The Great American Steamboat Race (5 page)

inches deep. From such a beginning came the mighty Mississippi.
Schoolcraft gave the lake

a new name, one that he contrived by splicing together parts of two Latin words, “
veritas caput
,” which translate into English as “true head”— meaning the river’s

Schoolcraft’s discovery of the “true head” provided the Mississippi’s total measurement, from source to finish. From Lake Itasca in Minnesota the river stretches approximately 2,350 twisting, curving
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, discoverer of the
miles to its debouchment into
source of the Mississippi in 1832. He named
the Gulf of Mexico, its course
_{the Minnesota lake from which the river
and length forever changing
sprang Lake Itasca, a name he coined by splic
with the vagaries of its flow. It
ing together parts of the Latin phrase “
veri
receives into its broad stream
tas caput
,” meaning “true head” (Library of}

Congress).
the waters of some 250 tributaries, and the area that it drains comprises about 1,250,000 square miles, nearly half of the continental United States.

The Mississippi is America’s mightiest river — and its most important, a fact keenly realized by President Thomas Jefferson and his secretary of state, James Madison, who purposed to gain the free navigation of the river and acquire for the United States the city that commanded the river’s outlet to the sea. “There is on the globe,” Jefferson wrote in 1802, “one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half our whole produce and more than half our inhabitants.”
³

“The navigation of the Mississippi,” President Jefferson declared, “we must have.”
⁴
Control of the Mississippi and access to the Gulf of Mexico were, together, a highly inflammatory issue in 1802. France had lost much of its valued New World territory as the price of peace in the French and Indian War, which ended in 1763, but it still had aspirations of empire in America. France had undergone a revolution beginning in 1789, which had deposed Louis XVI and swept away most of the old order, and in late 1799 General Napoleon Bonaparte in a fraudulent popular election had been voted first consul of the newborn French republic and had taken over the French government. On March 21, 1801, he had re-acquired from Spain the vast Louisiana territory as a first step in his plan for French expansion. But in the spring of 1803 he changed his mind, his thoughts shifting away from the New World and settling instead on the nearby hated nation that stood as the major obstacle to his achievement of world domination. The conflict he sought and the conquest he desired were not in America, he decided, but rather in England. Louisiana became disposable.
After several tough bargaining sessions, Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe, representing the United States, bought Louisiana, including New Orleans, for about twenty million American dollars. They signed the purchase agreement on May 2, 1803, in Paris.
All concerned were delighted. “The negotiations leave me nothing to wish for,” Napoleon remarked. Monroe grandly called the negotiations the “extraordinary movements of the epoch in which we live.” Perhaps seeing much farther than the others, Livingston exultantly declared, “This is the noblest work of our whole lives.”
By a vote of twenty-four to seven, the United States Senate on Monday, October 17, 1803, ratified the treaty of purchase, the final action needed to seal the deal. By its extraordinary purchase the United States acquired an

View of New Orleans in 1839. The United States acquired the city in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Its importance was emphasized by President Thomas Jefferson in 1802. Through New Orleans, he wrote, “the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.” New Orleans controlled navigation on the Mississippi, and, “The navigation of the Mississippi,” Jefferson declared, “we must have” (Library of Congress).

additional 827,987 square miles, or 529,9 11,681 acres, more than 22 percent of the present-day United States, everything from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, including all or parts of the states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado as well as the state of Louisiana.

Not only the Mississippi River but all the land that it drained, from the east and from the west, would now forever belong to the United States and its people. A whole new era of American agriculture, industry, commerce and transportation had dawned, brilliant with opportunity and promise. All that was needed then was a suitable vessel to travel the big river, bearing settlers and developers into the mid-continent’s rugged vastness and carrying from it the wealth of produce, materials and products that it yielded.

Travel
down
the big river was not much of a problem. Canoes and pirogues and, later, flatboats, keel boats and barges simply went with the current, steered by sturdy river boatmen manning paddles or oars. Travel
up
the river was another matter entirely. The river’s many bends and twists rendered sail power impractical, so that boats going upstream had to depend on the manpower of their crews, who laboriously poled, paddled, rowed or towed their vessels against the relentless current to upriver destinations. Those arduous and limited methods of propulsion prevented the full use of the river and stood in the way of America’s realization of its tremendous potential.

