Chapter 1: What was the significance of the first steamboat on the Mississippi River?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, December 1811. The newly built steamboat New Orleans sits at the waterfront, its twin copper boilers a cacophony of sound. Pumps thumping, valves shrieking, steam hissing. On shore, a crowd has gathered to watch if this strange new vessel will actually work, if it can deliver on its bold promise to master the turbulent waters of the mighty Ohio.
Slowly, at first, the New Orleans pulls away. On board, the passengers, a select group involved in the vessel's construction and finance, begins to sense the voyage. The slap-slap of the huge paddle wheel striking the water, the deck plates vibrating underfoot.
On the main deck below, firemen fuel the roaring furnace, building speed, moving the vessel past the familiar flotilla of flatboats, barges, rafts, and keelboats. For men who've spent their working lives at the mercy of the river's cross currents and fickle winds, this mechanical behemoth is a wonder, a sight to behold.
Downriver, the great Ohio will eventually merge with the Mississippi, with every perilous obstacle along the way. Snags, driftwood, treacherous sandbars, sudden shoals. But for now, today, cutting a clean line through the wide brown water, it's all just progress being made, faster and more forcefully than ever before, here at the dawn of a new age in the heartland of America.
Welcome to American History Hit, I'm Don Wildman. In short order, vessels once reliant on fickle winds were now propelled by giant paddle wheels, driving bigger and heavier loads up and down the Hudson River, through the Chesapeake, and out into the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. And soon enough, an entirely new ship design was created to work America's vast inland river system.
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Chapter 2: How did the steamboat revolutionize transportation in America?
The steamboat reigned supreme along so many rivers, moving cargo and humans dramatically from town to town, creating an economy and a culture all its own. To explain how the steamboat happened and how it changed America in such fundamental ways is the expertise of Professor Robert Goodmanstead of Colorado State University.
who has authored the books Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom and The Devil's Own Purgatory, the United States Mississippi Squadron in the Civil War. Professor, nice to be with you. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Excellent. So firstly, let's discuss the context of the times surrounding the beginning of this new innovation. What was happening at the time of the steamboat's invention?
The first steamboat, first commercially used steamboat, was Robert Fulton's steamboat in New York. Right. And most Americans lived close to the Atlantic seaboard. And transportation was via river. It was via really bad roads as well.
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Chapter 3: What were the economic impacts of steamboats on American society?
It was almost quicker to go from, say, Philadelphia to England than it was to go from Philadelphia to, you know, 300 miles inland because the roads were terrible. Now, the steam engine revolutionizes that. It revolutionizes travel in the United States and worldwide. And especially you can go up river, what they considered at the time, a fast pace. Now, we wouldn't consider it fast today.
But back then, they would talk about steamboats shooting off like an arrow. You know, we're talking maybe 25 miles an hour is their top speed. But going up river and what Americans saw as conquering time and space became the real thing. way that steamboats altered the economy and the culture of the United States.
It's interesting, you know, making appointments, having a schedule is all the advent of the industrial age. That's the ability to call your own shots. You know, tourism, as a matter of fact, begins because of the steamship, really the ability to go out to the thing and the railroad, of course. But once we have that power, it's a fascinating new world.
Louisiana Purchase, of course, 1803, has a huge impact on this story, adds the port of New Orleans and the Mississippi River itself, the superhighway of the 19th century. This is going to supercharge the development of this new kind of design, isn't it?
Chapter 4: How did the design of steamboats evolve to navigate river conditions?
It is. And one of the backers of the first successful steamboat on the Mississippi River was Robert Livingston. And he was one of the people who actually negotiated the Louisiana Purchase. And I don't think it's coincidental that he saw the economic potential in the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River and even west of the Mississippi River.
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's important to realize that the design of these boats, and I'm talking about the old, you know, showboat type of thing. We've all seen mock-ups of this in the modern age, this sort of flat bottom boat, very wide, very shallow draft. All of this design was really to adapt to those river conditions, wasn't it? Because there was so much difficulty in navigating them.
