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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [00:51]
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- [01:39]
Don Wildman
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania December 1811 the newly built steamboat New Orleans sits at the waterfront, its twin copper boilers a cacophony of sound, pumps thumping, valves shrieking, steam hissing. Onshore, a crowd has gathered to watch if this strange new vessel will actually work, if it can deliver on its bold promise to master the turbulent waters of the mighty Ohio. Slowly at first, the New Orleans pulls away. On board the passengers, a select group involved in the vessel's construction and finance begins to sense the voyage. The slap slap of the huge paddle wheel striking the water, the deck plates vibrating underfoot. On the main deck below, firemen fuel the roaring furnace, building speed, moving the vessel past the familiar flotilla of flatboats, barges, rafts and keelboats. For men who've spent their working lives at the mercy of the river's cross currents and fickle winds, this mechanical Behemoth is a wonder, a sight to behold. Downriver, the great Ohio will eventually merge with the Mississippi. With every perilous obstacle along the way snags driftwood, treacherous sandbars, sudden shoals. But for now, today, cutting a clean line through the wide, brown water, it's all just progress being made faster and more forcefully than ever before. Here at the dawn of a new age in the heartland of America. It is very nice to be with you. Welcome to this episode of American History hit. I'm Don Wildman. Back in the early 1800s, as America expanded west, a new technology forever altered how this nation would run. Never mind the world. It was the steam engine. And advances in this technology allowed it to be applied to shipping in short order. Vessels once reliant on fickle winds were now propelled by giant paddle wheels, driving bigger and heavier loads up and down the Hudson river, through the Chesapeake, and out into the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. And soon enough, an entirely new ship design was created to work America's vast inland river system. The steamboat reigned supreme along so many rivers, moving cargo and humans dramatically from town to town, creating an economy and a culture all its own. To explain how the steamboat happened and how it changed America in such fundamental ways is the expertise of professor Robert Gudmundstedt of Colorado State University, who has authored the books Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom and the Devil's Own the United States Mississippi Squadron in the Civil War. Professor, nice to be with you. Thanks for joining us.
- [04:42]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
- [04:44]
Don Wildman
Excellent. So, firstly, let's discuss the context of the times surrounding the beginning of this new innovation. What was happening at the time of the steamboat's invention?
- [04:55]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
The first steamboat, first commercially used steamboat was Robert Fulton's steamboat in New York. Right. And most Americans lived close to the Atlantic seaboard, and transportation was via river. It was via really bad roads as well. It was almost quicker to go from, say, Philadelphia to England than it was to go from Philadelphia to, you know, 300 miles inland because the roads were terrible. Now, the steam engine revolutionizes that. It revolutionizes travel in the United States and worldwide. And especially you can go up river. What they considered at the time a fast pace. Now, we wouldn't consider it fast today, but back then, they would talk about steamboats shooting off like an arrow. You know, we're talking maybe 25 miles an hour is their top speed. But going upriver. And what Americans saw as conquering time and space became the real way that steamboats altered the Economy and the culture of the United States.
- [06:03]
Don Wildman
It's interesting, you know, making appointments, having a schedule is all the advent of the industrial age. That's the ability to call your own shots. You know, tourism, as a matter of fact, begins because of the steamship, really, the ability to go out to the thing and the railroad, of course, but once we have that power, it's a fascinating new world. Louisiana purchase, of course, 1803, has a huge impact on this story. Adds the port of New Orleans and the Mississippi river itself, the superhighway of the 19th century. This is going to supercharge the development of this new kind of design, isn't it?
- [06:38]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
It is. And one of the backers of the first successful steamboat on the Mississippi river was Robert Livingston. And he was one of the people who actually negotiated the Louisiana Purchase. And I don't think it's coincidental that he saw the economic potential in the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi river and even west of the Mississippi River. And he, along with Robert Fulton, worked with Nicholas Roosevelt, who was the great grand uncle of Theodore Roosevelt, to build and to set the first steamboat on the western waters. And that was the New Orleans was the name of the steamboat.
- [07:22]
Don Wildman
Exactly. It's important to realize that the design of these boats, and I'm talking about the old, you know, showboat type of thing, we've all seen mock ups of this in the modern age. This sort of flat bottom boat, very wide, very shallow draft, all of this design was really to adapt to those river conditions, wasn't it? Because there was so much difficulty in navigating them.
