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How Riverboats and Steamers Shaped American History

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Throughout American history, there have been many modes of transport that forever changed the face of this country. Everything from the development of automobiles to the railroad, canal boats, and even the covered wagon—they’ve all played a big role in bringing us to where we are today.

The steamboat is part of this rich history. While there are lots of different types of steamboats, some of which are ocean going, we’ll focus on the riverboat variety here. Prior to automobiles and railways, it was rivers that connected one part of the U.S. to another. Steamboats were responsible for ferrying people and goods all over the country and to the coasts where shipments could then be transported overseas. Let’s jump in and start with the earliest known steamboat history.

Steamboats Invented in Europe

Though these boats were responsible for reshaping America, they were originally developed in Europe. You see, it was in the late 1600s when early experiments on the steam engine began. These were led by the French inventor Denis Papin, and Thomas Newcomen of England. It started with a device known as the steam digester, which was an early kind of pressure cooker. From there, these two men experimented with pistons, and Papin eventually suggested that this technology could be used to operate a paddlewheel boat.

Both men made designs attempting to power a boat, though neither of their designs worked that well. Still, innovation is part of the human spirit, so soon, other inventors followed suit. English scientist John Allen patented the first steamboat in 1729. Over the next thirty-some years, other inventors attempted to improve on steam engines and steamboats, one of whom was William Henry from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He produced his own steam engine in 1763, which he put on a boat. The boat sank—but it’s thought perhaps Henry’s work inspired others to keep innovating.

The Rise of Steamboats in America

From there, it was a race to develop working steam engines—and working steamboats. Several people made working steamboats in the 1780s. In the United States, John Fitch of Philadelphia launched a steamboat in 1787, and it proved such a success that by 1788, he was operating a commercial steamboat service that followed the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey . This was a passenger boat that could carry up to 30 people, traveling between seven and eight miles per hour.

Unfortunately for Fitch, while his boat was a success, his business was not. The route on which his boat traveled was one already well covered by roads and wagons, so there wasn’t much need for a passenger boat.

But later, Robert Fulton, an American inventor who found himself intrigued by the possibilities of steamboats, ended up creating his own vessel in 1807. This was the North River Steamboat , which later became known as the Clermont —and it could be considered the boat that started the steamship revolution in the U.S.

The Clermont was pretty incredible for the time. It traveled the Hudson River between New York City and Albany, making the 150-mile trip in as little as 32 hours. Because of its capabilities, it became the first commercially successful steamboat in the U.S.

In the wake of the Clermont’s success, steamboats began to proliferate around the United States—especially along the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, where they were instrumental in not only ferrying passengers up and down long stretches but also hauling grain, lumber, supplies or anything else that needed to be moved long distances. These riverboats also grew in prominence in the western United States during the California Gold Rush, usually pressed into service to carry miners and mining supplies closer to the gold fields.

Riverboats During the Civil War

When you hear about Civil War boats, the two that most people are familiar with are the Monitor and the Merrimack , which were ocean-faring steamships called “ironclads.” They receive most of the historical attention because truly, these two ships were a revolution of their times. But there’s a whole other side to Civil War naval history that you don’t often hear about—and that was the battles waged by Union and Confederate riverboats.

Away from the East Coast, the naval war was fought for control of the major rivers, most especially the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers—and this involved paddlewheel boats that had been converted into warships. These river battles were waged by monitors, which were heavily armed but lightly armored smaller rivercraft, and ironclads, which were boats that had been heavily armored with iron plates. Some of the war’s most famous battles, like the Battle of Vicksburg, involved the use of riverboats. Between the Vicksburg battle and the seizure of New Orleans, this secured the Mississippi River for the Union Army, enabling them to transport men and supplies up and down the river.

The Heyday of America’s Greatest Riverboats

To this day, the Mississippi River is still a major shipping lane within the United States, though nowadays, you’ll find a variety of craft going up and down its waters. Through the 19 th century to the early parts of the 20 th century, however, it was the paddlewheel steamer that dominated the Mississippi—and other major rivers, too. Some of these boats were so famous that they became state symbols, like the Iowa , which was an 1838 steamer that is part of Iowa’s state seal. The Anson Northup is another famous steamer that in 1859, became the first to cross over from the U.S. to Canada on the Red River.

During this time, steamers were a major part of what drove American expansion. Their speed and power meant that people could transport more goods and passengers than ever before, which is a big part of the reason why port towns flourished so well—because steamers were bringing in the goods from the heartlands that would be transported for trade overseas. These rivercraft became iconic, something that people all over the United States took great pride in as symbols of progress and prosperity.

Eventually, though, riverboats began to wane in popularity. There were a couple of reasons behind this. For one thing, the big steamers were incredibly dangerous. Ultimately, most of these boats would either burn down or they’d be destroyed when the powerful boilers that powered them exploded. They were wooden ships, after all, powered largely by wood fires since wood was so easy to procure along the rivers on which they ran. Accidents were quite frequent, and many who traveled on them took their lives into their own hands. In places like Alton, Illinois, homes along the river even featured platforms called “widow’s walks,” which were rooftop platforms where women would watch for their husbands to come home on the riverboats they crewed. To put into perspective how dangerous these crafts were, the Scientific American reported in December 1860 that 487 people had died that year in steamboat accidents.

Even though steamers were dangerous, the danger wasn’t the primary factor behind their decline. Actually, it was the development of the railroad. As more and more rail lines began to spread across the United States, riverboat popularity waned. Railroads had too many advantages—they were faster, capable of hauling more, they were safer, and they could reach landlocked places that didn’t have river access.

Even so, riverboats never did go out of service entirely. Today, you’ll still find them all over America’s largest rivers. Some of those old paddle steamers that were once so iconic are still around, though these days, most are replica pleasure craft designed with modern engines that are infinitely safer than the old wood-fired boilers that used to run them.

Riverboats are still a rich American tradition, and they truly were a formative part of American history. If you ever have the opportunity, schedule a cruise or even an afternoon tour on one of America’s replica paddleboats. It’s an experience that will take you back in time.

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Flashback: A Brief History of the Riverboats

Located downtown on the riverfront; it set sail daily during the spring, summer and fall months; and has been providing fond memories for millions of passengers throughout the years. The Tom Sawyer has been part of St. Louis history for decades. But do you know the storied history?

Here’s a one-minute synopsis: Decades ago, the downtown St. Louis riverfront was home to hundreds of riverboats that lined the Mississippi riverfront. (Who remembers the tall stacks of the Robert E. Lee or the shimmering Admiral?)

Enter the Tom Sawyer brought to St. Louis in 1964 to accommodate the spectators who wanted a closer look at the building of the Gateway Arch. Since then, many boats have left the riverfront (most recently, the Admiral in 2011), but today, the Tom remains. This year he celebrate his 50 th  anniversary of cruising on the St. Louis riverfront!

(And another fun fact: The Gateway Arch Riverboats are a part of the oldest Mississippi excursion boat company that has called St. Louis its home port since 1917!)

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A Secret History of American River People

The lost narratives of river people, river communities, and the river itself.

A shantyboat is a small crude houseboat (also called a flatboat, broadhorn, barge, scow, or ark). There is a long forgotten history in America of people living in homemade shantyboats, a reasonable and cost-free solution for displaced people in rural areas and workers in urban areas.

During the 19th century into the 1930s, itinerant workers lived in shantyboats along the canals and rivers of industrial American towns. Now, not only the shantyboats are gone, but the wild river banks, the river-based industry, and even the towns and neighborhoods adjacent to the river.

Working-class people living on the water is tied to economic conditions, the boom and bust cycles of capitalism, the 1890s, the Great Depression, the 70s, and the early 2000s.

In the fallout from the U.S. economic collapse in 1893, thousands of families left their homes in the upper Mississippi Valley in home-built shantyboats to look for work along the more industrialized lower Mississippi River and Ohio River Valleys. In the 1930s, displaced and jobless people took to the waters, to live or to travel to look for work. Dozens of published chronicles of these family sojourns are still available.

Family on front porch of houseboat on river in Charleston, West Virginia-1938

During the 1960s and 70s, a water-based analogue of the Back To The Land movement blossomed in leftover houseboat communities. People looked to the relative freedom of rivers, lakes, and seas, especially in floating communities in Sausalito, California, Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. Largely class-based conflicts between these houseboat communities and land-based home owners decimated these communities, and still flare up occasionally in the remnants of these communities today.

More recently, young middle-class men and women, principally from punk and anarchist communities, have taken to the river in homemade houseboats to float the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri and other rivers. Despite the maze of regulation and prohibition against it, some of these itinerant communities of boat people still exist here and there.

William Glasier Crop

Des Arc Bayou, 1912

Family on Houseboat

Bohemian Flats Along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, MN

Bohemian Flats, Minneapolis, MN, 1910

Kentucky River

Loading the Lewis and Clark Keelboat_robertgriffing590x387

Shantyboat in Winter

shantyboat at iron bridge

Houseboat washed high and dry amid debris. Maunie, Illinois-1930

Houseboat along Ohio River at Rochester, Pennsylvania-1940

Houseboat on the Ohio River at Rochester, Pennsylvania-1940

The Deserted house boat-1905

Steel bridge over Illinois River at Pearl, Ill-1905

Anna Hubbard at outdoor kitchen

Harlan Hubbard on deck of his shantyboat

A visit to Harlan Hubbard’s shantyboat

L&N Railroad Bridge between Newport and Cincinnati

Harlan and Anna Hubbard’s shantyboat at Fort Thomas, Ky

Harlan Hubbard building his shanty boat

Anna Hubbard hangs laundry on the line to dry

Anna Hubbard at shanty boat (with bicycle)

Men loading tobacco onto a shantyboat barge

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Biography of Robert Fulton, Inventor of the Steamboat

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From Artist to Inventor

The nautilus submarine, designing the steamboat.

• The Steamboat Clermont

The New Orleans Steamboat

First steam-powered warship, later life and death, legacy and honors.

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Robert Fulton (November 14, 1765—February 24, 1815) was an American inventor and engineer who is best known for his role in developing the first commercially successful steamboat. America’s rivers opened to commercial trade and passenger transportation after Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont , made its maiden voyage along the Hudson River in 1807. Fulton is also credited with inventing the Nautilus, one of the world’s first practical submarines.

Fast Facts: Robert Fulton

• Known for: Developed the first commercially successful steamboat
• Born: November 14, 1765 in Little Britain, Pennsylvania
• Parents: Robert Fulton, Sr. and Mary Smith Fulton
• Died: February 24, 1815 in New York City, New York
• Patents: US Patent: 1,434X , Constructing boats or vessels which are to be navigated by the power of steam engines
• Awards and Honors: National Inventors Hall of Fame (2006)
• Spouse: Harriet Livingston
• Children: Robert Fulton, Julia Fulton, Mary Fulton, and Cornelia Fulton

Robert Fulton was born on November 14, 1765, to Irish immigrant parents, Robert Fulton, Sr. and Mary Smith Fulton. The family lived on a farm in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, which was then still a British American colony . He had three sisters—Isabella, Elizabeth, and Mary—and a younger brother, Abraham. After their farm was foreclosed on and sold in 1771, the family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Though he had been taught to read and write at home, Fulton attended a Quaker school in Lancaster at age eight. He then worked in a Philadelphia jewelry shop, where his skill at painting miniature portraits for lockets inspired the young Fulton to pursue a career as an artist.

Fulton remained single until age 43 when in 1808, he married Harriet Livingston, the niece of his steamboat business partner, Robert R. Livingston. The couple had a son and three daughters together.

In 1786, Fulton moved to Bath, Virginia, where his portraits and landscapes were so well-appreciated that his friends urged him to study art in Europe. Fulton returned to Philadelphia, where he hoped his paintings would attract a sponsor. Impressed by his art, and hoping to improve the city’s cultural image, a group of local merchants paid Fulton’s fare to London in 1787.

Though he was popular and well-received in England, Fulton’s paintings never earned him more than a meager living. At the same time, he had taken note of a series of recent inventions that propelled a boat with a paddle, which was moved back-and-forth by jets of water heated by a steam boiler. It occurred to Fulton that using steam to power several connected rotating paddles would move the boat more effectively—an idea he would later famously develop as the paddlewheel. By 1793, Fulton had approached both the British and United States governments with plans for steam-powered military and commercial vessels.

In 1794, Fulton abandoned his career as an artist to turn to the very different, but potentially more profitable area of designing inland waterways. In his 1796 pamphlet, Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation , he proposed combining existing rivers with a network of manmade canals to connect towns and cities throughout England. He also envisioned methods for raising and lowering boats without the need for costly mechanical lock-and-dam complexes, specially-designed steamboats for carrying heavy cargo in shallow water, and designs for more stable bridges. While the British showed no interest in his canal network plan, Fulton succeeded in inventing a canal dredging machine and obtaining British patents for several other related inventions.

Not daunted by England’s lack of enthusiasm for his canal ideas, Fulton remained dedicated to building a career as an inventor. In 1797, he went to Paris, where he approached the French government with an idea for a submarine he believed would help France in its ongoing war with England . Fulton suggested a scenario in which his submarine, the Nautilus, would maneuver undetected beneath British warships, where it could attach explosive charges to their hulls.

“Should some vessels of war be destroyed by means so novel, so hidden and so incalculable the confidence of the seamen will vanish and the fleet rendered useless from the moment of the first terror.” —Robert Fulton, 1797

Considering the use of Fulton’s Nautilus submarine to be a cowardly and dishonorable way to fight, both the French government and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte refused to subsidize its construction. After another failed attempt to sell the idea, Fulton was granted permission by the French Minister of Marine to build the Nautilus.

The first tests of the Nautilus were conducted on July 29, 1800, in the River Seine at Rouen. Based on the success of the trial dives, Fulton was granted permission to build a revised model of the Nautilus. Tested on July 3, 1801, Fulton’s improved Nautilus reached a then-remarkable depth of 25 feet (7.6 m) carrying a crew of three and remaining submerged for over four hours.

Fulton’s Nautilus was eventually used in two attacks against British ships blockading a small harbor near Cherbourg. However, due to winds and tides, the British ships eluded the slower submarine.

In 1801, Fulton met then-U.S. ambassador to France Robert R. Livingston, a member of the committee that had drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence . Before Livingston had come to France, his home state of New York had granted him the exclusive right to operate and profit from steamboat navigation on rivers within the state for a period of 20 years. Fulton and Livingston agreed to partner up in order to build a steamboat.

On August 9, 1803, the 66-foot-long boat that Fulton designed was tested on the River Seine in Paris. Although the French-designed eight- horsepower steam engine broke the hull, Fulton and Livingston were encouraged that the boat had reached a speed of 4 miles per hour against the current. Fulton started designing a stronger hull and ordered parts for a 24-horsepower engine. Livingston also negotiated an extension of his New York steamboat navigation monopoly.

