The Great American Steamboat Race (24 page)

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).

Another steamer, the
Alton
, which reached the burning boat within half an hour after the fire started, failed to stop to give aid and actually contributed to the accident’s death toll. The
Alton
came steaming up on the scene, amid the exhausted survivors in the water, holding onto floating debris, and the turbulence caused by its paddle wheel sucked several survivors under water and drowned them. A man holding onto a floating barrel and helping a woman hold on to it, too, was washed underwater by the
Alton
, as was the woman. The woman drowned; the man bobbed up to the surface and floated fifteen miles downriver before being rescued by the steamer
Statesman
. A man named McDowell and his wife were both in the river when the
Alton
arrived. He managed to stay afloat and was swept by the current two miles downriver, where he then swam ashore. His wife, though, holding onto a wooden plank, was pulled under by the
Alton
and drowned. McDowell’s son also died in the disaster.

Survivors told other stories of horror. A young wife and mother, Mary Ann Walker, awakened by shouts of “Fire!” dashed out of the women’s cabin holding her infant child, trying to reach her husband. Unable to get to him in time, she watched as he fell into the flames and she then jumped into the river to save herself and her child. She grasped a plank and was within forty yards of being rescued by the
Columbus
, another steamer that had come upon the tragic scene, when she suddenly sank out of sight and was seen no more. A young man who had fled to the hurricane deck and escaped the flames turned back to the blazing cabin when he heard his sister’s cries. Trying to save her, he clasped her in his arms as the flames overtook them. Both burned to death.

One of the
Ben Sherrod
’s clerks, one of its pilots and its mate all burned to death, as did all the boat’s chambermaids. Of the thirty-five negro crewmen on the vessel, only two survived. Among the dead were two of the captain’s children and his father. The captain’s wife, one of the ten women who leaped into the water, survived but was severely burned. The captain also survived. Not more than six or seven passengers survived. The charred wreck of the
Ben Sherrod
sank beneath the Mississippi’s dark waters just above Fort Adams.

The steamboat
Brandywine
left New Orleans in the evening of April 3, 1832, bound for Louisville, carrying some two hundred and thirty passengers as well as freight, including a number of carriage wheels packed in straw and stacked on the boiler deck, near the officers’ cabins. Sometime during its voyage the
Brandywine
became engaged in a race with the steamer
Hudson
and fell behind when it was forced to stop for repairs. Back in the race following the repairs, the
Brandywine
attempted to gain speed and make up its lost time by feeding more rosin into furnace, thereby intensif ying the heat and increasing steam pressure. About thirty miles above Memphis, about seven o’clock in the evening of April 9, the
Brandywine
’s pilot, in the pilothouse, noticed that the carriage wheels’ straw packing was on fire and quickly gave an alarm.

The captain and crewmen immediately responded, trying desperately to extinguish the flames and pulling out the burning wheels and throwing them overboard. Their efforts, however, only exacerbated the blaze by allowing the wind to whip through the separated mass of straw-packed wheels, spreading the flames to other parts of the boat. In less than five minutes after the pilot had given the alarm, the entire vessel was ablaze. The boat’s yawl quickly filled with frightened passengers and was lowered into the water. No sooner had it touched the stream than it overturned and sank, leaving the passengers to the mercy of the Mississippi.

The pilot steered the flaming steamer, still under way, toward shore, hoping to beach it. About a quarter of a mile from the riverbank the boat ran aground and stuck fast on a sandbar in nine feet of water. Passengers and crewmen still aboard either perished in the flames or hurled themselves into the river and tried to swim to shore. Of the two hundred and thirty passengers the
Brandywine
carried, an estimated seventy-five survived the disaster. The rest either burned to death or drowned.

The
Belle of Missouri
was far more fortunate. En route from New Orleans to St. Louis, it stopped just above Liberty, Illinois, to take on wood and caught fire while docked. Its two hundred or so passengers fled safely to shore — and none too soon, for a shipment of gunpowder aboard the boat exploded not long after their escape.