Then came a revolutionary, history-changing invention. Many men, both in the United States and in Europe, contributed to its development, but it was Robert Fulton, a poor immigrant’s son from Pennsylvania, who made it work successfully. To him went the credit and the fame for the creation of the steamboat.

No longer then was the river master. It became servant. Perspicacious witnesses to the coming of the earliest steamboats realized what was happening. When the first steamer to ply the Mississippi, the
New Orleans
, pulled into Natchez on its maiden voyage in January 1812, an elderly slave who watched it in admiration immediately sensed its meaning. Throwing his hat into the air, he exultantly shouted, “Ol’ Mississip done got her master now!” Or so the story goes.

Development of the land and resources along the Mississippi and its tributaries rapidly followed. The banks of the river, on both sides, became dotted with settlements and towns and the landings for the steamboats that were the main means of transportation. New communities sprang up, and older ones grew larger and busier. Travelers on the steamboats that served the river cities and towns got sort of a water bird’s view of the mid-continent from the decks of the boats. For many, particularly nineteenth-century immigrants, the voyage into America’s heartland began at the city that was founded to serve as the mid-continent’s gateway.

It stood as a geographic curiosity, perilously poised on the east bank of the threatening river, the storied city of New Orleans, which by the middle of the nineteenth century had become the commercial terminus of the vast Mississippi valley. From the steamboats’ upper decks passengers could peer down on the city, over the ridge of the protective levee, viewing the city’s structures as if from an elevated railway, which was the sight that onetime river pilot Samuel Clemens remembered seeing as his vessel approached the city. “In high-river stage, in the New Orleans region,” he wrote, “the water is up to the top of the inclosing levee rim, the flat country behind it lies low — representing the bottom of a dish — and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.”
⁵

As steamers bucked the muddy flow and churned northward from New Orleans they made stops where their freight or passengers required, often being hailed to shore by passengers seeking to board them from an isolated spot on the levee. But many of their landings were regular stops, one of the first of which, going upriver, was Donaldsonville, Louisiana, where Bayou Lafourche — which a couple of millennia or so ago was the main stream of the river — splits off from the Mississippi to make its own way to the gulf. The voyage to Donaldsonville, about seventy-eight river miles from New Orleans, became one of the standard speed measurements for Mississippi steamers. The record — four hours and twenty-seven minutes — was set by the steamboat
Ruth
, which met an unseemly end when in 1868, some twelve miles above Vicksburg, it caught fire and burned.

The site of a trading post as early as 1750 and of a Catholic church by 1772, the town was laid out by William Donaldson, who had acquired a large tract of land there in 1806. The new town soon became known to the area’s French population as
La Ville de Donaldson
. Situated as it was in the heart of sugar-cane country, it became an important shipping point for cane growers, who made of it a prosperous community of elegant homes and other attractive buildings. For three months in 1830 Donaldsonville served as the capital of Louisiana.

The next big steamer stop above Donaldsonville was Baton Rouge, the Louisiana capital city, which Samuel Clemens saw as a veritable garden in the nineteenth century, “clothed in flowers ... like a greenhouse. The magnolia trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge snowball blossoms.”
⁶
The nineteenth-century capitol, built to resemble a European castle, was one of the city’s chief tourist attractions. The environs of Baton Rouge presented to steamboat travelers scenes of sugar cane plantations, with elegant plantation houses, sprawling fields of cane and clusters of slave houses.

After Baton Rouge the next significant stop was Bayou Sara, Louisiana, at the mouth of the stream named Bayou Sara, just below St. Francisville, on the east side of the Mississippi. Bayou Sara, the town, had been a popular port and safe haven for flatboats since the late 1700s, and by the 1860s, with the coming of steamboats, it had grown into one of the major shipping points between New Orleans and Natchez, made so by the nearby cotton plantations that it served. Repeated flooding, however, eventually forced the town’s residents and businessmen to move their homes and buildings to the higher ground of St. Francisville, situated on a bluff. During the years of the area’s booming cotton economy in the mid–nineteenth century, St. Francisville became an affluent community, known for its handsome plantation homes and town houses. The town of Bayou Sara, meanwhile, declined and by the end of the century had disappeared, all but one of its buildings having been dismantled, demolished or carried away by the Mississippi’s raging floodwaters.