In 1804, Fulton returned to London, where he tried to interest the British government on his design for a semi-submersible, steam-powered warship. However, after British Admiral Nelson’s decisive defeat of the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, the British government decided it could maintain its then undisputed mastery of the seas without Fulton’s unconventional and unproven steamships. At this point, Fulton was close to poverty, having spent so much of his own money on the Nautilus and his early steamboats. He decided to return to the United States.

In December 1806, Fulton and Robert Livingston reunited in New York to resume work on their steamboat. By early August 1807, the boat was ready for its maiden voyage. The 142-foot-long, 18-foot-wide steamboat used Fulton’s innovative a one-cylinder, 19-horsepower condensing steam engine to drive two 15-foot-diameter paddlewheels, one on each side of the boat.

On August 17, 1807, Fulton and Livingston’s North River Steamboat—later known as the Clermont —began its trial voyage up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. A crowd gathered to watch the event, but the onlookers expected the steamboat to fail. They jeered at the ship, which they called "Fulton's Folly." The ship stalled at first, leaving Fulton and his crew scrambling for a solution. A half-hour later, the steamboat's paddlewheels were turning again, moving the ship steadily forward against the Hudson’s current. Averaging nearly 5 miles per hour, the steamboat completed the 150-mile trip in just 32 hours, compared to the four days required by conventional sailing ships. The downstream return trip was completed in just 30 hours.

In a letter to a friend, Fulton wrote of the historic event, “I had a light breeze against me the whole way, both going and coming, and the voyage has been performed wholly by the power of the steam engine. I overtook many sloops and schooners, beating to the windward, and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved.”

With the addition of additional sleeping berths and other improvements, Fulton’s North River Steamboat began scheduled service on September 4, 1807, carrying passengers and light freight between New York and Albany on the Hudson River. During its initial season of service, the North River Steamboat suffered repeated mechanical problems, caused mainly by the captains of rival sail-powered boats who "accidentally” rammed its exposed paddlewheels.

During the winter of 1808, Fulton and Livingston added metal guards around the paddlewheels, improved the passenger accommodations, and re-registered the steamboat under the name North River Steamboat of Clermont—soon shortened to simply Clermont. By 1810, the Clermont and two new Fulton-designed steamboats were providing regular passenger and freight service on New York’s Hudson and Raritan rivers.

From 1811 to 1812, Fulton, Livingston, and fellow inventor and entrepreneur Nicholas Roosevelt entered into a new joint venture. They planned to build steamboat capable of traveling from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, a journey of over 1,800 miles through the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. They named the steamboat New Orleans .

Just eight years after the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory from France in the Louisiana Purchase , the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers were still largely unmapped and unprotected. The route from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Cairo, Illinois, on the Ohio River required the steamboat to navigate the treacherous “ Falls of the Ohio ” near Louisville, Kentucky—a 26-foot elevation drop in about one mile. 

The New Orleans steamboat left Pittsburgh on October 20, 1811, and arrived in New Orleans on January 18, 1812. While the trip down the Ohio River was uneventful, navigating the Mississippi River proved a challenge. On December 16, 1811, the great New Madrid earthquake , centered near New Madrid, Missouri, altered the position of previously-mapped river landmarks, such as islands and channels, making navigation difficult. In many places, trees downed by the earthquake formed dangerous, constantly moving “snags” in the river channel that blocked the ship's path.  

The successful—albeit harrowing—first voyage of Fulton’s New Orleans proved that steamboats could survive the numerous perils to navigation on America’s western rivers. Within a decade, Fulton-inspired steamboats would be serving as the main means of passenger and freight transportation throughout America’s heartland.

When the English navy began to blockade U.S. ports during the War of 1812 , Fulton was hired by the U.S. government to design what would become the world’s first steam-powered warship : the Demologos .

Essentially a floating, mobile gun battery, Fulton’s 150-foot-long Demologos featured two parallel hulls with its paddle wheel protected between them. With its steam engine in one hull and its boiler in the other, the heavily armed, armor-clad vessel weighed in at a hefty 2,745 displacement tons , thus limiting it to a tactically dangerous slow speed of about 7 miles-per-hour. Though it underwent successful sea trials during October 1814, the Demologos was never used in battle.

When peace came in 1815, the U.S. Navy decommissioned the Demologos . The ship made its last voyage under its own power in 1817, when it carried President James Monroe from New York to Staten Island. After its steam engines were removed in 1821, it was towed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where it served as a receiving ship until it was accidentally destroyed by an explosion in 1829.

From 1812 until his death in 1815, Fulton spent most of his time and money engaged in legal battles protecting his steamboat patents. A series of failed submarine designs, bad investments in art, and never-repaid loans to relatives and friends further depleted his savings.

In early 1815, Fulton was soaked with icy water while rescuing a friend who had fallen through the ice while walking on the frozen Hudson River. Suffering a severe chill, Fulton contracted pneumonia and died on February 24, 1815, at age 49 in New York City. He is buried in the Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery on Wall Street in New York City.

Upon learning of Fulton’s death, both houses of the New York State legislature voted to wear black mourning clothes for the next six weeks—the first time such a tribute had ever been paid to a private citizen.

By enabling affordable and dependable transportation of raw materials and finished goods, Fulton’s steamboats proved essential to the American industrial revolution . Along with ushering in the romantic era of luxurious riverboat travel, Fulton’s boats contributed significantly to America’s westward expansion . In addition, his developments in the area of steam-powered warships would help the United States Navy become a dominant military power. To date, five U.S. Navy ships have born the name USS Fulton .

Today, Fulton’s statue is among those displayed in the National Statuary Hall Collection inside the U.S. Capitol. At the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Fulton Hall houses the Department of Marine Engineering. Along with telegraph inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, Fulton is depicted on the reverse of the 1896 United States $2 Silver Certificate. In 2006, Fulton was inducted into the “National Inventors Hall of Fame” in Alexandria, Virginia.

• Dickinson, H. W. “Robert Fulton, Engineer and Artist: His Life and Works.” University Press of the Pacific, 1913.
• Sutcliffe, Alice Crary. “Robert Fulton and The Clermont.” The Century Co., 1909.
• Latrobe, John H.B. “A Lost Chapter in the History of the Steamboat.” Maryland Historical Society, 1871, http://www.myoutbox.net/nr1871b.htm
• Przybylek, Leslie. “The Incredible Journey of the Steamboat New Orleans.” Senator John Heinz History Center , October 18, 2017, https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/western-pennsylvania-history/the-incredible-journey-of-the-steamboat-new-orleans .
• Canney, Donald L. “The Old Steam Navy, Volume One: Frigates, Sloops, and Gunboats 1815-1885.” Naval Institute Press, 1990. 
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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Steam-powered vessels were important to the growth of the U.S. economy in the antebellum years.

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Steamboat River Transport

Steamboats proved a popular method of commercial and passenger transportation along the Mississippi River and other inland U.S. rivers in the 19th century. Their relative speed and ability to travel against the current reduced time and expense.

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Any seagoing vessel drawing energy from a steam-powered engine can be called a steamboat. However, the term most commonly describes the kind of craft propelled by the turning of steam-driven paddle wheels and often found on rivers in the United States in the 19th century. These boats made use of the steam engine invented by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen in the early 18th century and later improved by James Watt of Scotland. Several Americans made efforts to apply this technology to maritime travel. The United States was expanding inland from the Atlantic coast at the time. There was a need for more efficient river transportation, since it took a great deal of muscle power to move a craft against the current. In 1787, John Fitch demonstrated a working model of the steamboat concept on the Delaware River. The first truly successful design appeared two decades later. It was built by Robert Fulton with the assistance of Robert R. Livingston, the former U.S. minister to France. Fulton’s craft made its first voyage in August of 1807, sailing up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, New York, at an impressive speed of eight kilometers (five miles) per hour. Fulton then began making this round trip on a regular basis for paying customers. Following this introduction, steamboat traffic grew steadily on the Mississippi River and other river systems in the inland United States. There were numerous kinds of steamboats, which had different functions. The most common type on southern rivers was the packet boat. Packet boats carried human passengers as well as commercial cargo, such as bales of cotton from southern plantations. Compared to other types of craft used at the time, such as flatboats , keelboats , and barges , steamboats greatly reduced both the time and expense of shipping goods to distant markets. For this reason, they were enormously important in the growth and consolidation of the U.S. economy before the Civil War. Steamboats were a fairly dangerous form of transportation, due to their construction and the nature of how they worked. The boilers used to create steam often exploded when they built up too much pressure. Sometimes debris and obstacles—logs or boulders—in the river caused the boats to sink. This meant that steamboats had a short life span of just four to five years on average, making them less cost-effective than other forms of transportation. In the later years of the 19th century, larger steam-powered ships were commonly used to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The Great Western , one of the earliest oceangoing steam-powered ships, was large enough to accommodate more than 200 passengers. Steamships became the predominant vehicles for transatlantic cargo shipping as well as passenger travel. Millions of Europeans immigrated to the United States aboard steamships. By 1900, railroads had long since surpassed steamboats as the dominant form of commercial transport in the United States. Most steamboats were eventually retired, except for a few elegant “showboats” that today serve as tourist attractions.

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GATEWAY ARCH EXPERIENCE

All things gateway arch, old courthouse and gateway arch riverboats. all the time., flashback: a brief history of the riverboats.

Spectators take in views of the Arch’s construction from the decks of the riverboats. All rights reserved by JNEM Archives.

They’re located downtown on the riverfront; set sail daily during the spring, summer and fall months; and have been providing fond memories for millions of passengers throughout the years. The Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher—aka, the Gateway Arch Riverboats—have been part of St. Louis history for decades. But do you know THEIR storied history?

Here’s a one-minute synopsis: Decades ago, the downtown St. Louis riverfront was home to hundreds of riverboats that lined the Mississippi riverfront. (Who remembers the tall stacks of the Robert E. Lee or the shimmering Admiral?)

Enter Tom and Becky: They were brought to St. Louis in 1964 to accommodate the spectators who wanted a closer look at the building of the Gateway Arch. Since then, many boats have left the riverfront (most recently, the Admiral in 2011), but today, the Tom and Becky are the only two that remain. This year they celebrate their 50 th anniversary of cruising on the St. Louis riverfront!

(And another fun fact: The Gateway Arch Riverboats are a part of the oldest Mississippi excursion boat company that has called St. Louis its home port since 1917!)

We’ve been feeling nostalgic as of late, so we decided to take a walk down memory lane. Enjoy these photos of the riverboat views during the building of the Arch. My, how times have changed!

River view from the deck of the Admiral. (Note the lifesaver!) All rights reserved by JNEM Archives.

The Arch begins to take shape. All rights reserved by JNEM Archives.

Another riverboat view. All rights reserved by JNEM Archives.

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A History of Riverboats in Mississippi

The mighty Mississippi river stretches from Northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The second-longest river in the United States, the Mississippi is integral to the history of America — particularly in the state of Mississippi. Riverboats facilitated travel, commerce, and cultural exchange within Mississippi and beyond. Learn more about the impact of Mississippi riverboats in this post from Visit Mississippi .

Riverboats: The Early Days

While people have navigated the waters of the Mississippi River for centuries, steamboat technology was not viable until the early 1800s. The first steamboat to travel the Mississippi was the New Orleans, whose October 1811 maiden voyage began in Pittsburgh, PA, and ended in New Orleans after traveling along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The New Orleans stopped in Natchez in December 1811 before continuing to its final port in New Orleans. First established by French colonists and later ruled by the Spanish, Natchez was an important center of trade and cultural exchange.

The Golden Age of the Steamboat

By the 1830s, steamboats existed all along the Mississippi River and its major tributaries. The growth of Mississippi’s riverfront communities, such as Bolivar, Commerce, and Greenville, can largely be attributed to the riverboat trade. Riverboats also brought new settlers to the state, helping to speed up agricultural development in the fertile Mississippi Delta.

Propelled by steam-driven paddle wheels, steamboats could navigate the river more quickly and effectively than barges or flatboats. They carried goods such as cotton, timber, and livestock up and down the river, expanding trade throughout the growing U.S. However, steamboats could be dangerous — the boilers used to create steam could build up too much pressure and explode. Steamboats were also susceptible to hitting obstacles such as rocks or logs, which could cause them to sink. This created a growing industry for a smaller type of riverboat called a “snagboat.” Snagboats patrolled the Mississippi River looking for tree stumps, debris, or other hazards and removing them before they damaged larger steamboats.

Wealthy Mississippians could enjoy leisure travel on a showboat — a riverboat used for theater and musical performances. Showboats were ornately decorated and would announce their arrival at a port by playing music that could be heard for miles.

Riverboats During the Civil War

During the years after Mississippi’s secession from the Union, many steamboats were used to support the Confederate Army. Riverboats carried troops, provisions, and supplies along the Mississippi during the Civil War. Demand for ships was so high that both the Union and Confederate governments chartered steamboats. Riverboats also played a role in the defense of Vicksburg, an important Confederate stronghold that connected the South to the Western states.

Gaming on the River

Riverboat gambling became popular in the early 1900s due to legislation surrounding gaming. By keeping poker, roulette, and other games of chance restricted to a riverboat, business owners could evade the anti-gambling laws that were in effect on land in states along the Mississippi River. Riverboat gaming in Mississippi was legalized in 1993, but unfortunately, Hurricane Katrina destroyed many riverboat casinos. In response, Mississippi lawmakers allowed casinos to move 800 feet inland.

However, you can still find a few riverboat casinos throughout the U.S. In Mississippi, visitors can try their luck at the Ameristar Casino Hotel in Vicksburg , a riverboat-style casino and hotel located right on the water.

Mississippi Riverboats in the Present Day

According to National Geographic, by 1900, the growth of railroads across the U.S. significantly reduced the demand for transporting goods and people via steamboat. Many riverboats were retired, but a few showboats remained as a testament to this period in history.

The popularity of riverboats continues to thrive in the Magnolia State. Today, tourists can enjoy the relaxing and immersive experience of river cruising. These luxury expeditions offer a unique way to travel the Mississippi, where guests can admire the breathtaking scenery along the waterway. First-class accommodations, fine dining, and a variety of things to do can be expected on a luxury tour on the Mississippi. Companies such as American Cruise Line and Viking River Cruises offer a variety of cruises that vary in duration and cities visited, like Vicksburg and Natchez.

Plan Your Trip With Help From Visit Mississippi

If you’re planning a trip to one of our historic riverfront cities like Natchez, Vicksburg, or Greenville — or anywhere else in the Hospitality State — Visit Mississippi is here for assistance.

Plan your next trip to Mississippi using our complimentary trip planner tool that helps you map out all your must-see attractions, restaurants, and lodging options. Whether you’re here for a week or just passing through, you’ll find a wealth of information about Mississippi history and culture on the Visit Mississippi website. For more information, contact us today.