The
Clarksville
caught fire near Ozark Island in the Mississippi on May 27, 1848, and its pilot promptly turned for shore. Just as the bow of the boat struck the riverbank, flames broke into the main cabin, one of the boilers exploded and, simultaneously, three barrels of gunpowder ignited, creating a huge cloud of black smoke. The captain, named Holmes, jumped overboard with his wife, left her on shore, then returned to the stricken vessel to direct the evacuation of the other passengers, shouting to them, “Pick up chairs, everybody! Jump overboard. But take your chairs. They’ll give you something to hold you up!” When the last person was off the boat, Captain Holmes, suffocating from the pall of smoke, leaped from the upper deck. His body struck the railing on the lower deck, and he was thrown into the flames and burned to death. All of the cabin passengers survived, although many were injured, including the governor of Tennessee. Thirty deck passengers, however, at the stern of the boat and evidently too frightened to dash through the smoke to the bow and jump overboard, lost their lives.

On October 8, 1849, five steamboats — the
Falcon
, the
Illinois
, the
Aaron Hart
, the
Marshal Ney
and the
North America
— that were docked at the Poydras Street wharf in New Orleans caught fire and burned as flames spread from boat to boat. Two other steamers in nearby berths managed to back into midstream and escape the inferno with only minor damage.

The
Martha Washington
, on its way from Cincinnati to New Orleans, caught fire in the Mississippi at one-thirty in the morning on January 14, 1852. Within three minutes the boat was engulfed by flames, blazing from stem to stern. Only a few of the passengers were lost, however, and only one of the crew, the boat’s carpenter.

In the steamboat’s earliest days explosions and fires could be attributed to the crudeness of the propulsion systems, the boilers in particular. It took time for manufacturers and engineers, advancing the steamboat’s machinery largely through trial and error, to learn how to build safe boilers and have them used safely. But as steamers became commonplace and water transportation became the major mover of freight and passengers in the Mississippi valley, competition overtook the concern for safety. Speed became the first objective of steamboat owners and operators. Attempts to beat old records and outrace the competition led to abuses of the machinery and, in many cases, the complete abandonment of caution. Captains would order their boats’ fireboxes crammed with fuel, and fires were made to burn ever hotter by adding to the flames pitch, rosin, oil or pork fat — then tying or weighting down the automatic safety valves on their boilers to raise steam pressure to an explosively high level.

At the same time that newspapers were reporting the latest disasters on the river they were also editorializing against the dangers presented by owners and operators who put speed above safety, widely believed to be the ultimate cause of most steamboat explosions and fires. Letters to the editor further decried the dangerous practices. “Want to know why boilers bust on leaving shore?” one former steamboat captain wrote in a letter published in the New Orleans
Picayune
in November 1840. “Steamboat men and even passengers have a pride in making a display of speed. To do this they hold on to, instead of letting off, steam. The flue gets hot and the water low, and the first revolution brings the two elements in contact and causes a collapse.”
¹

Another reason for the alarming number of fiery disasters was thought to be simple disregard of the hazards of traveling with combustible materials aboard a wooden boat. An appalled Frenchman visiting in the United States, Michael Chevalier, wrote that “Americans show a singular indifference in regard to fires. They smoke without the least concern in the midst of halfopen cotton bales, with which a boat is loaded; they ship gunpowder with no more precaution than if it were so much maize or salt pork, and leave objects packed in straw right in the torrent of sparks that issue from the chimneys.”
²
Like other critics, Chevalier also noticed that speed trumped all safety considerations aboard the steamers.

Another deadly peril on the river was boat collisions, one of the worst of which involved the steamer
Monmouth
. It left New Orleans on October 23, 1837, headed for the Arkansas River, carrying 611 Creek Indians to a reservation where they were to be resettled. On the night of October 30, a particularly dark night, the
Monmouth
was steaming through a part of the Mississippi known as Prophet Island Bend and there encountered the ship
Tr e m o n t
,
³
which was being towed down the river by the steamboat
Wa r re n
, obscured by the darkness and evidently unseen by the
Monmouth
’s officers until the last minute. In a desperate effort to avoid the oncoming
Tr e m o n t
, the
Monmouth
apparently swerved, but too late. The prow of the
Tr e m o n t
caught the
Monmouth
broadsides, smashing into the steamer with such an impact that the
Monmouth
’s main cabin was separated from its hull. The hull sank almost immediately, but the cabin was sent drifting downstream on the current until it broke in two, spilling all of the
Monmouth
’s passengers into the night-shrouded river.

