Roger M McCoy
Even in the best conditions riverboats of the nineteenth century faced the hazards of snags, groundings and explosions. As if these hazards were not enough, steamboats soon competed in high risk racing. Racing these boats became popular along with horse racing and dog racing. The public became avid about boat racing, and the crews took great pride in helping their boat win a highly publicized race. In many cases, the races were planned in advance, with spectators lining the riverbanks to enjoy the excitement of the race. Others were impromptu events urged on by passengers looking for a little excitement. Steamboat captains competed as a matter of pride and ego and boat owners believed that a record of wins would draw more passengers. Betting on races was widespread with one highly publicized race drawing more the $1,000,000 in wagers (approximately $30,000,000 today). Mark Twain commented on the excitement of steamboat racing in his usual vivid style: “Two red-hot steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, straining every nerve—that is to say, every rivet in the boilers—quaking and shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam—this is sport that makes a body’s very liver curl with enjoyment.” The phrase “straining…every rivet in the boilers…” should be enough to convince anyone that steamboat racing was risky. One steamboat race became a major event with thousands of spectators. It was a race between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez steaming from New Orleans to St. Louis. The history of the Natchez steamboat shows nine riverboats by that name, the first built in 1823. Fire destroyed the sixth Natchez in 1863. The ninth Natchez, built in 1957, still operates as a tourist attraction in New Orleans. The seventh Natchez famous for racing the Robert E. Lee was built in 1869 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was 301 feet long, had eight boilers and a capacity of 5,500 cotton bales. In her nearly ten years of service, she made 401 trips with no serious accidents. This Natchez had beaten the previous steamboat speed record in 1844 and was a good match for the famous race. The Robert E. Lee was built in the Ohio River town of New Albany, Indiana, in 1866. As it happens there had been two previous steamboats named Robert E. Lee. This stately boat was nicknamed the “Monarch of the Mississippi.” So how did this much-publicized race proceed? It began in New Orleans on June 30th, 1870, with the Robert E. Lee pulling ahead from the beginning and gaining a lead of several hours in the first day. Then both boats began to experience equipment problems. The Robert E. Lee burst a steam pipe the first night allowing the Natchez to come within three minutes of her, the closest margin of the race. Later the Natchez lost a water pump that cost it thirty minutes. Then it had to stop because of fog for five hours. In the end the Robert E. Lee arrived in St. Louis on July 4, 1870 around 11:30 am in the morning; the Natchez followed, arriving at 6:00 pm. Crowds of people in East St. Louis and St. Louis came to the river banks to watch the arrivals. This famous race had several elements that made it a competition between two boats traveling under very different conditions. Although both boats were comparable in size and power, their captains had different approaches to the race. On board the Robert E. Lee were only seventy-five specially invited guests and no cargo. Captain John W. Cannon outfitted the Lee to race. The Natchez under the command of Captain Thomas Paul Leathers, prepared for a regular trip, taking on board a full complement of passengers and cargo. The Natchez made regular stops for fuel and to unload cargo. Captain Cannon, on the other hand, made arrangements to refuel the Robert E. Lee while underway. Thus the Robert E. Lee proceeded while carrying no cargo, steaming ahead through fog and made only one stop, and won the race in 3 days, 18 hours and 14 minutes. By contrast, the Natchez carried her normal load and stopped as normal, tying up overnight when fog was encountered. Despite this she finished the race only six hours later than the Robert E. Lee. The race of the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez from New Orleans to St. Louis became immortalized by the prominent lithographers, Currier and Ives, and their well-known print forms the masthead for this series of blogs on nineteenth-century riverboats. Several other paintings of the great race have been made but the Currier and Ives picture is the best known. Such racing involved major risks. Steamboat racing became highly popular and sometimes deadly. In some cases the races were planned and advertised in advance, with spectators lining the riverbanks beforehand to enjoy the spectacle. Others were impromptu affairs, sometimes urged on by the passengers and steamboat captains. Useful as steamboats were, they came with one big problem: they were inherently dangerous. The steam boilers were prone to exploding and igniting fires. The boats were wooden and much of their cargo was highly flammable cotton bales, along with barrels of turpentine and gunpowder. These hazards came in addition to the snags and submerged bars that could rip a hull open. Between 1816 and 1848, boiler explosions alone killed more than 1,800 passengers