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The Mississippi River

Mississippi River Boat History

St. Paul and Minneapolis exist today because of riverboats. In fact, virtually every city along the major rivers of the United States can trace its very existence to the arrival of riverboats in America. In the early 1800s, the Minnesota Territory was inhabited by Native Americans, soldiers, trappers, traders, explorers, and lumbermen. The cities, if you could call them that, were little more than camps where these rugged individuals congregated to drink, play cards, fight, and rest.

Native Americans hunted and farmed in the Mississippi valley for hundreds of years before white men arrived. The first European settlement in the Twin Cities area was Fort Snelling. In 1805, President Thomas Jefferson sent a young army Lieutenant, Zebulon Pike, into the area to find a suitable site to build a military outpost. Two years earlier, President Jefferson had purchased the entire central portion of the country from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico from Napoleon Bonaparte of France. That land agreement was called the Louisiana Purchase. President Jefferson wanted an army post in Minnesota to protect the country’s new land from the British and to keep the peace between warring Indian nations—the Dakota and Ojibway.

Lt. Zebulon Pike

Arriving at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers in the summer of 1805, Lt. Pike met French-Canadian Fur Trader Jean Baptiste Faribault repairing his canoe at the lower end of the island. After exploring the area, Pike determined that the bluffs overlooking the island between the two rivers would be an excellent location for the fort. That island eventually was named Pike Island, in his honor.

Col. Josiah Snelling

Fourteen years later, the first contingent of soldiers, led by Col. Henry Leavenworth, arrived to begin construction of the fort, originally called Fort St. Anthony. They endured extreme hardships in the first year, and nearly 40 men died over the winter. A new commander, Col. Josiah Snelling, took charge in 1820 and over the next four years, he supervised construction. Upon completion of the new military complex, Gen. Winfield Scott came from Washington D.C. to inspect the fort. He was so impressed with what Snelling and his men had accomplished in the wilderness that he recommended to Congress that they rename the facility Fort Snelling.

A Place Called Pig’s Eye

In the 1830s, a rugged frontiersman came to the Minnesota Territory. Known as Pig’s Eye Parrant because of a battered face he had acquired as a result of too many barroom brawls, the bawdy newcomer discovered a cave on the north bank of the Mississippi River about four miles downriver from Fort Snelling. In the cave was a marvelous, spring-fed stream; thus, given the name Fountain Cave. Ole Pig’s Eye, who brewed liquor, decided that Fountain Cave was a perfect place for his home and business. He quickly found many customers at Fort Snelling.

Over the years, a number of civilians had migrated down from Canada and settled on the government land surrounding Fort Snelling. By 1838, the new commandant became concerned with the growing civilian population at the Fort. He told them to leave Fort property, and when they refused, he ordered his troops into their settlement. The soldiers forced the civilians out of the area and burned their homes. There was no other white settlement for hundreds of miles, so 150 families wandered down the river until they came to Pig’s Eye Cave. Fresh water, unlimited hunting and fishing, and a ready supply of lumber made the cave a perfect place to live. The people formed a new community, and they called it Pig’s Eye.

Three years later, in 1841, a Catholic priest named Father Lucien Galtier arrived and built a small log chapel about a mile downstream (near the present site of the Robert Street Bridge). Every Sunday, the people of the Pig’s Eye community traveled down river to Father Galtier’s chapel. Soon, they became dissatisfied with the name of the community and decided to change it to the name of that little chapel. It was the Chapel of Saint Paul. That is how the city of St. Paul began at Fountain Cave, which was located approximately where the ADM Grain Terminal is today along Shepherd Road, just upriver from the downtown area.

Riverboats Create St. Paul

Over the next few years, the tiny community grew slowly until the big riverboats suddenly began to venture north on the Mississippi River. Please remember, there were no cars, trucks, trains, or airplanes. Travel was done through the woods by walking, riding a horse, in a wagon pulled by horse/oxen, or by boat. Rivers were the “freeways” of the 1800s. Travel was faster and much more comfortable on the big riverboats than by any other means. By the 1850s, hundreds of riverboats were coming to St. Paul bringing all types of goods and thousands of people. The entire Minnesota Territory had a non-Indian population of about 6,000 people in 1850. By the early 1860s, the population had exploded to 200,000. Almost all of those new residents arrived by riverboat.

Riverboat traffic began modestly in 1847 with 47 vessels arriving in Saint Paul—including the riverboat Lynx with a 23-year-old school teacher named Harriet Bishop. Riverboat arrivals increased each year, attaining peaks of 1,027 in 1857 and 1,068 in 1858 (the year Minnesota became a state). Severe national economic depression struck in 1859, slashing riverboat arrivals to 808. Arrivals held relatively steady into the 1860s, when the Civil War dominated national attention. During the war, many riverboats transported military troops and supplies throughout the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Some were even converted to early battleships using bales of cotton stacked high around their perimeters to defend against hostile gunfire. As the war ended, steel rails were being laid across the country, and riverboat landings in St. Paul plummeted almost to extinction.

You can see that riverboats truly did play a vital role in the creation of St. Paul. However, as marvelous as these big boats were, they posed many serious threats. In those early days, riverboats were powered by giant steam engines. Steam engines used wood that was in abundant supply along the river shores for fuel. Unfortunately, steam engines were under tremendous pressure, and the boilers frequently exploded, destroying the riverboat and killing many passengers and crew. Another danger was fire that could be started by hot sparks, which billowed out of the riverboat’s smokestacks. If the riverboat somehow managed to avoid fire and explosion, they also faced peril from rocks and snags (dead trees) under the water that could puncture the wooden hull and sink the boat.

Traveling the river was a very dangerous experience but one that many people made in the hope of reaching this new land of lush woods and abundant wildlife. Just to prove that human beings are not totally without hope, we did learn from those early mistakes. Today, riverboat travel is extremely safe due to the upgrades that have been made in vessel construction, course plotting, river maintenance, and crew training.

* All historic paintings are from the private collection of Capt. William D. Bowell, Sr., founder of the Padelford Packet Boat Co., Inc. The paintings were done by Padelford employee Ken Fox.

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Mississippi River Cruises

History of steamboats on the mississippi river.

Julie Green

| June 28, 2013

Just how long have steamboats been on the Mississippi River? For twenty-five years in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, individual inventors including John Fitch and James Rumsey labored toward the use of steam power in water transport of goods and people. Until then, goods or cargo made its way down stream on the Mississippi River on flatboats or keelboats. In fact all movement that took place on the river was predominantly one direction with any attempt at upstream transportation completed by costly poling against the current over long periods of time.

While Rumsey and Fitch fought over patent rights of a successful steamboat whose design was put in service between Philadelphia and New Jersey, others were moving ahead in their quests to develop steamboats that could travers the powerful current of the Mississippi. On the heels of Scotland’s successful upstream running on the River Carron of the Charlotte Dundas in 1801, American inventors, among them Oliver Evans and Robert Fulton worked in earnest to put a steamboat in service in America.

Fulton had immense success with his steamboat Clermont in traveling the 150 miles of the Hudson River from New York City to Albany in just over 30 hours. Fulton recognized the economic potential of using steamboats to move people and goods up and down the Mississippi and in 1811 the New Orleans became the first steamboat on the mighty river thus ushering in a new era of river transportation and a romantic period defined by sidewheelers and sternwheelers.

Steamboats on the Mississippi River in those early years were few but notable. A lightweight steamboat, the Comet , completed a similar voyage to the city of New Orleans, and following the War of 1812, more steamboats began to ply the Mississippi’s waters. The Vesuvius , a steamboat also owned by Fulton and similar in design to the New Orleans and the Enterprise were both launched in 1814 and sported design changes that made them better suited to navigate shallow water and strong current. Bringing with it the well known design of multiple decks, the Washington , launched in 1816 was a two deck steamboat allowing the upper deck to be reserved for passengers while the lower deck held cargo.

Mississippi River travel was developing into an economic and travel boon with the presence of a growing number of steamboats and the resulting growth of cities along its route. Memphis, St. Louis and Natchez expanded in population and economic development as they evolved into important port cities. Not surprisingly, with the evolution of port cities came further growth in steamboat development.

In 1814 the city of New Orleans recorded 21 steamboat arrivals, however, over the course of the following 20 years, that number exploded to more than 1200. The steamboat’s place as a transportation necessity was secured.

The theatrical Chapman family recognized the steamboat’s potential as an entertainment vessel and after numerous runs of entertainment productions on existing boats, in 1837 had their own steamboat built. Calling it the Floating Theater, this vessel was the predecessor of the familiar showboat that launched steamboat travel into the glorious era that is well recognized as an essential experience for Mississippi River travelers today.

Interrupted for a time by the Civil War, and by the advent of the automobile, steamboat travel on the Mississippi River experienced an evolution of growth, safety legislation and design change that sealed it’s place in history. The elegantly festooned, multiple decked sternwheelers that grace the river today call up a long and colorful history that helped expand a nation and capture imaginations forever in novel and story.

ABOUT JULIE

My name is Julie Green and I am the head writer, content contributor, and chief, cook, and bottle washer too! My goal is to provide you information about the Mississippi River.

It’s a wonderful place that I call home. I’d like to think I know a thing or two about this area!! Please stop by often and pay us a visit.

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The steamboat played an important role in Arkansas from the earliest days of the Arkansas Territory. Before being superseded by the railroad in the post–Civil War era, steamboats were the primary means of passenger transport, as well as moving raw materials out of Arkansas and consumer goods into the state.

The inland rivers steamboat, invented in the Mississippi River Valley in the first half of the nineteenth century, eventually connected every person on or near a stream to the larger world. The first major historian of the steamboat, Louis Hunter, saw the steamboat as the “most notable achievement of the industrial infancy” of the United States, not to mention the chief technological means by which the frontier advanced and by which steam power was introduced and spread in the United States. Building and supplying steamboats with hulls and machinery provided the infrastructure that pushed the United States’ transition from the “wood age” to the “iron age.”

In 1820, the steamboat  Comet made it to  Arkansas Post (Arkansas County) ; two years later, the Eagle was the first to visit Little Rock (Pulaski County) on its way to what is now Russellville (Pope County) with a load of supplies for Dwight Mission . The Arkansas Gazette reported numerous steamboats operating regularly on Arkansas waters even in the 1820s, including the Robert Thompson , Allegheny , Spartan , Industry , and Catawba . By 1829, the Laurel had reached Pocahontas (Randolph County) on the Black River , and two years later, Batesville (Independence County) on the upper White River was reached by the Waverly . The Ouachita River had its Dime , and even the Red River Raft was breached by the late 1830s. By about 1875, steamboats had reached everywhere in the state, up the Little Red River , into the Fourche La Fave River , up the St. Francis River and Bayou Bartholomew , and eventually up the Buffalo River as far as Rush (Marion County) . The keelboats that had once supplied these towns were supplanted by these vessels that could reach almost anywhere in the state with cargoes of factory goods and foodstuffs, along with emigrants and travelers, and then go downstream with cotton or subsistence staples.

It is difficult to find details on most of these steamboats. After the mid-nineteenth century, boats were required to be registered and their boilers certified, but even these requirements documented only such details as name, length, width, depth of hull, sometimes the number of boilers and the diameter of cylinders in the engines, and something called “tonnage,” which was calculated in different ways at different times. The earlier boats are especially poorly known, partly because the inland rivers steamboat had to be created to deal with unique conditions on inland rivers, a process that was poorly recorded. Rapid progress involved numerous false steps, hand labor, and experiment tempered by experience. Rapid development also took place in building and controlling steam engines to make them more reliable and safe, with the concurrent development of all the associated regulations and legal protections.

The form of the steamboat itself came into being particularly in the 1820s and 1830s. A steamboat is different from the deep-water, deep-draft vessel that has cargo, quarters, and everything else deep in the hull. The new form was simply a long, narrow, shallow pontoon upon which cargo was stacked and cabins were built higher and higher. Some cargo could be placed in the hull, but the engines and boilers sat on the main deck; passengers’ cabins and the salon were on the second or “boiler” deck with perhaps a “Texas” deck above that for the crew; and the pilot house perched at the front of the stack for visibility. The hull, much like a bridge, had to be reinforced with an extensive truss system, known as “hog chain” and consisting of long runs of wrought-iron rods over stout “sampson” posts, both along the length, as much as 350 feet, and across the width, up to forty feet plus overhanging “guards” that made the main deck even wider than the hull. The wrought-iron rods were fitted with enormous turnbuckles, and by tightening or loosening these turnbuckles, the flexible hull could even be “walked” over shallow sand bars.

There were variations in placement of the paddlewheels. Putting them on each side of the hull, as in those boats known as “sidewheelers,” made for smoother passenger travel and a bit easier steering, but the paddlewheels were outside the lines of the hull, leaving them vulnerable and making the vessel much wider. The sternwheeler put the paddlewheel at the back, creating a narrower vessel as well as protecting the fragile paddlewheel by hiding it at the rear of the hull. The sternwheeler eventually proved more efficient at pushing barges, and it was the sternwheeler form that survived the loss of the passenger trade brought on by the spread of railroads after the 1870s; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sternwheelers were used for towboats.

These wooden-hulled steamboats were vulnerable, and their lives were often short . The most frightening losses were from boiler explosions due to abuse, clogging by muddy river water, or design weaknesses. One of the most famous boiler explosions occurred on the sidewheel steamboat Sultana . The only photograph of the Sultana was taken during a short stop at the waterfront at Helena (Phillips County) on April 26, 1865. The photograph shows that the boat was astonishingly overloaded—in a vessel 260 feet long and forty-two feet wide, built in 1863 for 300 or so passengers, thousands of people could be seen, nearly all of them Union soldiers recently released from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps. Not long after the boat stopped briefly at Memphis, the boilers of the Sultana exploded near Mound City (Crittenden County) in the middle of the night on April 27. Approximately 2,000 to 2,300 people were killed. This remains the worst maritime disaster in North America. Many times the disaster was less spectacular, the result of accidentally holing the hull by ramming into submerged log, but the result was still loss of the vessel; most of the time, at least some of the cargo and steamboat machinery was salvaged.

In spite of their vulnerability, hundreds of sternwheelers and sidewheelers of various dimensions were an integral part of daily life in Arkansas for most of the 1800s, certainly from 1830s into the 1880s, when the network of railroads finally reached maturity. Any factory goods from ceramic tablewares to pianos traveled at least part of the way by steamboat, and even for isolated farmsteads, the wagon journey at the end was only a few miles from the riverside landing to the house. Cotton , corn, livestock, wool, bricks , lumber , staves , logs, and other products traveled only a short way to the docks.

Steamboats played a role in tumultuous events as well, beginning with carrying troops and supplies in the early 1800s to Fort Smith (Sebastian County) . In the 1830s, tens of thousands of Native Americans passed through Arkansas as part of Indian Removal , and many traveled on steamboats such as the Smelter , Thomas Yeatman , Reindeer , Little Rock , Tecumseh , and Cavalier , or on the keelboats often towed by these vessels. Moreover, much of the crew on antebellum steamboats were slaves .

