Robert Gudmestad

But south of that, there aren't any coal mines for the most part.

And so it's wood.

And so there were wood yards and boats had to stop at wood yards to take on more wood.

A cord of wood was, you know, two to three dollars per cord.

But if you were a deck passenger, we haven't really talked about deck passengers a lot.

You're paying a minimum price and you're getting literally a position on the deck or there was a central room that you could be in that was close to the boiler room.

So you're very close to you're next to the roustabouts.

You're next to the people who are doing the labor on the boats.

And that's an indignity if you're a white southerner that you are literally like living alongside an enslaved person who's throwing wood into the furnace or shoveling coal.

And it wouldn't have been below decks.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Below deck was storage.

Right.

On a few of the early steamboats, there was space below deck, but they found out very quickly that that...

was a design flaw.

And so people are on the main deck and above.

They did.

Because especially in the 1830s and 1840s, there is no regulation of these boilers.

And as boats got older, the boilers...