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.
Chapter 5: What was the experience like for passengers aboard steamboats?
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. It was a narrow flat bottom boat. And then the deck extended wider.
Chapter 6: How did the steamboat era contribute to the culture of gambling?
Oh, I see. Right above the water. Because faster boats had less... contact with the water. Sure. And people wanted fast boats. But the deck itself became the repository for all kinds of cargo on these steamboats. He had chains that literally would hold the deck from drooping down and touching the water. They were called hog chains.
You mentioned the New Orleans. First successful steamboat on the Mississippi launched 1811 to 12. That was her maiden forage was in there. Left from Pittsburgh to New Orleans via the Ohio and then the Mississippi. One needs to remember that these are massive rivers that all connect. And that was really what was the remarkable aspect of the middle of the country, that these highways existed.
Chapter 7: What role did steamboats play in the Civil War?
Tell me about that voyage. How long did it take, those early steamships?
That voyage left on October 20th, 1811. And a couple of days later, it's in Cincinnati. A couple of days after that, it's in Louisville. But it had a problem in Louisville because there were the falls at Louisville. And when the New Orleans got to Louisville, they weren't sure if it would actually make it over the falls.
And that would be disastrous if it scraped over the falls, got a hole in the boat, and then sank. That's not a good demonstration of an early technology. So they spent a couple of weeks essentially at Louisville waiting for the water to rise and taking people on board and demonstrating that they could go up river and go back down river and that kind of thing.
They finally decided to shoot over the falls, so to speak. And so there was enough water and it was kind of this very rough voyage over the river or over the falls, but they made it. They get further down. This crazy coincidence was that you had a series of earthquakes that happened in the center of the United States that probably not a lot of Americans have heard of.
They're called the New Madrid earthquakes.
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Chapter 8: What led to the decline of the steamboat era in America?
And so by this point, the New Orleans was on the Mississippi River. And these were three magnitude eight earthquakes that happened. And then with the aftershocks as well. And the story goes that for a while, a portion of the Mississippi River actually went upstream. The waters ran backwards.
because of the magnitude of the earthquake, which is actually a pretty fitting metaphor for the steamboats because in a way, you know, they're going upstream. They're kind of making the water go backwards. Yes, right. And this was really difficult because they had a guide on this boat. His name was Andrew Jack, and he was very familiar with these rivers.
And he had to know the rivers because of where the eddies were and where the sandbars were and that kind of thing. But now the river is completely remade in a portion of it between lower Missouri and above Natchez. But they're able to guide their way through, and then they get to Natchez by December 30th.
And fittingly, they take on cotton bales as their first commercial product that they ship to New Orleans, and they arrive in New Orleans on January 12th, 1812.
A triumph. This is a triumph of the times. Yeah. And no wonder. It's an incredible ability that totally lacked before. Let's talk about the impacts of this technology. By the 1850s, we've entered into what is called the golden age of steamboats. It's hard to conceive how many. I mean, there were a thousand steamboats working on those western rivers, weren't they? There were.
And there were steamboats of all sizes.
And of all types in some ways. Yeah. You have the larger steamboats on the Mississippi River, but then you have a lot of smaller steamboats on the tributary rivers, ones that would have a draft of maybe one or two feet. And, of course, steamboats are at the mercy of the environment because if there's not enough water, they can't run.
But if there is enough water, you have this amazing network where you could go – to Montana. You could go to Oklahoma. You could go to Pittsburgh. You could go to St. Paul, Minnesota and New Orleans. And almost anywhere in between, that was along a river. Yes. And so you've got people both going upstream and downstream, and you have cargo going upstream and downstream.
And so you're getting kind of this sense of interconnectedness that you didn't have before. Because with a flat boat, if you say you were going to go from Cincinnati to New Orleans, which was not uncommon, you build the flat boat, you put your product on it, you'd float down. When you got to New Orleans, you'd sell your product, you'd break up the flat boat for scrap, and then you'd walk back.
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