During the Civil War , both Union and Confederate forces exploited steamboats for rapid communication and transport of troops, horses, and supplies on Arkansas waters. Little Rock, Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) , DeValls Bluff (Prairie County) , and Helena became major re-supply centers and shipping points, first by the Confederacy, then by the Union. Civilian vessels were chartered; in the case of the Homer , the Confederacy made use of it until its capture by the Union and scuttling in the Ouachita River in April 1864 at Camden (Ouachita County) . Bombardment of Confederate positions on land by Union gunboats was an important factor in the capture of St. Charles (Arkansas County) on the White River in June 1862, the destruction of Arkansas Post (Arkansas County) in January 1863, and the defense of Helena in July 1863. The Engagement at St. Charles included the scuttling of three steamboats by Confederates in a vain attempt to block the upstream advance of the Union fleet. The capture of Little Rock in September 1863 saw the sinking of more Confederate vessels, including the gunboat Pontchartrain . Throughout the war, Union-chartered steamers and specially built tin-clad and iron-clad warships were fired on regularly from the shore, and Confederates even managed to  capture and burn the tin-clad  Queen City at Clarendon (Monroe County) in June 1864.

After the Civil War, some of the biggest-ever sidewheel steamboats were built for use on the Mississippi, but by the 1890s, passenger travel had largely ended. Indeed, passage on many rivers was made more difficult simply by the construction of many bridges for the trains. However, improvements in sternwheel maneuverability and increases in power—combined with increasing improvement of the waterways by dredging, snag removal, and electric light channel marking—made the larger rivers such as the Arkansas, the lower White, and Red efficient for the transport of bulk cargoes such as iron, grain, construction materials, chemicals, gravel, sand, and coal. Water transport is still common today, when a diesel-powered all-steel towboat can push twelve to thirty-six steel barges, and just one steel barge can carry the equivalent of fifteen large hopper-type railroad cars or fifty-eight semi-trailers. Even a modern sternwheel passenger steamboat sometimes plies the Arkansas River , such as the Delta Queen , built in 1924–1927 for excursions on the Sacramento River in California and rebuilt for the Mississippi River system in 1947.

The chart below lists some of the steamboats that were notable in Arkansas history. A list of those involving fatal accidents can be found at the Steamboat Disasters entry.

For additional information: “As Much as the Water: How Steamboats Shaped Arkansas.” Center for Arkansas History and Culture, University of Arkansas at Little Rock. https://ualrexhibits.org/steamboats/ (accessed January 7, 2022).

Baldwin, Leland Dewitt. The Keelboat Age on Western Waters . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1941.

Bates, Alan L. The Western Rivers Engine Room Encyclopoedium . Louisville, KY: Cyclopoedium Press, 1996.

———. The Western Rivers Steamboat Cyclopoedium, or, American Riverboat Structure and Detail, Salted with Lore . Leonia, NJ: Hustle Press, 1968.

Branam, Chris. “A Database of Steamboat Wrecks on the Arkansas River, Arkansas, Between 1830–1900.” MA thesis, University of Arkansas, 2003.

Brown, Mattie. “A History of River Transportation in Arkansas from 1819–1880.” MA thesis, University of Arkansas, 1933.

Dethloff, Henry C. “Paddlewheels and Pioneers on Red River, 1815–1915, and the Reminiscences of Captain M. L. Scovell.” Louisiana Studies 6 (Summer 1967): 91–134.

Fitzjarrald, Sarah. “Steamboating the Arkansas.” Journal of the Forth Smith Historical Society 6 (September 1982): 2–30.

Gandy, Joan W., and Thomas H. Gandy. The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs: Natchez to New Orleans, 1870–1920 . New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1987.

Haites, Erik F., James Mak, and Gary M. Walton. Western Rivers Transportation: The Era of Early Internal Development, 1810–1860 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Hawkins, Van. Smoke up the River: Steamboats and the Arkansas Delta . Jonesboro, AR: Writers Bloc, 2016.

Huddleston, Duane, Sammie Rose, and Pat Wood. Steamboats and Ferries on White River: A Heritage Revisited . Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1995.

Hunter, Louis C. Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949.

McCague, James. Flatboat Days on Frontier Rivers . Champaign, IL: Garrard Publishing Co., 1968.

Stewart-Abernathy, Leslie C. “Ghost Boats at West Memphis.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 67 (Winter 2008): 398–413.

Stewart-Abernathy, Leslie C., ed. Ghost Boats on the Mississippi: Discovering Our Working Past . Popular Series No. 4. Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey, 2002.

Way, Frederick, Jr. Way ’s Packet Directory, 1848–1994 . Rev. ed. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994.

Way, Frederick, Jr., compiler, and Joseph W. Rutter. Way’s Steam Towboat Directory . Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990.

Leslie C. Stewart-Abernathy Arkansas Archeological Survey

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A Walk Through the Historic Showboat Majestic Before It Left

I'd been running by the Showboat Majestic for years. Even long before those days of jogging along the riverfront, I'd noticed it. Despite all I had learned (and written) about Cincinnati history over the years, though, I never knew the boat was a floating theater until after the last curtain had been drawn.

Cincinnati is a city with a proud riverboat history—a place that idolizes that heritage at times. Tall Stacks came and went, along with several other paddle wheel-backed restaurants, but riverboat excursions and water taxis still operate between the Ohio and Kentucky riverfronts. There’s no denying that riverboats and their history are intrinsically linked with Cincinnati’s identity.

The Showboat wasn’t a steamship, though. In fact, it’s not necessarily a “ship” at all. It has no motor, no means of locomotion. An external means of conveyance, the towboat named Attaboy , once pushed it up and down American rivers. Since 1967, though, the floating theater was permanently moored on Cincinnati’s Public Landing.

SHOWBOATS (1800s-1920s)

Showboats were a tradition that can be traced back to 1816, when a cargo-carrying keelboat was repurposed as a means of transportation for a traveling theater troupe. The Floating Theatre was the first purpose-built showboat. Launching out of Pittsburgh in 1831, she kicked off a trend of vessels equipped with theaters that brought entertainment to communities scattered along the banks of rivers in the American frontier.

“Showboating” took a pause during the Civil War as the Union Navy sought to secure essential supply routes, but the tradition continued and expanded after the Confederacy’s surrender. Boats like the New Sensation, Goldenrod, Water Queen , and Princess proliferated a type of theater unique to American culture.

As the nation grew and the continent became connected, technology evolved and the showboat tradition began to diminish. Still, Captain Tom Reynolds (allegedly hailing from a showboat family himself) sought to ply the trade. The last ship he’d construct, the Majestic , launched from Pittsburgh in 1923. For years, Captain Reynolds lived on the boat with his family and used Attaboy to pilot the floating theater up and down Midwestern rivers. Often, he’d pull into a port and stay for a while when academic partnerships brought university students on board to perform.

THE MAJESTIC (1950s-2000s)

By 1959, Reynolds sold the ship to Indiana University. Although the school regularly used the historic vessel as a venue for productions, Captain Tom still maintained the boat. In December of that year, he was killed after being thrown from the tow ship Attaboy . It’s suspected that the boat’s engine “kicked.”

The United States Coast Guard would go on to usher in new regulations concerning wooden vessels. Majestic was pulled into dry dock and refitted with a steel hull. At the time, Indiana University also sought to sell the vessel. The City of Cincinnati outbid Louisville for the chance to place the boat on their riverfront.

Before stadiums and sprawling parks lined the riverbanks, the Showboat Majestic sat beneath a bridge off the shores of Cincinnati. A dedicated base of subscribers regularly patronized the floating theater to see productions put on by students from the University of Cincinnati. After the partnership with UC ended in 1988, a nonprofit known as Cincinnati Landmark Productions began producing shows on the boat. From 1991 to 2013, the company (who today operates the Covedale Center for the Performing Arts, Warsaw Federal Incline Theatre, and Cincinnati Young People’s Theatre) operated the boat’s 221-seat venue.

After they left, the City of Cincinnati began looking for a buyer.

Six years later, the city found one. A couple from Adams County, who had a reputation for preserving river history, purchased the ship for $110,000. They moved it in April of 2019 to a spot just west of Manchester. They hope to develop the boat into an upriver tourist and entertainment attraction and are currently working out plans to include crowdfunding a renovation.

After 52 years on the Cincinnati riverfront, the Showboat Majestic departed, but its legacy will float on.

You can lend your support to repurposing the Showboat Majestic at this GoFundMe pa ge. Follow more of author and photographer Ronny Salerno's work by visiting his website, Queen City Discovery.

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Steamboat Travel Was Dirty And Dangerous, Especially On The Missouri River

Imagine the United States' expansion westward.

Most people picture wagons traversing the trails and railroads chugging towards the coasts.

But before trails were blazed and tracks were laid, mighty steamboats bore hundreds of tons of cargo and passengers through the nation's arteries – its rivers and waterways.

Before the Civil War, St. Louis was the last stop west on the railroad, so anything, or anyone, needing to go to Kansas City went by steamboat. 

The closest place to get a taste of what it was like to travel by steamboat is in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's hometown. It's also now the hometown of the Mark Twain riverboat. 

The Mark Twain was built in the 1960s, and comes with a diesel engine instead of steam and doesn’t have a large paddlewheel in the back, unfortunately. But otherwise, it’s a good replica of 19th century steamboats, with its wide decks stacked onto each other, each becoming narrower, like a tiered cake.

Passengers board the boat on the lower deck. It’s enclosed, air conditioned, decorated in deep red and smells like popcorn. Capt. Steve Terry co-owns the boat with his wife. He says that riverboats today are mainly for tourism, but back in the 19th century, they had a very different role.

"This would have been pretty much open because this is where they would have stored the cotton bales, the barrels, the livestock and what not, would have all been on this deck," Terry said. "Back in those days, freight was the number one thing, that’s what paid the bills."

That’s why, according to historian Patrick Dobson at Johnson County Community College, freight took priority over lower-level passengers, the people who only paid $3 or $4 for a ticket west.

"Most steamboat captains loaded cargo and animals first and then passengers took up whatever place they could on the deck," Dobson said. "The deck passengers were just regular people who had to bring their own food, they took their chances with the elements; they basically lived outside."

Historian Paula Rose, who works in education and preservation at the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, describes the journey of deck passengers this way:

"You were riding right alongside the hot boilers, you were riding alongside livestock and other passengers, it was very crowded, sweaty, dirty, smelly – it was not a fun way to travel, but it did get you out west," Rose said. "And you might be able to start a new life."

Meanwhile on the upper decks, the cabin passengers paid double what the deck passengers did, but had their own private room and a very different experience. They ate in stately dining rooms, were served cuisine on par with the finest hotels. They drank in bars with gambling tables, or lounged on the deck and watched the river.

"There were two absolutely different experiences on a steamboat and that also reflected the class structure of the United States at large at that time," Rose said.

But regardless of whether you were rich or poor, the river was dangerous. Carol Lewis grew up in Hannibal, and was raised to respect and fear the river.  

"It's dangerous. My parents ingrained in me, you don't go on the river," Lewis said. "The current is strong and look at all the debris. But I love the river. It's pretty, it's big, it's mighty."

In the early 19th century, this would have been a hazardous trip, particularly when traveling on the Missouri.

"The Missouri River was notorious for eating boats," Capt. Terry said. "The average lifespan of a newly built steamboat back in Sam Clemens’ [Mark Twain's] era was two years. On the Mississippi river, it was four to five years."  

"There were about 289 steamboats that sank or possibly more on the Missouri River in the mid-19th century," Rose said. "The Arabia sank by hitting a tree snag, which was very common, but also boiler explosions were common and people would die in those situations."

Dobson said that if the river and the boat didn’t get you, the other passengers might.

"Most people had to worry about getting their stuff stolen or taken from them," Dobson said.

With gambling and booze on board, riverboats developed a reputation. Even the captains weren’t necessarily trustworthy. Some captains hired professional gamblers to take money from their passengers. Or worse.

"There were instances of captains getting people off of the boat so they could get over a certain kind of impediment, like a sandbar or gravel bar, and then just leaving the passengers and not coming back," Dobson said.

Drifting downstream on the Mississippi River, it's easy to see the river hasn't been completely tamed. There’s life under the surface and in the brush along the bank. Unlike trains or planes, on a riverboat the world slowly passes by, time slows and you can take in the splash of fish, the chirps of birds, the smooth glide of a hawk or eagle. 

As the boat pulls back into the dock, a train whistles — which is apt.

After the Civil War, trains quickly overtook steamboats. Even though steamboats could carry more load in a smaller space, train travel was not confined to waterways and they could head directly west. But Dobson says steamboats and the river still have a place in our collective imagination.

"It was the idea of west and the idea of a new start and the idea of a manifest destiny of the nation to move from one coast to the other," Dobson says. "And steamboat captains became heroes themselves — leaders who could put a crew of people together, and move upstream on a very complex piece of machinery, [and] forwarding the American experiment into places that it hadn't been tried before."

Even with awareness of the steamboat's dangerous and dirty past, there's a natural nostalgia for that slower, wilder time. 

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The Sons and Daughters of Pioneer Rivermen (S&D) was established in 1939 to perpetuate the memory of Pioneer Rivermen and for the preservation of river history. 

Join the former and active riverboat captains, crew and their families, historians, artists, model builders and those with an interest in the history of the people and boats of the Mississippi River system in sustaining a uniquely American tradition. Subscription is not restricted to descendants of river pioneers, the only requirement for a subscription is in interest in river history!

84th Annual Meeting Schedule   

Friday, September 13th, 2024 7:30 PM - Special Unveiling Ceremony & Cocktail Party, Lafayette Hotel Rufus Putnam Room 8:30 PM - Moonlight Excursion Aboard VALLEY GEM, Departs From Ohio River Levee In Front Of Lafayette Hotel

Saturday, September 14th, 2024 9:30 AM - Annual Business Meeting - Lafayette Hotel Sternwheel Room 12:00 PM - Lafayette Hotel Luncheon, LST-325 Guided Tour By Capt. Bob Kubota Immediately Following 6:00 PM - Evening Banquet, Lafayette Hotel Sternwheel Room View/Download The Full Weekend Itinerary Here

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Robert E Lee

Robert E Lee not the racer depicted in the race with the Natchez

The Lee Line ROBERT E LEE was built at Howard Shipyard Jeffersonville Ind in 1899, whereas the ROB’T E Lee which raced the NATCHEZ was built in 1866.  The race began June 30, 1870 and ran from New Orleans to St. Louis.   The racer ROB’T E LEE was dismantled in mid-April 1876 and her hull was taken to Memphis and used as a wharf boat.  The Lee Line ROBERT E LEE was lost December 22, 1904.

