Don Wildman

I mean, I have a boat on the Hudson River.

You'd have to check the water to know what's coming down river.

It's a big part of having a boat on a river because anything can sink you, puncturing the hulls and so forth.

Then you had collisions with other ships in the night.

Did they do many night trips?

Was it a multi-day kind of thing?

I have to jump in.

There's the origin of the name Tom Sawyer, isn't it?

I didn't know that.

Because Samuel Clemens was a riverboat captain.

And yet the era thrived up until its ending.

And when we come back after this break, we're going to discuss the decline of the steamboat and its legacy.

Spoiler alert, it has something to do with the Civil War.

And we're back.

Robert, how does this decline come about for the steamboat?

What marks the end of the golden age?

Right.

Now, nobody wants to travel during the Civil War.

I mean, they use it for obviously cargo and so forth.

But what had been developing was this sort of culture of, I don't know, tourism is the wrong word for it, but passenger travel for sure.