The bluff overlooking the Mississippi at Natchez. The British novelist Frances Trollope traveled down the Mississippi in 1827 and in her travelogue wrote that Natchez appeared “like an oasis in the desert.” By the mid–nineteenth century its natural beauty had become enhanced by the dozens of elegant mansions built by multi-millionaire cotton planters (Library of Congress).

Natchez, a hundred river miles above St. Francisville, was one of the few places that Frances Trollope, the early-nineteenth-century British novelist, found to her liking as she traveled down the Mississippi in 1827. “At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved by bluffs, as they call the short intervals of high ground,” she wrote in her travelogue and commentary,
Domestic Manners of the Americans
. “The town of Natchez is beautifully situated on one of those high spots. The contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw, palmetto, and orange, the copious variety of sweetscented flowers that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert. Natchez is the furthest point to the north at which oranges ripen in the open air, or endure the winter without shelter. With the exception of this sweet spot, I thought all the little towns and villages we passed wretchedlooking in the extreme.” By the mid–nineteenth century it was not only Natchez’s natural beauty that made it attractive but the hundreds of mansions built by wealthy cotton planters who made Natchez a city of millionaires.

Unavoidable for steamboat travelers was the most notorious part of the city — the dockside section known as Natchez-Under-the-Hill, a rude cluster of saloons, gambling joints and brothels built on the mud flats beside the river, always the first and last part of Natchez that steamboat passengers saw.

Being a major port on the river, Natchez became one of the most prominent speed-measuring destinations for steamboats operating out of New Orleans. The steamer
Ruth
held the record for that run, too, making the trip from New Orleans to Natchez, about 350 river miles, in fifteen hours and four minutes in 1867, a time unsurpassed until 1909, when the battleship USS
Mississippi
made the run in fourteen hours, after starting two miles farther up the river than had the
Ruth
.

Vicksburg, seventy-five river miles above Natchez, situated where the Yazoo flows into the Mississippi from the northeast, is another city built on a hill that rises from the riverbank. Its known history began in 1715 with a French-built fort, Fort St. Pierre, which became Fort Nogales under the Spanish administration in 1719 and was renamed Fort McHenry after the Americans took it over in 1811. The town was named for the Methodist preacher, Newitt Vick, who bought 1,100 acres atop the bluff to build a community there. By 1826, when Vicksburg was incorporated, it had become a thriving town, enlivened by the steamboat traffic that came to carry the area’s cotton away. Its riverfront grew to become almost as boisterous and disreputable as Natchez-Under-the-Hill. By 1860 the town’s population had increased to 4,600. (Before the nineteenth century ended, Vicksburg gained distinction as the birthplace of Coca-Cola. Joseph Augustus Biedenharm, a candy-store and soda-fountain owner, in March 1894 put his popular soda-fountain drink in bottles that he could take out and sell in the countryside, and thus was the popular soft drink born.)

From Vicksburg, steamers continued upriver to Lake Providence, Louisiana, on the west bank — so named, it was said, because its sheltered landing, beside the lake of the same name, provided refuge from river pirates in the 1700s and early 1800s. Clemens called Lake Providence “the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come to” on a voyage down the Mississippi. After Lake Providence, it was on to Greenville, Mississippi, on the east bank, another prominent cotton shipping point.

For many years Napoleon, Arkansas, at the mouth of the Arkansas River, was a major port on the river, the next one above Greenville. There where Marquette and Joliet had halted their exploration of the lower Mississippi and two Indian villages had welcomed them in 1673, there eventually rose a European settlement that by 1832 was large enough to warrant a post office. In 1851 the town was visited by Peter Daniel, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, who wrote about it in a letter to his daughter, telling her, “I reached this dilapidated and most wretched of wretched places at noon today and am compelled to wait until 2
P
.
M
. tomorrow for the mail boat to Little Rock. This miserable place consists of a few slightly built, wood houses, and the best hotel in the place is an old, dismantled steamboat.”
⁷

Nevertheless, Napoleon became a thriving community, its prosperity owing to the cotton crops of plantations in the area. At its peak, Napoleon had a population estimated at 2,000, plus a large but uncounted number of transients. It was the county seat of Desha County until 1874, when the county seat was moved to Watson after the river ate away a section of the riverbank and a number of buildings were washed away in the powerful flow of the river. That event marked the beginning of the end for Napoleon. By the 1880s there was nothing left of it.