One Response to Robert E Lee

Give credit where credit is due… You mention the Robert E. Lee steamboat (not the racer) was built in Jeffersonville (true), but you do not say the racer Rob’t E. Lee was built in New Albany, Indiana. This racer one is the more famous one. Thanks, Robert G Powell, former resident and grad of New Albany High School

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IHJ Exploring History: Riverboat Twilight — An essential American experience on the Mississippi River from LeClaire to Dubuque

The Riverboat Twilight on the Mississippi River. From May through October the Twilight cruises the river between its ports in LeClaire and Dubuque. For more information about the Twilight visit riverboattwilight.com. Photo courtesy of Peter Mulac

May/June 2024 (Volume 16, Issue 3)

By Emily Stier

Mark Twain once said, “Along the Upper Mississippi River every hour brings something new.” No doubt the thousands of passengers who have travelled the Upper Mississippi River aboard the Riverboat Twilight have found that to be true as they have experienced the mighty river and witnessed portions of Eastern Iowa from the unique perspective of riverboat luxury.  

The Riverboat Twilight is a 140-passenger riverboat that provides one-day, two-day and sightseeing cruises from May through October on the Upper Mississippi River. For 116 days out of the year, its passengers are given the opportunity to engage in an essential American experience; travel on one of the world’s most storied waters, the Mississippi River.  

The Twilight’s signature two-day cruise departs from the historic river town of LeClaire for the overnight destination of Iowa’s oldest city, Dubuque. During the two-day cruise, passengers are encouraged to step back from their daily routine and immerse themselves in the relaxation, pace and elegance of days gone by.  

The Twilight offers unmatched access and views of the Upper Mississippi River. The captain provides historical, cultural and ecological narration to showcase the various sites. The route weaves through two locks and dams, several river towns, a drawbridge, a 240,000-acre National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, and more.  

Along with the physical points of interest, the Upper Mississippi River is home to an array of wildlife. During each cruise the Twilight offers travelers views of bald eagles, great blue herons, pelicans and gulls, as well as land-fairing animals like beavers, otters and even a swimming deer on occasion.

The Twilight’s Victorian-style design transports guests back to the time of steamboat luxury. The Twilight is a riverboat with traditional sconces and gingerbread woodwork. It is quaint enough to get to know your neighbor, yet big enough to enjoy privacy with your travel companion(s). There are three decks with ample indoor and outdoor seating as well as wrap-around windows.  

Fresh meals are prepared in the galley onboard, and the full-service bar and gift shop provide just the right indulgences one would want from a vacation.

The Twilight’s voyages have continually improved over the past 37 years, but it all began with a vision from its founder, Captain Dennis Trone.

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal .

“After a century of loose talk about jazz coming 'up the river' from New Orleans, William Howland Kenney makes sense of that phrase by putting us on those boats and showing us the life that Mark Twain never experienced. gracefully guides us through the boat business, the entertainers that performed for the passengers and crew, and the culture of life on the riverboats. With this book, the history of jazz just became richer, deeper, and more wonderfully complicated.”—John Szwed, author of “We've been skimming on the surface of this topic for years. Now William Kenney offers baptism by full immersion. is a thoughtful and imaginative exploration of the American character in transition, illuminating how jazz reshaped perceptions of the river and vice versa.”—Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Tulane University