and crew and injured another 1,000, and racing added significantly to the chance for an explosion. In 1965 noted historian and prolific writer Daniel Boorstin commented, “A voyage on the Mississippi was far more dangerous than a passage across the ocean.” A nineteenth-century humorist, Charles Godfrey Leland, said much the same about steamboat racing. “From the days of the Romans and Norsemen down to the present time, there was never any form of amusement discovered so daring, so dangerous, and so exciting as a steamboat race,” Such racing is, of course, inevitable given the human inclination to compete, to demonstrate their skill, and show the superiority of their boat. Sources: Discover Indiana. https://publichistory.iupui.edu/items/show/146 Springfield Museum. Springfield, Massachusetts The Great Mississippi Steamboat Race From New Orleans to St. Louis, July 1870, Currier & Ives. https://springfieldmuseums.org/collections/item/the-great-mississippi-steamboat-race-from-new-orleans-to-st-louis-july-1870-currier-ives/ Thomas, Christian. For Profit and Glory: Steamboat racing on the inland rivers. https://www.howardsteamboatmuseum.org/river-history/for-profit-glory-steamboat-racing-inland-rivers/ Twain, Mark. 1885. Life on the Mississippi. retrieved from: Gutenberg Books, https://www.museum.state.il.us /RiverWeb/landings/Ambot/SOCIETY/SOC8.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee_(steamboat) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez_(boat) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-deadly-steamboat-races-enthralled-america-180982038/
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In the early nineteenth century steam-powered riverboats were the major form of transportation for people and cargos in three immense river basins in the young United States: the Mississippi River, the Ohio River, and the Missouri River. Also canals connected cities like New York and Chicago to the great river network of mid-America until railroads provided better and faster service in the mid-nineteenth century. The size of many nineteenth-century riverboats was a problem in itself. Some steamers were so long, over 200 feet, that they undulated with the waves as they traveled despite beams and braces to help keep the boat rigid. A passenger noted that you could see the wave coming down the length of the boat. The riverboats were not without risk and they often met with disaster by hitting submerged objects such as fallen trees or sandbars. Either of these hazards could break open the hull, although the sandbar in some cases only grounded the boat temporarily. The disaster most feared by the traveling public aboard a nineteenth- century riverboat was boiler explosions. The explosion of the riverboat Sultana on the Mississippi River had such a high death toll that public pressure forced Congress to enact the nation’s first transportation safety act. Author Charles Dickens visited America in 1842 and traveled by riverboat on the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. As he learned more about the boats he observed, “…steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in the season.” Such knowledge, however, did not deter the number of people traveling on riverboats, or reduce cargo shipments. Boat builders valued the importance of good weight distribution. To achieve this they put the boilers near the front—the bow—and the machinery in the middle or at the stern. They attempted to stiffen the long framework of the hull with trusses and long iron rods. Unfortunately putting the boilers near the bow paved the way for death and destruction for thousands of passengers whose cabins were located on the deck above the boilers. Passengers lives were never in greater jeopardy than when they stood on the upper decks while watching workers loading cargo at a landing. Many explosions occurred at landings due to the increase of pressure when the engines were stopped. The first recorded explosion on a Mississippi River steamer was in 1816. The steam pipe on the Washington burst and nine men were scalded to death. In the following year the Constitution blew up, and thirty lives were lost. Over time a frightful toll of boats and lives occurred on steamboats. Congress began moving to regulate steamboat boilers. In 1849 a list of 233 explosions on river steamers was compiled for the purpose of informing Congress on the question of steamboat boilers. The list showed that, as nearly as could be ascertained, 2,563 lives were lost and 2,007 persons injured in the explosions, a total of 4,660. The property loss was placed at $3,090,360 (1.2 billion today). One important riverboat, the Sultana, set records when it exploded on the Mississippi River in 1865, only a few weeks after the end of the Civil War. At the time of the explosion the Sultana was carrying an estimated 2000 Union soldiers who had been held in Confederate prisoner of war camps (for comparison, the Titanic disaster took 1503 lives). Many of the returning soldiers came from Confederate hospitals or prisons in poor condition and disabled. The Sultana was docked in Vicksburg for boiler repairs when it’s Captain, Cass Mason, heard that the U.S. government would pay an attractive sum to transport soldiers ($90 each). He decided a thorough repair of the boiler would cause him to miss this opportunity, so he ordered a quick and temporary fix. In order to take maximum advantage of the government offer, Captain Mason also accepted many more soldiers than the Sultana was designed to carry. While underway one of the Sultana’s boilers exploded a few miles north of Memphis, Tennessee at approximately 2 a.m. on April 27, 1865. SOME DEVICES LEAVE A BIG GAP HERE. