Read The Great American Steamboat Race Online
Authors: Benton Rain Patterson
The Great American Steamboat Race (21 page)
Cooks sometimes worked eighteen-hour days, often in torturous heat, from early morning till the middle of the evening when all their pots and pans were again clean and put away for the next day’s use. The cook designated as first cook was the head of the kitchen, directing and overseeing a staff that might total as many as four cooks, depending on the size of the boat and its passenger-carrying capacity. On small steamers there might be as few as two cooks, including the first cook, and those two did everything the kitchen operation required. The first cook also did the hiring and firing of his subordinate cooks and paid them their wages from funds provided by the captain. The man lowest in the cooks’ pecking order was responsible for the most onerous kitchen duties — lighting the fires, washing pots and pans, and assembling the piles of leftovers from which ordinary crewmen ate. First cooks were able to bargain with captains for their pay and in the 1850s made as much as fifty dollars a month, sometimes more. Subordinate cooks received considerably less.
Above the main deck toiled the cabin crew, an assortment of workers whose primary duty was to make the cabin passengers comfortable and keep them happy. As important as any members of the cabin crew were the chambermaids, usually the only female members of the steamboat’s complement of workers and usually numbering no more than two aboard an average size steamer. Not only did they keep the passengers’ staterooms clean and orderly — which included making up beds, emptying washbowls and refilling water pitchers — they also washed the bed linen, towels, tablecloths and napkins, and often the passengers’ and boat officers’ clothes. The washing was done in wooden tubs, and the items were hung up to dry along the rails or on the main deck. Whatever needed pressing the chambermaids ironed with irons heated on coal fires and when all items were clean and pressed, the chambermaids returned the clothes to the passengers and the boat’s linen to the steward. Working from early morning till late evening, chambermaids had good reason to believe the maxim that “woman’s work is never done.”
Their pay might run as high as twenty-five dollars a month, but they also received tips. Passengers tipped them for washing and ironing their clothes, for assisting women passengers with getting dressed and for other help. Slave workers ordinarily were not tipped, but passengers often couldn’t tell who was and who wasn’t a slave and tipped them regardless. One chambermaid, a free black woman, reported that she made six to seven dollars in tips on each trip between New Orleans and Natchez.
Like other members of the crew, chambermaids received what was in effect free room and board while working on the steamers. They slept on the floor of the main cabin, or saloon, after the cabin passengers had turned in for the night or, on trips when there were empty staterooms, they were allowed to sleep in the passengers’ berths.
Sexual abuse was an occupational hazard for chambermaids. They were vulnerable to unwanted advances and even assault from ordinary crewmen, passengers and the boats’ officers, including the captain. Slave women were particularly vulnerable, with little or no legal protection, but after the Civil War and the elimination of slavery, black women resorted to the courts to protect them and punish their abusers, not often with satisfactory results, however.
The boats’ porters carried the cabin passengers’ baggage aboard and off the boats, under the supervision of the clerk. They issued baggage-claim checks to passengers and stowed the bags that were not kept in the passengers’ staterooms. While the boats were in motion, the porters had little to do, but at every stop where cabin passengers came aboard or disembarked, they leaped into action to assist.
Waiters were almost a separate class of crew members. Their jobs, more so than the others, put them in continued contact with cabin passengers, which included the traveling elite of the times, and thus required of the waiters a certain poise, intelligence and appearance, as was the case with William Wells Brown. Appropriately dressed to serve the boats’ first-class passengers, waiters usually wore suits or dark pants and white coats. They set the dining tables, took food orders, served the food and drinks and bussed the tables. They also tended the coal stoves that warmed the saloon, set up cots in the saloon for cabin passengers who bought their tickets after the staterooms had already filled, sometimes helped the cooks with food preparation, ran errands for the steward and kept the saloon clean. They worked under the direction of the steward, who hired them. The job of steamboat waiter, along with that of steward and chief cook, carried prestige in the black communities along the river, and it often led to promotion, by the captain, to steward, a position highly prized and well rewarded.