Groovin’ on the River Louis Armstrong and Riverboat Culture In April 1919, several years before moving to Chicago, where he cut some of his most important records, Louis Armstrong determined to see where his burgeoning talent as a jazz cornetist, vocalist, and entertainer might take him. In September 1918 he had started playing on a Streckfus Steamers excursion boat that plied New Orleans harbor but, still restless, announced to friends and colleagues that he would be shipping out to perform along the Mississippi River from New Orleans as far north as Minneapolis. Armstrong, who had been born on August 4, 1901, was then seventeen years old. He had decided to accept what looked like an exciting job offer from John Streckfus and his bandleader Fate C. Marable to play in their new hot dance band on board the steamer Sidney. He had not then ventured much beyond the neighborhood of his birth and had only quite recently decided to become a professional musician. But having been left to his own resources from an extremely tender age, he was prepared to embark on what turned into a restless life of touring the circuits, playing for junkets for three seasons on the river. He would later permanently leave the river but continue to travel, taking his restless, fugitive music on a train north to Chicago's South Side. He then traveled by jalopy to New York, by transatlantic steamer to Europe, and ultimately on ocean liners and airplanes that carried him to West Africa and around the world. His youthful decision to work out his future on America's greatest river set into motion a lifetime of exile from his southern home, forcing him to translate for new audiences the music he had pioneered back in New Orleans, rethinking and reinventing himself, exploring his musical capacities and creating new meanings while on the move. Most of the early historians of jazz linked the emigration of its musicians from New Orleans to the official closing in 1917 of Storyville, the city's vice district, in which some jazzmen had found performance opportunities. That narrow interpretation ignored in Armstrong's as in Marable's case the rich context of the black migration out of the South after World War I, a major chapter in the African American diaspora. A closer look at the outpouring of musical creativity that accompanied the Great Migration indicates that New Orleans jazz pioneers, and those with whom they performed on the river, became the heralds of their people's migration northward. Whereas the blues singers became its musical voices, the jazzmen, led by Armstrong, trumpeted the Great Migration primarily to the wider white world of the racially segregated excursion boats. As heralds and modernist troubadours, they experienced this great movement of people in a way that both paralleled and contrasted with that of the majority who were not musicians. Armstrong, the many musicians who played with him, and those who followed him onto the riverboats did not migrate in the simplest sense of moving from some point in the South to settle down in Chicago. But neither did many male migrants, who tended to move in a generally northerly direction from one job to another before taking on a major industrial center such as Chicago or Pittsburgh. Although the riverboats did paddle northward up the river, they also steamed eastward and westward across it, before paddling southward back to their original point of departure after Labor Day, their musicians usually still aboard. Armstrong, for example, worked his way from one small town to another up and down the river for three seasons, reconnoitering the major Mississippi valley urban areas, creating a network of professional contacts that helped him find his way in the world. When he first arrived in St. Louis in 1919, he was stunned by its tall buildings: There was nothing like that in my home town, and I could not imagine what they were all for. I wanted to ask someone badly, but I was afraid I would be kidded for being so dumb. Finally, when we were going back to our hotel I got up enough courage to question Fate Marable. "What are all those tall buildings? Colleges?" "Aw boy," Fate answered, "Don't be so damn dumb." He learned quickly by playing after-hours sessions with St. Louis musicians. His meetings with them epitomized the black musical migration in the Mississippi valley. After demonstrating his unsurpassed improvisational talents, Armstrong listened to them and much admired their literacy and musicianship. Together, they all talked about Chicago. This after-hours networking within a context of further migration and travel would continue for many years, creating what the scholar Gerald Early has called a "Black Heartland." Armstrong, of course, permanently left the riverboats in 1921 to return temporarily to New Orleans. His further migrations to the North came when he boarded an Illinois Central train to travel to Chicago to join King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. He could not have gone there by riverboat, there being no waterway deep or wide enough between the Mississippi River and Chicago to convey him there. While working on the river, Armstrong occasionally returned to New Orleans, and he continued to spend much of his time performing on the road around the world, becoming the prototype of the traveling musician who often seemed to live in trains, planes, taxis, hotel rooms, clubs, and recording studios. His career as the single most celebrated jazz star was a most exceptional one, but he, like most of his colleagues, spent long periods moving from one gig to another. From the point of view of most Americans, Armstrong's restless world was even more elusive and mysterious than that of Marable. Black musicians were strictly segregated from the white passengers on the riverboats, as, later, from the patrons of the clubs and dance halls of the northern cities. "More than white musicians, black ones were usually excluded from the more stable engagements (of a week or longer)," and often lived through careers filled with musical "one-nighters," their more frequent displacements making them harder to locate at any given moment. Armstrong later described what it was like to be on the road in the South: "Lots of times we wouldn't get a place to sleep. So we'd cross the tracks [into the black section of town], pull over to the side of the road and spend the night there. We couldn't get into hotels. Our money wasn't even good. We'd play nightclubs and spots which didn't have a bathroom for Negroes. When we'd get hungry, my Manager, Joe Glaser, who's also my friend, Jewish and white, would buy food along the way in paper bags and bring it to us boys on the bus who couldn't be served." Employment on the tramping riverboats offered many of them one of their longest-lasting engagements and was, for that reason alone, a milestone in many careers. But however slowly, the paddle wheelers kept moving, too. Elusive black musicians, for whom Armstrong became a figurehead, lived and worked for months at a time in reasonably close proximity to the white crew and passengers. But, thanks to the Jim Crow regulations on board, they still remained essentially enigmatic to whites, their music new and puzzling, their dress and comportment unlike that of the more familiar levee roustabouts, their after-hours destinations and activities a mystery to most white people. Calling Armstrong and his fellow musicians "mysterious" presumes, in part, a middle-class white perspective that preferred black musicians to remain largely unknown, the better to stamp them all with racist stereotypes. The musicians could be "known" mostly within the traditions of riverboat entertainment. In the 1920s, American audiences still looked for exotic characters when stepping onto riverboats for their musical entertainment. Given the long tradition of minstrelsy, most whites thought that any black roustabout, deck hand, or musician carried an air of mystery, gaiety, and danger. During his years on the river, Armstrong, who, as we shall see, remained largely docile in the face of racial oppression, began to think about the need for an on-stage persona from this artificial racial perspective, one that would reinterpret elements of the minstrel show stereotypes. His arrival on the excursion boat scene found him near the start of his long career as a crossover musical entertainer, and he was then a timid young man, as yet unsure who he was. But even he could not ignore his amazing talent, so Armstrong gradually discovered the courage to confidently project an image, one at which American audiences marveled in the 1930s and 1940s. By then, he had conjured an "in-between" restless persona in which he mixed his unsurpassed instrumental improvisations with an unusual jazz patois, hoarse yells, scat singing, an eyeball-rolling, handkerchief-waving, leering humor mixed with pathos, and a mysterious musical sensibility that keened in its joy. Smiling and bowing reassuringly, Armstrong nevertheless seemed a subversive enigma, his music and gruffly masculine presence slyly creating ironic reversals of beloved lyrics and melodies, his fevered imagination an unpredictable, surging force. The new riverboat musician's early experiences had engendered a tough resilience and a determination to succeed as a musical entertainer. According to Laurence Bergreen, his had been a "wretched" childhood. His memories of its pain and promise had led Armstrong, like the true artist, to signify on it (reinterpret it) onstage, in his music, and in his patter. On the typewriter that he brought on board with him, he initiated a long life of banging out jazzy letters that rarely failed to mention some detail from his "gruesome" days and nights as a timid child in a dangerous world on the grimy sidewalks and in the squalid brothels and cabarets of Storyville. Yet, as Bergreen insists, Armstrong was full of surprises: thanks in large part to music, he later came to insist that his childhood had been an ideal one for a jazz musician. In so doing, he usually reached for the laugh but still revealed an "edge of anger" and hurt stemming from the fact that his father had not only abandoned him and the family but had then paraded proudly through the streets of black New Orleans. His stories about Mardi Gras high jinks included stark recollections of the routine beatings and "head-whippings" the New Orleans whites meted out to inoffensive black workers. His soaring music expressed the mingling of joy and sorrow in his heart. Some of his colleagues "thought they detected a voodoo ethos about" Armstrong, and, indeed, he was familiar with voodoo and included some of its seemingly nonsensical chanting in his vocals. Armstrong's painful recollections of his errant father, his own forced incarceration in an orphanage, his betrayals by powerful figures of the New Orleans demimonde such as "Black Benny" Williams, and the terrible racial oppression that forced him into a life of exile all brought sounds of sorrow and melancholy to his carnivalesque jazz. The poet Nathaniel Mackey has explained that for those who, like Armstrong, have been subjected to the "social death" of racism and abandonment by a parent, "song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of 'orphan' one hears echoes of 'orphic,' a music that turns on abandonment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual 'Motherless Child.' Music is wounded kinship's last resort." When discussing Armstrong's scat vocals, Mackey argues that "scat's blithe mangling of articulate speech testified to an 'unspeakable' history" of racial oppression that only worsened during Armstrong's years on the river. In his published statements, Armstrong maintained an impenetrable diplomatic silence about the many difficulties of his decision to leave New Orleans. He admitted to feeling homesick, missing his mother and sister, friends and cronies, but he clearly signaled that he had exchanged his hometown for an excursion steamer in hopes of finding a better life. Most of the leading New Orleans musicians who had made a deep impression on him were leaving. The cornetist and bandleader Joseph "King" Oliver had decided to move to Chicago. The trombonist and bandleader Edward "Kid" Ory had determined to give Los Angeles a try. A surprising number of jazz musicians traveled the Gulf Coast network of waterways, railroads, and highways in search of greater employment opportunities in music. Among them were John Handy, Sam Morgan, Edmund Hall, Cootie Williams, Lee Collins, Buddy Petit, Oscar Celestin, Clarence Desdunes, Billie Pierce, Sadie Goodson Peterson, and Ida and Edna Goodson. The trumpeter Don Albert joined the migration of African Americans who lived west of New Orleans, on the western side of the Mississippi River, to Texas. The reedman Sidney Bechet had headed for Europe. All of them would live their lives in transit, a bag packed, a telegram announcing the next gig sliding under the door. Many of them ranged as far west as Texas, well up into the northern Midwest, and south to Mexico and Cuba. Many others joined Armstrong on board the vessels of Streckfus Steamers. Armstrong became the most celebrated representative of a broader and more diverse movement. Looking back after becoming jazz's first superstar, he left no doubt that working from 1916 to 1918 as a musician in and around New Orleans in Kid Ory's band had offered him his start toward professional advancement. The cornetist's wonderful ebullience gave a can-do, Horatio Alger tone to his memoirs of black Louisiana. But working with Ory never would have paid enough to free Armstrong or any of Ory's other musicians from long hours of manual labor during the week. Armstrong continued to sell coal door-to-door. Several other musicians worked as longshoremen and stevedores. In Louisiana, they could only hope to be part-time musicians who played for local black audiences, their wages modest at best. The "moldy figs" of the post–World War II years—people who clung desperately to early jazz in the face of the bebop revolution of the 1940s—spied purity and authenticity in black New Orleans music before it responded to white riverboat audiences and the big city media, but it would be easy to romanticize the musicians' struggles. Kid Ory had had so much trouble getting gigs that he had started promoting fish fries on a plantation in rural Laplace, Louisiana, one whose grounds reached down to the Mississippi. Ory and his friends caught fish straight out of the Big Muddy. His uncle, who ran a grocery store in Laplace, gave Ory whiskey and beer to sell, as well—five cents for a drink, five cents for a fish sandwich. Refusing to sit about waiting for gigs to come to him, Ory organized parties, becoming bandleader, promoter, bookkeeper, treasurer, and fish fryer. He sought out houses left empty by people who had migrated elsewhere in search of work. Such structures worked well for dance parties because they contained no furniture to get in the way. He also worked his party and picnic scheme at local baseball games and eventually earned enough to go into the musical instrument business as well. As a seven-year-old Ory had begun by making his own banjo, guitar, string bass, and violin in order to organize a band of street urchins. As his "spasm band" began to make some meager profits at baseball games, he gradually bought several real musical instruments: a trombone, of course, a violin, a twelve-string guitar, a string bass, a trumpet, and drums. When poor youngsters such as Armstrong accepted an invitation to play in Ory's band, the leader would rent them instruments on which to perform, reducing their wages accordingly. When Armstrong left New Orleans to play on the riverboats, therefore, he arrived without a musical instrument, knowing that, under a prior agreement, the captain would rent or sell him one. For Armstrong, simply getting to the point of having his own instrument represented a major step toward professional independence. The modest, localized, and rural setting of these initial musical endeavors, in which young part-time musicians played by ear on homemade instruments, defined what came to be seen, from a later vantage point, as "authentic" black jazz. But, in fact, the musical world of Kid Ory's band had also led naturally to the margins of more professional musical activities. The leading black bands from New Orleans ventured out to the Louisiana plantations every payday during the winter season when the sugar cane was ground. Buddy Bolden, for example, played on the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley line's excursion trains, which ran between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Such trains stopped at Laplace, where Bolden would play a number or two from the baggage car as advertising for an afternoon picnic and dance from 11:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. As soon as Ory secured his real instruments, he went into competition with these big-city professionals, dressing up his musicians in jackets and bow ties and leading them at picnics on weekends between performances in Laplace and Baton Rouge. His band's repertoire showed a debt to Buddy Bolden's by playing such tunes as "When the Saints Go Marching In" that he had taken from evangelical and Baptist churches. Those denominations used drums and piano accompaniment with their singing. Ory later admitted to Neshui Ertegun of Atlantic Records that his group's repertoire was more than two generations behind that of the churches. But Ory had been moving inexorably into more urban settings in which his rural roots intertwined with more commercial venues. He performed at Pete Lala's New Orleans bar as early as 1907 and landed his first job as leader of his own band in Gretna. Soon thereafter, he secured his historic gigs at Economy Hall in New Orleans and at Cooperative Hall in Milneberg by renting the halls himself and promoting dances. In 1916, the cornetist Joe Oliver left Ory's band, and Louis Armstrong replaced him. One year later, the thirty-eight-block area called Storyville, in which prostitution had been made legal in 1897, was officially closed, leaving the musicians and the prostitutes who had worked there scrambling for jobs. Not long thereafter, the riverboat bandleader Fate Marable began talking to Armstrong about playing in his hot riverboat dance band. As he thought about Marable's offer, Armstrong imagined it within the context of a search for freedom. He metaphorically recalled the time that he had entertained with a group from the waifs' home at a picnic under a broiling sun. Dizzy and exhausted, he had taken refuge in a nearby cypress swamp, where his thoughts had turned to the generations of slaves who had fled into the swamps from the plantations. Thinking of his own predicament, he had imagined his fugitive ancestors sitting on the knee-shaped tree trunks just above the snake-infested waters. Exhausted, he had perched on a knee and fallen asleep. Armstrong had awakened, blinded by an impenetrable blackness. Terrified, he had stumbled out of the cypress swamp, grateful to find the sun setting, his young fellow inmates packing their instruments, the interminable job finally played. According to his published autobiographies, Armstrong never went back to the swamp, opting instead to attempt a career as a professional jazz musician outside the South. Starting on the Mississippi River, he demonstrated to those that could hear new spaces between the beats, new notes with which to fill them, and a correspondingly dynamic, elusive, and original lifestyle. In a second metaphor, Armstrong speaks of the Mississippi as taking the contours of many poorly formed letters M and W when viewed on a map, likening his travels up and down the river to a young person's lessons in literacy. He notes his relief when, sitting on deck, he saw the cypress swamp slide past his northbound steamer. Much of Armstrong's unusual persona came from his childhood of extreme poverty and limited education, but his unusual and ultimately entertaining translations of his past also found encouragement in the process of his migration to the North and his subsequent chasing after the gigs. He and his jazz, even the partially tamed jazz that he played on the excursion boats, took some of its optimistic spirit from an important link between music and movement. Like the blues, jazz is a form of culture that readily travels. In the first half of the twentieth century, all sorts of Americans lived in motion, migrating from abroad to new homes, from the country to the cities, from east to west, and, most important for jazz and for African Americans, from the South northward. They inevitably left behind them much of their earlier thought and behavior but readily learned to redefine themselves by the contrasts between what they recalled of what they had been and what and whom they saw and heard around them on their journeys. Moreover, the riverboat musicians, proud of their craft, possessed an unparalleled ability to carry their musical identities with them. The elements of their New Orleans musical lives swiftly became what W. T. Lhamon Jr. calls a "lore cycle," an open-ended loop of musical gestures that brought an exotic excitement to riverboat dance music. Jazz may have been invented in New Orleans, but its new context on the Mississippi and the Ohio and in the major river cities changed it. Forward motion animates dynamically played notes into movement toward "the next expected tone," unfurling melodies moving toward completion, while developing harmonic progressions and stepping rhythmic patterns create an impression of "unfinished being." So the music that was commercialized as "jazz" throve on many varieties of exciting, adventurous travel. Its slang, like the music itself, came to incorporate metaphors of movement. Practiced players said they had "traveled miles and miles" through the paths of song; a musically rich performance was "a trip"; fans wanted to be "moved" by the music and pleaded with the musicians, "Go, go, go!" or "Send me!" Jazz's close relation to dance brought it joy in physical movement as dancers "hoofed it," "legged it," "beat the leather," "hopped," "trotted," "shimmied," and "toddled" to the music. Perspiring scholars tried to pin jazz down, but, of course, it was "in process," always becoming something new depending in part on where it was played, its freshness carrying a powerful message of solace and hope to those able to hear it. As we shall see, riverboat jazz even moved to the rhythmic chanteys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century riverine laborers. The riverboats and lives of incessant travel also encouraged what have often been described as the "joyful," "joy-making," "festive," "happy," and "fun" sounds of Armstrong's music. Well-established patterns of minstrelsy and the tourist trade indicated that bar and nightclub music by New Orleans blacks had to be upbeat and exuberant. Thus Armstrong's impossibly large stage smile. But the music that Armstrong recorded and that he wrote about playing is too easily dismissed as merely "happy music." It was not "unhappy music," but neither was Armstrong's jazz a cartoon music like that of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's "Livery Stable Blues," which was conceived and performed with caricatured low-comic intent. So, too, Jelly Roll Morton's "Hyena Stomp" drew in a similar manner on broad-brush vaudeville slapstick. During the 1950s, Armstrong and, in particular, his vocalist Velma Middleton entertained their audiences with plenty of pratfalls. Nevertheless, most of the recorded music that Armstrong performed in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings and his Mississippi River numbers of the 1930s and 1940s could more accurately be described as sharply glinting, in flight, agitated, and excited, not simply happy or joyful, a rough, tough-spirited music that resisted easy labels. Polyphony and polyrhythm gave it substantial complexity. Armstrong himself contributed a nearly operatic virtuosity. As Nathaniel Mackey insists, sadness lurks in his tone and expressiveness and, when blended with the Roaring Twenties spirit of nervous excitement, lent emotional depth to his music. Thus his music flew well beyond the comic minstrel mugging with which it was delivered. Much of this complexity expressed the hazards of the Great Migration, a mixture of eager anticipation and danger. For Armstrong, as for the musicians who played with him on the riverboats, jazz was, in addition to musical entertainment, what James Clifford has called a habitus, a space in time between past and future where one lived while on the move, a set of musical and social practices and associations that could be remembered and through which one could simultaneously remember one's hometown while far from it. Jazz skills, jazz ideals, and jazz's alienation from mainstream middle-class culture functioned as a body of knowledge with which and within which one could live and work while on the move, particularly on the water. Armstrong owed much to his musical experiences in New Orleans. But from 1919 to the end of the summer of 1921, he tramped the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers. He had no fixed home. He worked in order to change his place and position in American society. He never made Chicago his permanent home, either, and when he bought a home outside of New York City, he spent as much time away from it as in it. His music expressed the special kinds of movement characterized by migration, diaspora, and steamship voyages. It had great energy, ambition, daring, courage, undercurrents of the voyagers' nostalgia for home, and a tough alienation from sentimentalism and from mainstream culture.