Upriver from the Napoleon site is Helena. In the mid– and late 1800s Helena was the second largest city in Arkansas, with a population of about 5,000. More than merely a cotton center, the city prospered from its commerce in lumber and grain, and it was home to a foundry, machine shops, mills and wagon factories, all of which made it a major stop for steamers.

Memphis was next. The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto is believed to have been the first European on the site of Memphis, having arrived there in the 1540s. By the 1680s French explorers had erected Fort Prudhomme there, and by 1796, when Tennessee was admitted to the Union, the site was occupied by the new state’s westernmost settlement. The community was established as a town in 1819 by General Andrew Jackson, Judge John Overton and General James Winchester on a 5,000-acre land grant. In 1826 it was incorporated as a city, named for the ancient Egyptian metropolis on the Nile. It became a hugely prosperous cotton trading center, where more than 40 percent of the nation’s cotton crop was traded, making of its waterfront a bustling shipping point thronged by steamboats. Prosperity swelled the city’s population from 1,800 in 1840 to more than 18,000 in 1860.

After Memphis came New Madrid, Missouri, on the west bank. First established in 1789 and nearly destroyed in the 1811 earthquake that made it famous, the town, situated between the river and the forest, had been rebuilt and repopulated and had resumed its position as a regular stop for riverboats throughout the nineteenth century.

Hickman, Kentucky, one of the next small stops, was noticeable for its warehouses that held the region’s tobacco crop till it could be shipped out aboard steamers.

Then came Cairo, at the extreme southwest tip of Illinois, where the Ohio River delivers itself into the waters of the Mississippi, demarcating the lower Mississippi from the upper Mississippi, some one thousand miles above New Orleans. Protected by levees, the town stands on a narrow peninsula created by the two rivers as they rush toward their confluence. Because of its strategic position at the mouth of the Ohio, the site was a natural for some sort of settlement and fortification, as the Jesuit priest and explorer Pierre Francois Xavier observed in 1721. The settlement that resulted was first incorporated as a city in 1818, and after faltering in its development — for the first few decades of the nineteenth century it had only two buildings, one a log cabin and the other a warehouse — the community made a new start in 1837 and in 1858 was re-incorporated. By 1860 it had become an important steamboat port, and its population had risen to more than 2,000.

At Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the next stop, a hill rises quickly from the riverbank, and the city is built on that hill, as if holding its feet out of the water. In the early 1800s about a dozen families comprised the community, but in the mid– and late 1800s visitors arriving by steamboat could see the Jesuit school for boys that had been built not far up the hill and, above a sloping lawn, the public college that stood farther uphill, two institutions that helped account for Cape Girardeau’s reputation as the Athens of Missouri. The town had begun about 1793 and by the end of the nineteenth century it had become the busiest port on the river between St. Louis and Memphis.

Above Cape Girardeau, conspicuously standing out from the wooded hills, is a natural feature that helps vary the scenery, a sixty-foot-high rock called Grand Tower. It’s about an acre in area and rises from the river near the Missouri side. The town of Grand Tower, on the Illinois shore, opposite the rock, was another steamboat stop, once known as Jenkin’s Landing.

Ste. Genevieve, the next stop, believed to be the oldest European settlement in Missouri, was another town populated by no more than a dozen or so families in the early 1800s. Steamboat passengers arriving from the lower Mississippi and disembarking at Ste. Genevieve may have been surprised to discover that many of the town’s structures were built of logs standing vertically on the ground, French style, with no foundation, or on a sill, rather than logs laid horizontally, one on top of the other, the usual American way of erecting log buildings. Three of Ste. Genevieve’s so-called
poteaux en terre
(posts in the ground) structures have survived into the twenty-first century.

The 200-mile voyage between Cairo and St. Louis offered scenery that differed noticeably from what steamboat passengers could see on the riverbanks below Cairo — hills lush with green foliage bordering the river on both sides, a welcome relief to the lower Mississippi valley’s extensive flatlands.