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN. The explosion instantly killed hundreds, especially those soldiers who had been packed in right against the boilers. Many of them died from shrapnel, steam, and boiling water released from the explosion. Those on deck either went down with the boat of jumped into the river. Those who were able grasped a scrap of a board to stay afloat, and those who knew how to swim might make it to shore or stay afloat for a few hours until the rescue boat arrived. Unfortunately there were few survivors. Among the survivors was a young soldier from Michigan named Hosea Aldrich who described the chaos and confusion after the explosion, “…the first thing that I heard was a terrible crash, everything seemed to be falling. The things I had under my head, my shoes, and some other articles and specimens that I had gathered up and had them tied up in an old pair of drawers, they all went down through the floor. We scrambled back. The smoke came rushing up through the passage made by the exit of the exploded boiler. I was pushed in the water and started for the bottom of the Mississippi, but I soon rose to the surface and found a small piece of board, and soon had the luck of getting a larger board, which was very lucky for me, as I could not swim. We floated along down the river nearly an hour I think when my limbs began to cramp; that was the last of which I was conscious until at eight o'clock a.m. We had floated down the river six miles and lodged in the flood-wood against an island which was within two miles of Memphis, and here we were picked up by the United States picket boat.” Another writer named Jerry Potter wrote: “It was a particularly bad day to be out on the water. The Mississippi River was experiencing high water levels as melting snow from up north flooded its banks. Fallen trees and other debris mixed into the fast-moving waterways. It was difficult to navigate these clogged and swirling waters come nightfall, but Captain Mason was determined to make his shipment of soldiers. Several miles from Memphis, Tennessee, one of the Sultana’s boilers exploded. Because the boat had been so packed, many of the passengers were crammed right by the boilers. The explosion instantly killed hundreds, mostly soldiers from Kentucky and Tennessee who had been packed in right against the boilers. Many of them instantly died from shrapnel, steam, and the boiling water released from the explosion. One minute they were sleeping and the next they found themselves struggling to swim in the very cold Mississippi River. Some passengers burned on the boat. The fortunate ones clung to debris in the river, or to horses and mules that had escaped the boat, hoping to make it to shore, which they could not see because it was dark and the flooded river was at that point almost five miles wide.” All these passengers aboard the Sultana were torn between two choices: stay on the boat and die from the fire or jump into the water and possibly drown. Soldiers just out of war again found themselves fighting for their lives. Fortunately passing boats and local residents began a rescue operation to save the soldiers. One local man, John Fogelman and his sons made a raft from some logs and went to the flaming Sultana to rescue passengers. They made several rescue trips back to the burning boat. One soldier from Ohio noted, “When I came to my senses I found myself surrounded by wreckage, and in the midst of smoke and fire. The agonizing shrieks and groans of the injured and dying were heart-rending, and the stench of burning flesh was intolerable and beyond my power of description.” Within a few hours the Sultana went to the bottom of the Mississippi. One curious feature of this disaster is that some of the rescuers, who were defeated Confederate soldiers only a few weeks earlier, now saved the lives of their former enemy. The cause of the Sultana explosion can be laid on Captain Mason. His neglect of equipment and refusal to make adequate repairs plus his eagerness to make a bundle of money cost many lives. Sources: Young, David. Roiling on the River. Chicago Tribune 2003. Retrieved from: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2003-01-12-0301120511-story.html Berry, Chester D. Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors. Lansing, Michigan: Darius D. Thorp, Printer and Binder. 1892. Comstock, Daniel W. Ninth Cavalry: One Hundredth and Twenty-first Regiment Volunteers. Richmond, Indiana: J.M. Coe Publisher. 1890. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60363/60363-h/60363-h.htm Larry Holzwarth. See 1842 America Through Charles Dickens’ Eyes. Retrieved from: https://historycollection.com/see-1842-america-through-charles-dickens-eyes/13/ Aldrich, Hosea C. and Hatch, Absalom N. Returning Prisoners of War. Michigan Family History Network. Retrieved from: http://www. mifamilyhistory.org/civilwar/sultana. 1865. |
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