"You see this has got to be learned....A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape;and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch.You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it.You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it.
Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night.
All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines only you know better.
You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there) and that wall falls back and makes way for you.Then there's your gray mist.You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore.A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived.Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways....
You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD and never mind the one that's before your eyes."** Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," pp.103-04.
No wonder that the two hundred miles of the Mississippi from the mouth of the Ohio to St.Louis in time contained the wrecks of two hundred steamboats.
The river trade reached its zenith between 1840 and 1860, in the two decades previous to the Civil War, that period before the railroads began to parallel the great rivers.It was a time which saw the rise of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas, and which witnessed the spread of the cotton kingdom into the Southwest.The story of King Cotton's conquest of the Mississippi South is best told in statistics.In 1811, the year of the first voyage which the New Orleans made down the Ohio River, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi exported five million pounds of cotton.In 1834 these same States exported almost two hundred million pounds of cotton.To take care of this crop and to supply the cotton country, which was becoming wealthy, with the necessaries and luxuries of life, more and more steamboats were needed.The great shipyards situated, because of the proximity of suitable timber, at St.Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville became busy hives, not since paralleled except by such centers of shipbuilding as Hog Island in 1917-18, during the time of the Great War.The steamboat tonnage of the Mississippi Valley (exclusive of New Orleans) in the hustling forties exceeded that of the Atlantic ports (exclusive of New York City) by 15,000tons.The steamboat tonnage of New Orleans alone in 1843 was more than double that of New York City.
Those who, if the old story is true, ran in fear to the hills when the little New Orleans went puffing down the Ohio, in 1811, would have been doubly amazed at the splendid development in the art of boat building, could they have seen the stately Sultana or Southern Belle of the fifties sweep swiftly by.After a period of gaudy ornamentation (1830-40) steamboat architecture settled down, as has that of Pullman cars today, to sane and practical lines, and the boats gained in length and strength, though they contained less weight of timber.The value of one of the greater boats of this era would be about fifty thousand dollars.When Captain Bixby made his celebrated night crossing at Hat Island a quarter of a million dollars in ship and cargo would have been the price of an error in judgment, according to Mark Twain,* a good authority.
*Op.cit., p.101
The Yorktown, built in 1844 for the Ohio-Mississippi trade, was typical of that epoch of inland commerce.Her length was 182feet, breadth of beam 31 feet, and the diameter of wheels 28feet.Though her hold was 8 feet in depth, yet she drew but 4feet of water light and barely over 8 feet when loaded with 500tons of freight.She had 4 boilers, 30 feet long and 42 inches in diameter, double engines, and two 24-inch cylinders.The stateroom cabin had come in with Captain Isaiah Sellers's Prairie in 1836, the first boat with such luxuries ever seen in St.
Louis, according to Sellers.The Yorktown had 40 private cabins.
It is interesting to compare the Yorktown with The Queen of the West, the giant British steamer built for the Falmouth-Calcutta trade in 1839.The Queen of the West had a length of 310 feet, a beam of 31 feet, a draft of 15 feet, and 16 private cabins.The building of this great vessel led a writer in the New York American to say: "It would really seem that we as a nation had no interest in this new application of steam power, or no energy to appropriate it to our own use." The statement--written in a day when the Mississippi steamboat tonnage exceeded that of the entire British Empire--is one of the best examples of provincial ignorance concerning the West.
On these steamboats there was a multiplicity of arrangements and equipments for preventing and for fighting fire.One of the innovations on the new boats in this particular was the substitution of wire for the combustible rope formerly used to control the tiller, so that even in time of fire the pilot could "hold her nozzle agin' the bank." Much of the great loss of life in steamboat fires had been due to the tiller-ropes being burned and the boats becoming unmanageable.