- [07:43]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
It was. And before the steamboat, you had flat boats which just floated down the river, and they were very wide and they were difficult to navigate. In fact, Davy Crockett navigated a flatboat in the 1840s, and it got caught in an eddy and it basically broke up. And he almost died as a result of it. And he ended up totally naked on the waterfront of Memphis. And he said that he was literally skinned like a rabbit. That was the easy part. Going upstream was much more difficult because he had keel boats. And essentially you've got men with poles who were pushing the boat upstream against the current. And of course, the Mississippi has a very strong current now with a steamboat. The fact that it can go downriver and you can control it much more easily and it can go upriver against the current, that's what really changes things. And when you talk about the flat part of the steamboat, that was the deck, and the deck actually did not touch the water the part of the steamboat that touched the water was very narrow. It was a narrow, flat bottom boat. And then the deck extended wider, I see right above the water. Because faster boats had less contact with the water. Sure. And people wanted fast boats. But the deck itself became the repository for all kinds of cargo on these steamboats. He had chains that literally would hold the deck from drooping down and touching the water. They were called hog chains.
- [09:14]
Don Wildman
You mentioned the New Orleans, first successful steamboat on the Mississippi, launched 1811-12. That was a maiden voyage, was in there. Left from Pittsburgh to New Orleans via the Ohio and then the Mississippi one. Neat to remember that these are massive rivers that all connect. And that was really what was the remarkable aspect of the middle of the country that these highways existed. Tell me about that voyage. How long did it take those early steamships?
- [09:40]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
That voyage left on October 20, 1811, and a couple of days later it's in Cincinnati. A couple days after that it's in Louisville. But it had a problem in Louisville because there were the falls at Louisville. And when the New Orleans got to Louisville, they weren't sure if it would actually make it over the falls. And that would be disastrous if it scraped over the falls, got a hole in its. In the boat and then sank. That's not a good demonstration of an early technology. So they spent a couple of weeks essentially at Louisville waiting for the water to rise and taking people on board and demonstrating that they could go upriver and go back down river and that kind of thing. They finally decided to shoot over the falls, so to speak. And so there was enough water. And it was kind of this very rough voyage over the river. River or over the falls. But they made it. They get further down. This crazy coincidence was that you had a series of earthquakes that happened in the center of the United States that probably not a lot of Americans have heard of. They're called the New Madrid earthquakes. And New Madrid is in the boot heel of Mississippi. And so by this point, the New Orleans was on the Mississippi river And these were three magnitude 8 earthquakes.
- [10:56]
Don Wildman
Wow.
- [10:57]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
That happened. And then with the aftershocks as well. And the story goes that for a while, a portion of the Mississippi river actually went upstream. The waters ran backwards because of the magnitude of the earthquake, which is actually a pretty fitting metaphor for steamboats, because in a way, you know, they're going upstream, they're kind of making the water go backwards.
- [11:18]
Don Wildman
Yes, right.
- [11:19]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
And this was really difficult because they had a guide on this boat. His name was Andrew Jack, and he was very familiar with These rivers. And you had to know the rivers because of where the eddies were and where the sandbars were and that kind of thing. But now the river is completely remade in a portion of it between lower Missouri and above Natchez. But they're able to guide their way through. And then they get to Natchez by December 30th. And fittingly, they take on cotton bales as their first commercial product that they shipped to New Orleans. And they arrive in New Orleans on January 12, 1812.
- [11:55]
Don Wildman
A triumph. This is a triumph of the times, and no wonder. It's an incredible ability that totally lacked before. Let's talk about the impacts of this technology. By the 1850s, we've entered into what is called the golden age of steamboats. It's hard to conceive how many. I mean, there were a thousand steamboats working on those western rivers, weren't there?
- [12:15]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
There were, and there were steamboats of all sizes and of all types. In some ways, yeah. You had the larger steamboats on the Mississippi river, but then you had a lot of smaller steamboats on the tributary rivers, ones that would have a draft of maybe one or two feet. And, of course, steamboats are at the mercy of the environment, because if there's not enough water, they can't run. But if there is enough water, you have this amazing network where you could go to Montana, you could go to Oklahoma, you could go to Pittsburgh, you could go to St. Paul, Minnesota and New Orleans, and almost anywhere in between that was along a river.
- [12:58]
Don Wildman
Yes.
- [12:59]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
And so you've got people both going upstream and downstream, and you have cargo going upstream and downstream. And so you're getting kind of a sense of interconnectedness that you didn't have before. Because with a flatboat, if, say, you were going to go from Cincinnati to New Orleans, which was not uncommon, you build a flatboat, you'd put your product on it, you'd float down. When you got to New Orleans, you'd sell your product, you'd break up the flatboat for scrap, and then you'd walk back. Or maybe you'd buy a horse and you'd go back. But now with the steamboat, you can go from New Orleans to Cincinnati in a matter of days.