The crewmen of the
Warren
and those of another steamer that arrived on the scene, the
Yazoo
, managed to save about three hundred of the
Monmouth
’s passengers from the river. The rest drowned. Also lost were two of the
Monmouth
’s crew, the fireman and the bartender.

Blame for the collision was placed on the officers of the
Monmouth
, who failed to observe the Mississippi’s rules of the road. “This boat [the
Monmouth
],” according to a nineteenth-century account, “was running in a part of the river where, by the usages of the river and the rules adopted for the better regulation of steam navigation on the Mississippi, she had no right to go, and where, of course, the descending vessels did not expect to meet with any boat coming in an opposite direction.”
⁴

On November 19, 1847, the steamer
Talisman
was approaching Cape Girardeau, Missouri, when it was rammed by the
Tempest
, which struck it just forward of its boilers. The
Tempest
backed away, exposing an enormous hole in the
Talisman
’s side, through which water was rapidly pouring. In the
Talisman’s
pilothouse the pilot was furiously ringing the engine room bells to order more speed as he headed the vessel for the riverbank, trying to reach it before the boat, quickly sinking, slipped beneath the surface. The engine room meanwhile was filling with water. The chief engineer, named Butler, ordered his strikers to get out of the engine room and seek safety, but refusing orders from the pilothouse to also leave, he remained at his post to keep the crippled steamer under way as long as possible. In less than ten minutes the engine room filled with water, and the
Talisman
went down, taking chief engineer Butler with it to the bottom of the river. The
Tempest
stood by to help rescue the
Talisman
’s passengers and crew, but despite its efforts, more than fifty of those aboard the
Talisman
lost their lives.

The
Archer
, operating out of St. Louis, was struck by the steamer
Di Vernon
five miles above the mouth of the Illinois River on November 27, 1851, and was cut in two. It sank in three minutes, taking forty-one lives.

A twentieth-century writer gave some understanding of the problem of collisions on the river, particularly collisions involving towboats, which tow barges or other vessels by pushing them, making of them an unwieldy burden:

When you come to consider it, there should be more collisions than there are on the river. Especially on some of the smaller tributaries, the bends are so sharp that there is no way to see around them; and the hills go up on both sides, hiding any trace of smoke that may warn a pilot of another tow. You might hear the other fellow’s whistle, and then again you might not. It depends on the wind and the noises on your own boat.... The emergencies on the river are awful in their slowness. You see them a long time ahead and you do what you can; and if that’s not good enough, you’ll wish you hadn’t ever come on the river, and you wait for the crash — ten or fifteen minutes with no way out, no way to stop it from happening.
⁵

Other vessels, though, were not the only potentially disastrous hazards that steamers encountered on the river. On January 3, 1844, the
Shepherdess
was ascending the Mississippi on its way to St. Louis from Cincinnati, steaming into the stormy winter night through frigid water, most of its seventy or so passengers asleep, though several in the men’s cabin chose to huddle around the stove to keep warm. Around eleven o’clock, without any warning, the boat plowed into a snag — an obstruction in the river, usually a fallen tree — near Cahokia, Illinois, ramming it with such force that several planks were torn from the forward part of the boat’s hull. Water instantly began rushing into the gaping hole and in less than two minutes the water had risen to the lower deck. The captain, A. Howell of Covington, Kentucky, who had recently bought the
Shepherdess
and was making his first trip on it, ran to the women’s cabin to reassure the ladies, telling them there was no danger, then returned to the forecastle, which was awash as the bow of the vessel was slipping beneath the surface. He later was apparently swept overboard by the rising water and drowned.