Steamboat barbers were usually free blacks, though sometimes slaves, who contracted with the boat owner and rented space for their shops and worked for fees and tips. Bartenders, or barkeepers, were usually white, bright, young and personable. “ It was required by their employers,” George Merrick wrote, “that they be pleasant and agreeable fellows, well dressed, and well mannered. They must know how to concoct a few of the more commonplace fancy drinks affected by the small number of travellers who wished such beverage — whiskey cocktails for the Eastern trade, and mint juleps for the Southern.”
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Western men, Merrick claimed, took their whiskey straight, “four fingers deep.”
Merrick also claimed that “in the old days on the river”— before the Civil War — whiskey was considered a necessity, including aboard Mississippi River steamboats. “It was a saying on the river,” he wrote, “that if a man owned a bar on a popular packet, it was better than possessing a gold mine.... Men who owned life leases of steamboat bars willed the same to their sons, as their richest legacies.”
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It was not unusual for a person to hold leases on bars aboard several steamboats, hiring bartenders to operate them for him while he strictly supervised them. In the 1860s, Claiborne Greene Wolff, who had once been a steamboat steward, was the co-owner of the leases to bars on some thirty steamers.
Tending to confirm Merrick’s assertion of the popularity of whiskey on Mississippi River steamers was the practice of providing a free supply of it to crewmen as they worked. Like rum on sailing vessels, whiskey rations for crewmen on Mississippi River vessels, first keelboats and then steamers, were a means of attracting workers to burdensome jobs as well as a way to ease the pains of their tasks. “We always gave our men, black or white, as much as they wanted,” the captain of the
Ben Sherrod
admitted. “[We] kept a barrel of whiskey tapped on the boiler deck for them, have always done so, and let one of the watch draw for his mates. I have done the same for the last ten years.”
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After the
Ben Sherrod
caught fire during a race between New Orleans and Natchez in May 1837, that same captain, named Castleman, denied that whiskey was part of the cause. “My acquaintances will vouch for my discipline about drunkenness being severe,” he said. “Indeed I am generally blamed for being rigid with my hands.” He conceded the truth of reports that his firemen were singing and dancing when the fire broke out, but stated that “they always do when on duty,” apparently as a means of removing some of the hardness from the work.
Owners and Officers
On the Hudson and other rivers in the eastern United States steamboats were generally owned by companies, which paid captains to run them. Steamboats on the Mississippi and its tributaries, however, were in many cases owned by the captains who operated them. Alex Scott was one such Mississippi River owner-captain. He ordered a boat built and when it was put into service, running between St. Louis, Pittsburgh and New Orleans, he became Captain Scott and put himself to work at whatever tasks needed doing. When the boat was under way, he could usually be found on deck somewhere, often near the furnace doors, assisting the firemen. When the boat landed, he was up on the forecastle, assisting in one way or another the deckhands handling the freight. Ever alert to whatever was happening aboard his boat, he had a reputation for seldom sleeping while the boat was in operation.
On one rare occasion, though, he did fall asleep and became the victim of his crewmen’s practical joke. A mild-mannered, good-humored man (whose harshest expression was “by the Lord Harry!”), Scott was well liked by his crewmen, but they sometimes took advantage of his gentle nature. One night as his boat, the
Majestic
, was steaming up the Mississippi, Scott took a seat on the capstan, one of his favorite spots, and while sitting there, dozed off. Several crewmen noticed him sleeping and gingerly turned the capstan half way around so that instead of facing the jackstaff on the bow, Scott was facing the boilers while he slept. On a signal, the firemen opened all the fire doors at once, revealing the flames in the furnace, glowing brightly in the darkness, and at the same time they roused the captain. Seeing the light of the flames in front of him, he instantly concluded that another steamer was bearing down on his bow. He leaped from his seat on the capstan and yelled up to the pilothouse, “Stop her, Mister Pilot, or by the Lord Harry she will be into us!” When his crewmen broke into laughter, he realized his mistake and began laughing himself, enjoying the joke almost as much as the crew.
