Robert Gudmestad

And he, along with Robert Fulton, worked with Nicholas Roosevelt, who was the great-granduncle of Theodore Roosevelt, to build and to set the first...

steamboat on the Western waters.

And that was the New Orleans was the name of the steamboat.

Exactly.

It was.

And before the steamboat, you had flatboats, which just floated down the river.

And they were very wide and they were difficult to navigate.

In fact, Davy Crockett navigated a flatboat in the 1840s and it got caught in an eddy and it basically broke up.

And he almost died as a result of it.

And he ended up totally naked on the waterfront of Memphis.

And he said that he was literally skinned like a rabbit there.

That was the easy part.

Going upstream was much more difficult because you had keelboats.

And essentially, you've got men with poles who were pushing the boat upstream against the current.

And of course, the Mississippi has a very strong current.

Now with a steamboat, the fact that it can go downriver and you can control it much more easily, and it can go upriver against the current, that's what really changes things.

And when you talk about the flat part of the steamboat,

That was the deck.

And the deck actually did not touch the water.

The part of the steamboat that touched the water was very narrow.