… As he had in that frightening swamp, Armstrong found strength in the long history of African Americans who had plied the Mississippi River before him. As W. Jeffrey Bolster has written, for many West Africans who had been transported to Louisiana during slavery times, water was thought to purify and transport the soul. For Ibos, Kongo peoples, and West Africans in general, water was a potent metaphor for life beyond this world. The scholar Melville Herskovits notes that wherever West African religious beliefs were found within the United States, there also could be found the river cult or, more broadly, the cult of water spirits. Armstrong, after all, visited with and took guidance from his fugitive ancestors in a Louisiana swamp. According to Sterling Stuckey, during slavery times, immersion in and reemergence from water carried people into interstitial spiritual spaces linked to memories of Africa. A cycle of ceremonial death and resurrection began with the sacred ring shout, in which the people shuffle-danced in a counterclockwise direction, often around a barrel of water, as if the dancers were moving eastward and upward through the North American air in order to fly away from slavery, descend into the Atlantic Ocean, and reemerge back on the shores of West Africa, their roots remembered and replanted in North American soil. The ritual spiritual power in black Christianity of baptism by full immersion in rivers also flowed through the black levee culture through which Armstrong traveled. Even in the more secular circles within which jazz musicians felt most at home, the spiritual power of rivers moved. Such African American hymns as "Deep River," "Down by the Riverside," "I've Got Peace Like a River," "Joys Are Flowing Like a River," "Lord, My Soul Is Thirsting," "On Jordan's Stormy Banks," "Shall We Gather at the River?," and "Wade in the Water" blow gently soothing breaths over lonesome, weary travelers. The music scholar and theorist Samuel A. Floyd Jr. argues that the spirit and function of the West African ring shout extended to the "second line" (people who followed the musicians at funeral parades in black New Orleans), one of Armstrong's major influences. Here the worship of the ancestors mixed with the wildly secular celebration of life when the parade headed back from the burial ground. Here the bands improvised on such themes as "Oh, Didn't He Ramble!" The musicians learned to signify on the spirit and themes of the music. Louis Armstrong became the greatest stylist of this tradition. In the experiences of the black Mississippi lived a "poetics of relocation and re-inscription" in which the young Armstrong excelled. The Mississippi and Ohio rivers had long offered greater freedom of movement to African Americans, movement that launched the music in new directions. Riverboat musicians were heirs to this tradition, as well, and assimilated into their music the rhythms of the old black sailors' chanteys. Boats paid relatively well, and slaves had been allowed to hire their labor out to the boats' owners. Such mobility had given a higher social status to black laborers in slavery times. Enslaved individuals had sometimes been leased to steamers; they and free blacks worked as musicians, roustabouts, deck hands, firemen, cooks, porters, waiters, and watchmen. Though subject to rigid, often cruel discipline onboard, these laborers still associated water, rivers, boats, oceans, and ships with the freedom of black sailors. Despite the fact that officers routinely whipped, cursed, kicked, pushed, and hit their deck hands, cabin workers and musicians were not usually so abused. The combination of rigid racial segregation, cruel discipline, and the sense of enjoying the possibility of greater liberty encouraged a black riverboat culture that included a sense of rootlessness, horrendous working conditions, a distrust of authority, and a proud masculinity. Boat workers enjoyed obvious liberties, particularly when in port. According to the historian Tom Buchanan, riverboat slaves and free workers connected widely separated slave and free black communities from New Orleans to Cairo, Illinois, into a black intercity network along the Mississippi that allowed them to make contacts, create networks, and form opinions about the state of the wider white and black worlds in the United States. In ways that have not been understood heretofore, Armstrong played a particularly influential and controversial role in the riverboat experience. In 1919, 1920, and 1921, the young musician was deepening his initial discovery of the wellspring of improvisation that he had gradually revealed to himself in the aural world of black New Orleans, a powerful groove that he could not but bring on board with him. However, his unusually rapid improvisational progress accelerated on the Streckfus Line excursion boats, just where the orchestra leader Fate Marable and his employers so vigorously pursued their policy of musical literacy. For three summers, Armstrong therefore became the focus of a highly symbolic cultural struggle between oral and literate approaches to musical performance. His spectacular journey through this conflict made him the figurehead of a new musical interstice called jazz. When he first crossed the gangplank in his tattered shoes, Armstrong performed only in the aural world of Kid Ory's band. But the young cornetist subsequently assured the reading public in his 1936 autobiography that he had, under the tutelage of mellophonist David Jones and pianist Fate Marable, learned to read music. c. 1919. [Photo courtesy of Duncan Schiedt.]   Subsequent events would prove that Armstrong exaggerated and oversimplified his progress in musical literacy. When in 1923, two years after leaving the river, Armstrong joined Fletcher Henderson's hot dance band, one for which Fate Marable's band had provided excellent training, he still felt uncomfortable reading arrangements. His rhythmic swing helped transform that orchestra, but he still had to listen to someone else play the notes arranged for him so that he could then play them from memory. Where I had come from I wasn't used to playing in bands where there were lots of parts for everybody to read. Shucks, all one in the band had to do is to go to some show and hear a good number. He keeps it in his head until he reaches us. He hums it a couple of times, and from then on we had a new number to throw on the bands that advertised in the wagons on the corner on the following Sunday.…I had left Chicago, where the way we used to do it was just take the wind in and take what's left and blow out and now I got to watch this part. While rehearsing with the Henderson band, Armstrong, for example, missed the dynamic markings and blasted out his part while the rest of the musicians brought theirs down to pianissimo (abbreviated as pp ), as instructed in the arrangement. In response to Henderson's criticisms, he tried to cover up with a joke—"Oh, I thought that meant 'pound plenty' "—when explaining his failure to follow the chart. Beyond the initial step of learning to recognize the basic musical notation symbols, "reading music" becomes a relative matter. Some musicians come to specialize in it, becoming precise musical technicians. Others learn to read about as much as they need to play the gigs they manage to find. Armstrong came on board a musical illiterate who lived in the aural musical world he had shared with people in his neighborhood. He then learned to read music, perhaps not swiftly or at first sight, nor perfectly thereafter, but, with sufficient rehearsal, he did learn enough to play his parts well in performance. In the process, he discovered that in some important ways he didn't really want to read music. As he described it, the sheets of music distracted him, got between him and his audience, diverting his inner aural concentration on the sound of swiftly passing chords and rhythms with the external imperative of visual concentration. He became, after all, the most impressive "get-off man," or improviser, since Sidney Bechet. Early big bands such as those of Marable, Henderson, and Ellington clearly recognized a division of labor between the musicians who had been hired to read the charts and those who had been hired to "get off" into the surprising world of musical improvisation. Armstrong, therefore, moved beyond his initial illiteracy. Like many of the other New Orleans musicians, he dutifully learned to name the notes and to mathematically divide and subdivide their rhythmic values. He was, moreover, linguistically literate. He would use his typewriter to write letters to his old friends for hours at a time. When, in 1936, he wrote his first autobiography, he described the Mississippi as one might when looking at it on a map. The river looked to him like a winding series of poorly formed but recognizable signs whose form and meaning would emerge with greater clarity only with more direct riverboat experience. Armstrong was one of those who preferred to apply literacy to language while keeping music aural. He had excellent reasons. The oral world from which he sprang treated music and language in similar ways. Both partook of what Walter Ong has called an "oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive life world." Writing, whether linguistic or musical, reduced "dynamic sound to quiescent space." Written words and musical notation "isolate sound from the fuller context in which [they] came into being": "The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed to a real, living person or real, living persons, at a specific time in a real setting which includes always much more than mere words." Written notes were only that. Those played by ear, like pronounced words, naturally relied heavily on individual manipulations of intonation, pitch, and a grand variety of colorings and shadings. The black musical tradition had developed minute rhythmic variations in the way notes were articulated. The written score, on the other hand, seemed to musicians such as Armstrong a cold, unresponsive, unchangeable final statement imposed on the musical imagination, a Dead Sea scroll that remained outside any give and take of real persons, beyond discussion. In his written recollections of his hometown, in many of his letters, and in interviews, Armstrong emphasized the rich social context in which he had come to music. And here was the crux of his continuing attachment to playing music by ear, just as he was learning to read it at sight. He found in the world of sound, far more than in that of sight, emotional fulfillment. This is, according to Ong, part of the essential psychological meaning of music. It, like human consciousness and human communication, gives the impression of emanating from somewhere profoundly deep within oneself. Like river water, music seemed always in flux, moving toward the next discovery. A gifted musician such as Armstrong gathered and then immersed himself in sounds coming from all directions and sources, making himself the center of his own personal and original synthesis. Whereas sight dissects and isolates elements of experience, sound brings experience inside us and harmonizes our perceptions of the world. As Ong puts it, "The centering action of sound…affects man's sense of the cosmos, unifying, centralizing, and interiorizing." Improvised music, "like the spoken word…proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons; the spoken word [and music] form[] human beings into close-knit groups." Music, and, more particularly, improvised music (and even hot, agitated varieties) can generate, more than can a written arrangement, a sense of a sacred circle. These styles of music seem to emanate from an unknown source very deep within the musician, one that he or she experiences as a unifying harmony that is being shared with others. This aural worldview emphasizes a participatory give and take between audience and musician, plenty of leeway in exactly how one recalls a favorite tune, and a nonabstract, situational manner of understanding the communication process. Armstrong and the other black migrant musicians developed their own vocabulary to describe the major techniques, strategies, and culture of playing jazz. They spoke of "heads," "turnarounds," "the sock chorus," "licks," "getting off," and much more. The externalized authority of the tradition of musical literacy must have felt like the imposition of an oppressive new authority, little connected to Armstrong's musical background. That strong aural tradition formed the core of an interstitial musical life that included many other ingredients, as well. A poor, uneducated black man from the lowest social level of wicked Storyville, someone who nonetheless clung to certain old-fashioned American values, an African American much influenced by the Karnofskys, his adoptive Jewish family, a man traveling into a life of exile from his southern home, an individual moving through a time of crackling racial hostility calling for the strictest discretion and diplomacy—here was a man living between social and cultural categories. Striking out in search of a better life, he began to reinvent himself as a black musical entertainer, becoming a mysterious mixture of gifted solo improviser, comedian, and original vocalist with a guttural, rasping sound capable of suggesting pathos in humor. Even at that early stage in his career, Armstrong was in the full bloom of an unprecedented journey into a life of solo instrumental improvisation. As jazz musicians used to say, he was beginning to "own that thing." Instrumental control engenders a sense of personal stature and power within the world of music and in life generally. A life of improvisational development is a rare privilege. More often than not, literate musicians simply cannot improvise. His special gift intimately linked him through musical memory to his people and his ancestors. He had to know, far better than did Streckfus, what his gift might do for him in the world of musical entertainment. He liked and respected Fate Marable and made an on-going, two-and-one-half-year pass at learning to read his charts but stubbornly acted as if he knew that he would never live out his life and career as a section player. Marable might be right. He might live to regret his stubbornness. But, in fact, he did not. He was Louis Armstrong, and there never was another musician like him. Armstrong may also have had his own reasons for avoiding Marable's lessons. His exceptional talent raised complex questions about career planning. True, reading the riverboat charts offered poor musicians such as Armstrong a special Streckfus kind of economic opportunity—real enough, but strictly limited. They paid the average sideman $35.00 plus room and board or $65.00 per week without room or board, as when, for example, the boat worked for several weeks at one city and the musicians found rooms in the black sections of town. Given the Herculean labor of playing both a daytime and an evening cruise, this was downright parsimonious, but the Streckfus brothers probably were aware that Kid Ory paid his musicians only $17.50 per week (albeit for much less labor). In 1919 John Streckfus had paid only $37.50 per week without room and board, but he gradually increased the benefits and shortened the work hours. Much earnest, respectful negotiation convinced the Streckfus brothers to divide the orchestra into smaller units during the daytime cruises. That way, at least players got some time off. They subsequently decided to hire a different band for the daylight cruises, saving their best band for the moonlight excursions. (on the right) seen from the bow in this early photo. Louis Armstrong played on the and Walter Pichon, James Blanton, and Errol Garner performed in its dance hall when it was recommissioned as the . [Photo courtesy of the Jones Steamboat Collection, Special Collections Division, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.]   By 1926, when Henry "Red" Allen, following Armstrong's career trajectory and improvisational ideas, came aboard, the starting salary had increased to $45.00 per week, but room and board were not included. In order to keep exhausted musicians from jumping ship, they also offered a bonus of $5.00 per week, paid at the end of the summer season. If a musician could refrain from splurging in town after his night's work, if he would dutifully spoon in the starchy steamboat cuisine, sleep in the tiny, crowded bunk room, and save his pennies, he could welcome Labor Day with more cash in his pocket than he had ever had before. If such restraint faltered, he was still a young man with a bankroll in what looked and sounded like a glamorous job. In levee-front bars, that earned considerable respect. Armstrong wrote glowingly about rolling back into his old Storyville haunts, a wad of riverboat dollars in his jeans. The Streckfus brothers preferred to pay one flat rate negotiated between the black musicians' union and the company, and their experience with Armstrong led them, slowly and reluctantly, to modestly increase the salaries of their star players. He and other gifted improvisers such as Red Allen, Nathaniel Story, Earl Bostic, Clark Terry, Harold "Shorty" Baker, and Jimmy Blanton managed to eke out another $10.00 or $15.00 per week. The Streckfus brothers never fully accepted the star system because it led directly to higher wages for the star and less work from the sidemen. Nor would they allow them to accept gigs in the river cities after the midnight cruises. They insisted that if midwesterners wanted to hear their red hot band, they would have to pay to come on board. The same logic may have led them to discourage their musicians from recording, at least under the Streckfus banner. Armstrong wanted to become the featured soloist and vocalist in Fate Marable's dance band. Both Streckfus and Marable resisted the innovation. In 1921, therefore, Armstrong left the riverboats for good. He had found much to admire in the experience, but his employers' intransigence would leave a permanent wound. In his first autobiography, Armstrong characterized his last months on board as stormy weather and, many years later, took particular satisfaction in seeing that a Streckfus entourage had made the effort to come to a club in New York where he had star billing to hear and see him perform. Armstrong returned the gesture by going over to their table between sets. Although he has exaggerated his case, the musical theorist Jacques Attali has offered an important interpretation of radically new popular music styles such as the jazz Armstrong played on the river between 1918 and 1921. Attali insists that such musical breakthroughs act as heralds of emerging new social orders. Two of his many provocative points about the social functions of music offer potential insights into the social significance of Armstrong, the Great Migration, and riverboat jazz. First, Attali likens radically new musical styles to "noise" that has the potential to disrupt and silence the usual ritualized harmony of musical styles that have been designed to help people forget violent disruptions to the social order. Second, the manipulation of music by the powerful usually serves to ritually domesticate and therefore to "sacrifice" music's radical potential in an effort to restore listeners' belief in the political and social order. Riverboat jazz, a partially tamed adaptation of New Orleans jazz, eliminated violence, affirmed the possibility of social order, and offered a promise of racial reconciliation. Armstrong and his famous New Orleans jazz brothers had "brought the noise," black noise, through the Mississippi valley at the height of the region's racial tensions. Their astounding music might easily have reached hundreds of thousands of white Americans from New Orleans to Minneapolis. But many were deeply troubled by the social changes set in motion by the Great Migration. Within the "confidence game" played by the excursion steamers, power moved to make the nation's past live on into very unsettled modern times. In order to make twentieth-century midwesterners believe in the continued dominance of Mark Twain's world, the musicians had to sacrifice the blues, the radical challenges of their free polyphonic improvisations, fleetingly fast and grindingly slow tempi, and sexually frank lyrics. This suppression of what would have been to many white passengers the more threatening (because unfamiliar) qualities of New Orleans jazz also sacrificed Armstrong and Dodds, the two most spontaneous, innovative, and entertaining musicians in Marable's Metropolitan Jaz-E-Saz Orchestra. The riverboats had provided but a limited venue for Armstrong's solos. In the fall of 1921, he performed a solo titled "La Veda" accompanied only by piano. It received such applause that it became a featured act. But Armstrong had signed on to act as a section man in an arrangement-reading orchestra. In 1922 he would finally jettison his regimented role in the riverboat dance band. He postponed the daily quest for mastery of Euro-American musical literacy and moved on to the nightclubs of Chicago, a musical world where, on one hand, his individuality and expressive freedom found greater encouragement, while, on the other, the number of his professional choices was correspondingly limited. Because of the Streckfus policy against recording their bands, Armstrong never recorded with the celebrated Metropolitan Jaz-E-Saz Orchestra. As if that were not unfortunate enough, he had to wait twelve years before recording any tunes that evoked rivers in general or the Mississippi River in particular. But during the depression and World War II, he did express his new, remarkably unsentimental spirit in several recordings with river themes. Indeed, were one to include all the recordings that tapped into the general themes of parting and returning, leaving someone (and being left), and finding that person again, the