Some owners, such as James Dozier, from Nash County, North Carolina, were businessmen who were engaged in other enterprises and seeing opportunity in the steamboat business, entered it as well. As a young man Dozier moved to Paris, Tennessee, and began farming, became prosperous at it, then went into the mercantile business and later operated a tanning business with his father-in-law. After that he became a steamboat owner. By 1844 he had owned six steamers and with his sons he later became owner of at least three others. After the Civil War he moved to St. Louis, where he founded a large bakery.
Another steamboat entrepreneur was St. Clair Thomasson of Louisiana, who was a partner in a wholesale dry goods business and in 1843, with his business partner, Theo Shute, built the steamer
Baton Rouge
, which he captained and operated between New Orleans and Vicksburg.
Joseph Throckmorton was an owner-captain whose business career went the opposite way. He first owned several steamers that he operated on the upper Mississippi in the 1830s and 1840s, but around 1850 he decided to leave the river and try something else. He went into the insurance business in St. Louis and when that venture failed, he returned to what he knew best, steamboating. After he died in 1872 at age 72, a biographer poetically informed his readers that Throckmorton had “crossed the river that ferries but one way.”
In some cases owner-captains started their careers as boat-builders and knew steamboats from the inside out. James Ward first worked in a boatyard and from that job went to work as a carpenter on the steamer
Ione
and then on the
Amaranth
, operating out of St. Louis. In 1844 with three partners he built the steamer
St. Croix
and joined its crew as mate. He then sold his interest in the
St. Croix
and with two partners built the
St. Peters
, which he served as captain, running between St. Louis and Dubuque.
Many owner-captains in the 1830s and 1840s had first operated keelboats on the Mississippi and had then graduated to steamboats when they saw the steamers’ greater potential and superior working and living conditions. W.J. Koontz, born in Columbiana County, Ohio, in 1817, began his career on a keelboat that was owned by his brother. He later became a steamboat pilot, then a captain and then an owner-captain. He volunteered his services to U.S. general George B. McClellan during the Civil War, was made a commodore, posted to St. Louis and placed in charge of river transportation for Union troops.
L.T. Belt, born in St. Clair County, Illinois, in 1825, one of twelve children, was another owner-captain who advanced from keelboats to steamers. He and his brother Francis gave up keelboating and bought the steamer
Planter
in 1847 and operated it on the Mississippi between New Orleans and St. Louis. From that beginning Captain Belt eventually became president of the New Orleans and Bayou Teche Packet Company, operating steamers on Bayou Teche in Louisiana. Belt had other laudable accomplishments. For years he was superintendent of the Sunday school at the Rayne Memorial MethodistEpiscopal Church in New Orleans and was also, his biographer pointed out, an unusually dutiful son: “For the twenty years previous to her death, he never, but once, no matter how great the distance, failed to visit his aged mother on her birthday.”
Many other Mississippi River captains, of course, were not boat owners, but rather salaried employees of the companies that owned the steamers of which they were masters. Charles S. Rogers, born in New Hampshire in 1816, moved to St. Louis when he was 22 and got a job as clerk on a Mississippi River steamboat in 1842. From that job he rose over time to captain and later became president of Naples Packet Company, which operated twentythree steamboats and a number of barges and wharf boats. Henry W. Smith began his working life at a country store in Missouri in 1855, then took a job as second clerk on the
General Lane
, a Missouri River steamer. He advanced to captain of another Missouri River steamer and later became captain of a steamboat running between New Orleans and St. Louis. After the Civil War he became president of the St. Louis & Memphis Packet Company and distinguished himself for building the company’s steamboat fleet into one of the fastest and finest on the Mississippi.
One of the more unusual captains was William F. Davidson, who late in life became a Christian, got caught up in the temperance movement and thereafter banned bars on the several steamers he controlled, which operated between St. Paul and St. Louis. William Dean, whose career spanned thirty years as a pilot and captain, was so conscientious in his Christian beliefs that he would not operate his boat on a Sunday. Another unusual captain was Mortimer Kennett, who was something of a violin virtuoso and every evening played his violin for his passengers. “No navigation,” it was said of him, “was too difficult or night too dark to induce him to decline the very pleasant duty of entertaining his passengers with the sweet strains of his violin.”
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