Life on The Mississippi Read Free Page A

Mississippi in mind as they went about perfecting steam-powered navigation. Indeed, Fitch might have been more successful in promoting his invention, which made a number of voyages along the Delaware River, had the navigation of the Mississippi not been controlled at the time by the Spanish and then the French governments. President Jefferson sent Robert Livingston to France to bargain with Napoleon for navigation rights to the great river and his representative returned with what became known as the Louisiana Purchase, a vast territory that greatly increased not only the United States but the importance to the new nation of the Mississippi and its western tributaries. By 1812, one of Fulton’s steamboats had made the trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, only five years after the Clermont was first launched on the Hudson.
    It was not long before Fulton’s boat made regular trips between New Orleans and Natchez, and it was soon followed by other steam-powered craft eventually connecting towns on the Ohio with Southern regions. The importance of riverboat navigation to the economy of the West is suggested by the image the Kentuckian Henry Clay used in an 1824 speech as a metaphor to express the welfare of the United States as a whole:
    The difference between a nation with, and without, the [manufacturing] arts may be conceived, by the difference between a keel-boat and a steam-boat, combatting the rapid torrent of the Mississippi. How slow does the former ascend, hugging the sinuosities of the shore, pushed on by her hardy and exposed crew, now throwing themselves in vigorus concert on their oars, and then seizing the pendant boughs of over-hanging trees: she seems hardly to move; and her scanty cargo is scarcely worth the transportation! With what ease is she not passed by the steam-boat, laden with the riches of all quarters of the world, with a crowd of gay, cheerful, and protected passengers, now dashing into the midst of the current, or gliding through the eddies near the shore? Nature herself seems to survey, with astonishment, the passing wonder, and, in silent submission, reluctantly to own the magnificent triumphs, in her own vast dominion, of Fulton’s immortal genius!
    A similar contrast between keelboat and steamboat travel on the Mississippi was drawn in 1825 by the New England-born preacher Timothy Flint, in a retrospective account of the ten years he had spent on Western rivers, during which time the number of steamboats there had multiplied dramatically: “Justly to appreciate the value of steamboats on these waters, one must have moved up them, as long, as dangerously, and as laboriously, as I have done,” he wrote, recalling his travels in keelboats before moving on to a panegyric on the ease and luxuriousness of travel on “one of the better steamboats,” with
    its splendid cabin, richly carpeted, its bar-room and sliding-tables, to which eighty passengers can sit down with comfort. The fare is sumptuous, and every thing in a style of splendor, order, quiet, and regularity. . . . You read, you converse, you walk, you sleep, as you choose . . . [while] the varied and verdant scenery shifts around you. The trees, the green islands, have an appearance, as by enchantment of moving by you.
    By the time Flint’s book was published, the keelboat man was an endangered species on the Mississippi, his livelihood obliterated by the steamboat, and Flint tended to imbue him with romantic qualities as a figure associated with a rapidly disappearing scene. Thus he noted that the
    stories, told by boatmen stretched at the foot of a tree, just below which was the boat, and the wave of the Mississippi, and interlarded with the jargon of their peculiar phrase, or perhaps interrupted by the droll comment, or the incredulous questioning of the rest, had often to me no small degree of interest; and tricked out in the dress of modern description, would have made very tolerable romances.
    This hint was soon picked up by