number of his recorded movement tunes would rise dramatically. Armstrong created a new jazz interpretation of the black Mississippi, one that combined his musical roots with the lessons of his riverboat years if not their often melancholy spirit. His river recordings began on April 5, 1930, well after his famous Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions of the 1920s. They crop up in daring, wonderfully successful sessions held during the worst of the Great Depression. The first of them was "Dear Old Southland," created in 1921 by the African American songwriting team of Henry Creamer and Turner Layton when they had "borrowed" two spirituals, "Deep River" and "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and stitched them together to make their commercial hybrid. Armstrong recorded it as a solo in 1930 with accompaniment by the vaudeville dancer and pianist Buck Washington. The trumpeter launches into this musical voyage with a slow, haunting, dignified statement of the two sacred themes that is worthy of a New Orleans brass band marching to the cemetery. But then, following the musical tradition of the funeral parades, he leaps into double time, his joyous shouts sending sorrow flying into the glinting rough and tumble of hot jazz. He was a hip, secular, itinerant musician deeply influenced by the music of Storyville. Indeed, according to Marable, he was a "wild young man." Although such black intellectuals as W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke felt a strong attachment to the spirituals, or "sorrow songs," interpreting them as sacred expressions of a lost time of greater folk purity, Armstrong had grown up far from the halls of academe. Music critics for the Harlem paper New York Age joined forces with the National Association of Negro Musicians and the Hampton Institute's journal The Southern Workman to condemn the jazzing of the spirituals. But Armstrong created a hot commercialized river spirit by both respecting and jazzing the spirituals, working into his wild trumpet improvisations direct and heartfelt statements of the sacred old melodies. "Deep River" first attained great popularity in this country's publishing houses and concert halls in 1917, the year that Ell Persons was lynched in Memphis and a murderous race riot tore apart East St. Louis, Illinois. Nearly blasphemy in relation to Du Bois's sorrow songs and certainly "a moment when the subject-matter or the content of a cultural tradition [was] being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation," Armstrong's musical announcement of a new era was a transgressive act. In 1933–35 the trumpeter recorded with a twelve-piece band, similar in number and instrumentation to Marable's bands. Indeed, some of the musicians on these dates—Zilner Randolph, Harry Dial, Red Allen, Leonard Davis, Lawrence "Snub" Mosely, and Pops Foster—had played their ways through the Mississippi valley, too. A remarkable Victor session in 1933 produced "Mississippi Basin," "Dusky Stevedore," "St. Louis Blues," "There's a Cabin in the Pines," "Mighty River," and "He's a Son of the South." Sessions for Decca in 1939 and 1940 waxed the culturally rich "Shanty Boat on the Mississippi" and "Lazy 'Sippi Steamer." Armstrong's river recordings seem to me to be among the more successful records he made. They can be seen as his creative response to Joseph Streckfus and Fate Marable, the records that he would have liked to make with Marable's Metropolitan Jaz-E-Saz Orchestra ten or eleven years earlier, had he been allowed. On several of these sides we hear Armstrong leading orchestral arrangements, indicating how much he had learned from Marable's tuition despite their falling-out. At the same time, Armstrong is the star instrumentalist and vocalist who leads the band, asserting an individual authority in the recording studio denied to him on the river. Armstrong's river recordings create an "in-between space" in black music history. He interprets major themes of the black Mississippi, an important experience in the Great Migration, in his own hot, stomping, swinging manner, often at much faster tempi than the riverboat captains had allowed. His lyrics often allude to the sadness of the black South, but Armstrong frames all such moments with his sunny optimism. With Andy Razaf's lyrics for "He's a Son of the South" (Vic 24257), Armstrong, riding high over a fleet rhythm section that included the pianist Teddy Wilson and the banjoist Mike McKendrick, turns the Great Migration into a seemingly effortless but stylish strut. He's a son of the south very much on the move, dressed even better than Fate Marable, and, moreover, stepping to some really hot jazz, much too searing for old wooden paddle wheelers. He pulls out all the stops, his trumpet blistering his joyful, shouting notes, his slick journey through the lyrics slipping, gliding, and veering through the syllables. He slows the tempo a bit, switching into a minor key, to play and sing "Mississippi Basin" (Vic 24335). In singing these lyrics, Armstrong becomes a levee worker: "Even though the weight was heavy, I was happy on the levee. Want to take my rightful place in the Mississippi Basin back home. Everybody was for me there, all the folks will be there, used to like to wash my face in the Mississippi Basin back home." He wonders aloud why he left but recalls that he's going to make a beeline back home. He flips on full afterburner when blazing through Andy Razaf and J. C. Johnson's "Dusky Stevedore" (Vic 24320), his second recording about maritime labor. At a tempo that would have reduced the St. Paul to splinters, Armstrong doffs his hat to the roustabouts down on the levees of the Mississippi, singing that though the loads they carried were heavy, they still had a song to sing and "a ragtime shufflin' gate" to their steps. These tough, strong, stylish men demonstrated how to come through slaughter, offering an artistic rendering of the roustabout experience to counterbalance the meanness of the Streckfus Steamers' magazine story about Millennium Potts. Profiting enormously from his back-up band, one that also included Albert "Budd" Johnson and Scoville Brown on tenor and clarinet and St. Louis's own Zilner Randolph on trumpet, Armstrong slowed down just enough to hit a swanlike note of dignity for Billy Baskette's "Mighty River" (Vic 24351). The lyrics actually celebrate the sound of a departing steamer's whistle and bell, announcing a slow voyage back home to a girl (like Daisy Parker) whom migration had left behind. He even slips into these lyrics a statement that the best part of the trip will be getting to its end. Decca and Victor, labels that plied the nation's more commercialized musical markets, were many steps removed from the Okeh race record label, on which Armstrong's most famous Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions appeared. Armstrong's last two river recordings followed the standard ballad form with vocal. Terry Shand and Jimmy Eaton's "Shanty Boat on the Mississippi" (Decca 2729) and Armstrong's own "Lazy 'Sippi Steamer Going Home" (Decca 3283) provide a counterpoint to the advanced thinking of the other recordings. On the latter, according to Charles Garrett, Armstrong celebrated the social and economic potential of life in Chicago for a talented immigrant. On the former, however, he plays and sings hot interpretations of what he had left behind on his migration. "Shanty Boat" evokes the jerry-rigged houseboats of poor black people along the Mississippi, singing the feelings of an exhausted laboring man who looks forward to kicking back on his own shanty riverboat. He's gonna take him a wife, eat fish from the river, and "ain't gonna work no more." Chanteys were labor songs sung by sailors on boats. Although the lyrics of some of these songs refer back to British tars, many of them reveal black origins, so many, in fact, that one expert argues that the old sea chanteys derived from the West Indies. There, black islanders, defending themselves against severe weather, for example, moved their simple dwellings by mounting them on rolling platforms. The owner acted as both a shantyman and a chanteyman, singing out the call of a laboring song, while those pulling him and his house furnished a rhythmic response. "Shanty Boat on the Mississippi" commercializes and modernizes the shanty tradition, rearranging the old themes of labor, recreation, and music. Armstrong's river recordings are chanteys in jazz time, full of the music and images of riverboats and their traditions. The identity of the group mentioned in the lyrics depends on the listener's point of view, but black jazz lovers would have had no problems creating their own memories of the South and their migration in the performances. Armstrong's original manner of performance might have given his river recordings a little of the rebellious spirit of the black maritime tradition that extended from the eighteenth-century Atlantic trade to the nineteenth-century sail and steam vessels to the early twentieth-century packets and excursion boats. "Lazy 'Sippi Steamer," like "Mississippi Basin," celebrates the anticipation of a black laboring man like the composer or one of the black seamen or roustas returning home down the Mississippi. Armstrong evokes the powerful, mixed emotions of one returning to the South, the familiar sights and sounds along the banks of the Lower Mississippi evoking home and the lives of one's friends and family, all the beautiful but terrifying experiences that migrants like him had fled. Armstrong sings these songs straight, without scatting or adding comic interjections such as those he injected into his recording of Hoagy Carmichael's famous song "Lazy River" (OK 41541) and of "Lonesome Road" (OK 41538). The first might have seemed too romantic, the latter too full of self-pitying lyrics. He transforms the former by doubling the tempo and scat singing, the latter by erecting all around the melody and lyrics a scaffolding of vaudeville-style satire. His recording of "When It's Sleepy Time Down South" (OK 41504) compensates for the many little implied racial stereotypes in the lyrics by opening with a conversation between Armstrong and Charlie Alexander, the pianist in the session. They contextualize the song with signals of their solidarity in the Great Migration, discussing how long they've been "up here" and their plans to touch base back down South, the lovely old melody becoming a memory of the beauties of a less intense, slower-moving past. In the big band river records that Armstrong made during the thirties and very early forties, the great musician and entertainer turned all the hope and labor of his migration into his own interstitial interpretation of the Mississippi. He and his all-black recording orchestras recalled via their own experiences the black laboring men who had come before them. In the recordings of Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra, excited emigrants fairly flew through the air, with style and grace, their travels animated by the adventure, energy, and mystery of gifted young artists on the move. After World War II, a time of somewhat less violent race relations in the Mississippi valley, a time when more militant attitudes about how to deal with the white majority swept through black communities, Armstrong appeared to some to have accommodated himself too fully to racism and segregation on the river and elsewhere. The trumpeter Miles Davis, raised in East St. Louis, Illinois, excoriated Armstrong for his Uncle Tom behavior, as did Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Davis had never lived through the post–World War I riots and had never been so poor, and was therefore unable fully to appreciate how dangerous those times had been to a musician such as Armstrong. Whatever his practical spirit of accommodation, the older man had never granted whites in general nor the Streckfus family in particular dominion over him. Despite his reluctance to help free the drummer Baby Dodds from the clutches of John Streckfus Jr., Armstrong did not fully accept the riverboat captains' vision of white dominion on the Mississippi. In his second autobiography, he recounted it thus: one night, a mate roused him from his sleep with word that the captain had demanded his presence in the pilot house. Worried that he might have done something wrong, Armstrong rushed to the captain's side only to discover that the white-bearded gentleman wanted to point out to him Jackson Island, where Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer had cavorted with his friends. "I looked up at the old gentleman, not knowing what was to come. Then I saw he was smiling. He said, 'Louie, come in here. We're working up to Jackson Island in a few minutes and I thought you would like to see it.' He had remembered my telling him about my reading 'Tom Sawyer' and asking him if he had known Mr. Mark Twain." Streckfus placed a heavy, kindly hand on Armstrong's shoulder. After a lengthy silence, he finally said: "This is Mark Twain's country. He was a very great man. I never pass this part of the river without feeling that his spirit rests over it." I began to see a dark patch of woods standing out ahead of us on the left. Then I heard his voice again. "That is Jackson Island," the old gentleman said. I knew the time had come when I should feel something he wanted me to feel. I remembered from the book about how Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and their friend Little Joe Harper had gone to that island to be "pirates," and had cooked their food over a wood fire and had had a good time, but that seemed a long way back to me, and the island, as far as I could see it in the dark, looked just the same as a hundred other islands we had passed in the river in the long time we had been going since we left New Orleans. Although he has been accused of being a weak person whose spirit was broken by racial oppression, Armstrong, beneath his ever-present diplomacy, remained quietly resilient and independent in the face of pressure from such white authority figures as John Streckfus Sr., the president of Streckfus Steamers and captain of the boat on which he was working. In fact, this is a major lesson that can be learned from the history of his years on the river. Armstrong and Marable's other musicians took what the excursion boats could offer them and then got on with the greater goals of their migration. Their experiences in major cities along the Mississippi ultimately led them away from the South—and the riverboats. Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 64-87 of Jazz on the River by William Howland Kenney, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2005 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. William Howland Kenney Jazz on the River ©2005, 242 pages, 23 halftones, 1 map Cloth $27.50 ISBN: 0-226-43733-7 For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for Jazz on the River . See also: An excellent interview of William Kenney , with images and music clips, at the Jerry Jazz Musician website Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture by Lewis A. Erenberg Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema by Krin Gabbard A catalog of books in music Other excerpts and online essays from University of Chicago Press titles Sign up for e-mail notification of new books in this and other subjects University of Chicago Press: 1427 E. 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637 USA | Voice: 773.702.7700 | Fax: 773.702.9756 Privacy Policies Site Map Bibliovault Chicago Manual of Style Turabian University of Chicago Awards --> Twitter Facebook YouTube 162 IMAGES Paddling Through History: Riverboats Of La Crosse Memphis circa 1906. "A Mississippi River landing." The sidewheeler James Lee first rebuilt The echoes of Cincinnati's riverboat history can still be experienced America: 1900 high-resolution photo The History Of The Delta Queen Riverboat VIDEO The Montgomery RiverBoat Brawl will go down in History! 🔥😂 Riverboat Noahs Ark Palatka Florida #explorer #history #originalmusic #riverboats #1920's Liberty Square Riverboat 2024 The Revolutionary Steamboat of 1807: Robert Fulton's Life-Changing Invention! Go With the Flow...Henrietta III Do you know the REAL Mark Twain? COMMENTS Steamboats of the Mississippi Steamboats of the Mississippi. Steamboats played a major role in the 19th-century development of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, allowing practical large-scale transport of passengers and freight both up- and down-river. Using steam power, riverboats were developed during that time which could navigate in shallow waters as well as ... Riverboat A riverboat is a watercraft designed for inland navigation on lakes, rivers, and artificial waterways. They are generally equipped and outfitted as work boats in one of the carrying trades, for freight or people transport, including luxury units constructed for entertainment enterprises, such as lake or harbour tour boats. How Riverboats and Steamers Shaped American History Riverboats are still a rich American tradition, and they truly were a formative part of American history. If you ever have the opportunity, schedule a cruise or even an afternoon tour on one of America's replica paddleboats. Flashback: A Brief History of the Riverboats But do you know the storied history? Here's a one-minute synopsis: Decades ago, the downtown St. Louis riverfront was home to hundreds of riverboats that lined the Mississippi riverfront. History There is a long forgotten history in America of people living in homemade shantyboats, a reasonable and cost-free solution for displaced people in rural areas and workers in urban areas. Steamboat steamboat, any watercraft propelled by steam, but more narrowly, a shallow-draft paddle wheel steamboat widely used on rivers in the 19th century, and particularly on the Mississippi River and its principal tributaries in the United States. A Brief History of Steamboats On August 17, 1807, the Clermont, Robert Fulton's first American steamboat, left New York City for Albany, serving as the inaugural commercial steamboat service in the world. The ship traveled from New York City to Albany making history with a 150-mile trip that took 32 hours at an average speed of about five miles per hour. Biography of Robert Fulton, Inventor of the Steamboat Robert Fulton was an American inventor who designed the first commercially successful steamboat. Learn more about his life, career, and inventions. Steamboat Steamboats proved a popular method of commercial and passenger transportation along the Mississippi River and other inland U.S. rivers in the 19th century. Their relative speed and ability to travel against the current reduced time and expense. Any seagoing vessel drawing energy from a steam-powered engine can be called a steamboat. Evolution of Craft From the Raft to the Steamboat on the Mississippi When a journey was undertaken, a slave was stationed on the river bank to watch for the approach of a steamer; during the day he waved a white flag to signal it, during the night he burned a beacon fire on the levee and rapidly circled a blazing pine torch in the air, while in stentorian tones he cried out, "Steamboat ahoy! ahoy! ahoy! ahoy ... Flashback: A Brief History of the Riverboats The Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher—aka, the Gateway Arch Riverboats—have been part of St. Louis history for decades. But do you know THEIR storied history? Here's a one-minute synopsis: Decades ago, the downtown St. Louis riverfront was home to hundreds of riverboats that lined the Mississippi riverfront. (Who remembers the tall stacks of ... The History of Mississippi Riverboats A History of Riverboats in Mississippi The mighty Mississippi river stretches from Northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The second-longest river in the United States, the Mississippi is integral to the history of America — particularly in the state of Mississippi. Riverboats facilitated travel, commerce, and cultural exchange within Mississippi and beyond. Learn more about the impact of ... Mississippi River Boat History Mississippi River Boat History. St. Paul and Minneapolis exist today because of riverboats. In fact, virtually every city along the major rivers of the United States can trace its very existence to the arrival of riverboats in America. In the early 1800s, the Minnesota Territory was inhabited by Native Americans, soldiers, trappers, traders ... History of Steamboats on the Mississippi River Robert Fulton And His Steamboat "Clermont". Steamboats on the Mississippi River in those early years were few but notable. A lightweight steamboat, the Comet, completed a similar voyage to the city of New Orleans, and following the War of 1812, more steamboats began to ply the Mississippi's waters. The Vesuvius, a steamboat also owned by ... Steamboats The steamboat played an important role in Arkansas from the earliest days of the Arkansas Territory. Before being superseded by the railroad in the post-Civil War era, steamboats were the primary means of passenger transport, as well as moving raw materials out of Arkansas and consumer goods into the state. The inland rivers steamboat ... A Walk Through the Historic Showboat Majestic Before It Left Cincinnati is a city with a proud riverboat history—a place that idolizes that heritage at times. Tall Stacks came and went, along with several other paddle wheel-backed restaurants, but riverboat excursions and water taxis still operate between the Ohio and Kentucky riverfronts. Steamboat Travel Was Dirty And Dangerous, Especially On The Missouri River "The Missouri River was notorious for eating boats," Capt. Terry said. "The average lifespan of a newly built steamboat back in Sam Clemens' [Mark Twain's] era was two years. Natchez (boat) Natchez. (boat) Coordinates: 29°57′19″N 90°03′44″W. The SS Natchez in New Orleans. Natchez has been the name of several steamboats, and four naval vessels, each named after the city of Natchez, Mississippi or the Natchez people. The current one has been in operation since 1975. river history Join the former and active riverboat captains, crew and their families, historians, artists, model builders and those with an interest in the history of the people and boats of the Mississippi River system in sustaining a uniquely American tradition. Robert E Lee Robert E Lee. The Lee Line ROBERT E LEE was built at Howard Shipyard Jeffersonville Ind in 1899, whereas the ROB'T E Lee which raced the NATCHEZ was built in 1866. The race began June 30, 1870 and ran from New Orleans to St. Louis. The racer ROB'T E LEE was dismantled in mid-April 1876 and her hull was taken to Memphis and used as a wharf boat. IHJ Exploring History: Riverboat Twilight The Riverboat Twilight is a 140-passenger riverboat that provides one-day, two-day and sightseeing cruises from May through October on the Upper Mississippi River. For 116 days out of the year, its passengers are given the opportunity to engage in an essential American experience; travel on one of the world's most storied waters, the Mississippi River. Steamboat A steamboatis a boat that is propelledprimarily by steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels. Steamboats sometimes use the prefix designationSS, S.S.or S/S(for 'Screw Steamer') or PS(for 'Paddle Steamer'); however, these designations are most often used for steamships. Jazz on the River Jazz on the River gracefully guides us through the boat business, the entertainers that performed for the passengers and crew, and the culture of life on the riverboats. With this book, the history of jazz just became richer, deeper, and more wonderfully complicated."—John Szwed, author of So What: The Life of Miles Davis catamaran gulet motorboat powerboat riverboat sailboat trimaran yacht