Natchez, the
New Orleans
took on a shipment of cotton — although the shipper’s friends warned him against putting it on the steamboat — for delivery in New Orleans. That cotton thus became the first steamboat freight on the Mississippi.
On January 12, 1812, welcomed by thousands of cheering onlookers who crowded the levee to get a look, the
New Orleans
at last arrived at the city for which it was named, its history-making voyage ended, more than three months and more than two thousand miles after it had begun.
Nicholas was left in charge of the
New Orleans
and operated it on its scheduled runs between New Orleans and Natchez. It made the round trip regularly in seventeen days, carrying freight and passengers, and in its first year of operation it earned a profit of $20,000. One source
⁹
quoting from a publication of the early nineteenth century, gives details — some presenting a reporter’s odd arithmetic — of the boat’s operations:

Her accommodations are good, and her passengers numerous, generally not less than from ten to twenty from Natchez at $18.00 each, and when she starts from New Orleans, generally from thirty to fifty and sometimes as many as eighty, at $25.00 each to Natchez....

She performs thirteen trips in the year, which at $2,400 amounts to $3 1,200. Her expenses are, 12 hands at $20 per month, $4,320 [sic]; captain, $1,000; seventy cords of wood each trip, at $1.75, which amounts to $1,586 [sic], in all $6,906. It is presumed that the boat’s extra trip for pleasure or otherwise, out of her usual trade, have paid for all her repairs, and with the bar-room, for the boat’s provisions....