- [13:41]
Don Wildman
The railroad, of course, gets so much credit for opening up the west, before that, the stagecoaches. But we rarely talk about the power and importance of the steamboat and really unlocking this. And the reasons were economic, of course, because so much more product could be moved, both in load size, but also without spoiling, if you're talking about food products and so forth. I mean, what used to take a journey of three to four months to move through this interior now became a matter of a month. I mean, 25 to 30 days. Right.
- [14:10]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Even shorter than that. By the 1850s, I mean, you're looking at three or four days potentially going from New Orleans with the conditions are good. Going from New Orleans to Cincinnati or St. Paul or whatever it happened to be.
- [14:20]
Don Wildman
I mean, and this is what supercharges the cotton economy.
- [14:22]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Yeah, it supercharges the cotton economy and the Western economy in general for a couple of things. So specifically, with cotton, to sell cotton. Most cotton that's produced in the American south is spun elsewhere. The south did not have mills to convert the cotton to thread or the thread to cloth.
- [14:45]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [14:46]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
It's an early economy. So the cotton's going to New Orleans, and from there it's being trans shipped sometimes to the American Northeast. So you had the biggest cotton mills in America were in Massachusetts. Place like Lowell, Massachusetts, which a lot of people have heard about. But then a lot of cottons also go going to England because England's undergoing the Industrial revolution before America is. And there are large cotton mills in England as well. But these steamboats are perfect. They're much better than the flat boats for transporting cotton because they can transport so much more of it. And a cotton bale is about the size of a modern refrigerator and weighs 4 to 500 pounds. They would stack these cotton bales on the guards on the flat part of the steamboat, kind of like Lego bricks. You could get 2,000 cotton bales on a boat, as opposed to a flat boat, which would maybe have a couple of hundred.
- [15:39]
Don Wildman
Wow.
- [15:40]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
So you can bring these cotton bales very quickly for the time and very reliably to market. And not only that, when you're looking at farmers in places like Indiana or Illinois or Minnesota, they're now connected into this network as well. Because you talked about crops spoiling. Well, most crops were produced for a local market in the 1830s and 40s. But as you get to the 1850s and you get more mechanization, you have more production, especially of corn. And corn doesn't spoil that quickly necessarily. And so you can transport a lot of this corn, which, of course, is going to be grown in the Midwest through these steamboats into the South. And Southern plantations were dependent on, essentially on importing corn. Now, some of them produced corn, but for the most part, the south is a net importer of corn. Yeah. But then also what you're getting is these People in the Midwest are buying products, and these products are being moved on railroads east to west across, you know, the Midwest part. But a lot of them are coming from New Orleans and then up the river. And so these steamboats, if you're in the United States today and you drive on an interstate, you see 18 wheelers constantly.
- [16:56]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [16:57]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
And in some ways, they're the commercial backbone of our economy in America. 2025, 2026. Well, that's what the steamboats are doing. They're bringing consumer goods, they're bringing agricultural goods. They're bringing all manner of things that are supercharging the economy, as you put it, up and down the rivers. There's a sense of connectedness.
- [17:18]
Don Wildman
The economic engine of the middle of the country in this period becomes the steamboat. The flip side of that economics is that much that was done with forced labor. I mean, there's a story to be told about steamboats having to do with slavery, Correct?
- [17:31]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
There is. Obviously, slavery is an area of our history that is difficult to understand for modern Americans. The fact that you would own, that you would buy, that you would sell someone, and that we don't understand the extent to which slavery was based on force and violence, physical violence, psychological violence, and sexual violence. Many of the crews who worked on steamboats, especially south of Louisville, were enslaved Americans. And they are rented out by owners of steamboats to work in various capacities on these boats. I'll get to that in a second. And another thing is that steamboats were also a way that slave traders. So the men who bought and sold slaves, so they buy them more or less in the. In the upper south, like Kentucky and Tennessee, and transport them down to Louisiana or Natchez, which was a booming plantation economy. They're transported on steamboats as well, and they're in coffles. In other words, they're chained together in long lines with a chain passing in between them with manacles on the wrists. And one person commented that it's so common to see a coffle on a steamboat that nobody mentions it anymore. It's just taken for granted that these steamboats are transporting enslaved people to these southern markets. But the people who are forced to work on these steamboats, there's a bit of a measure of almost quasi independence for them, as opposed to working on a plantation. Now. They're going to work as roustabouts, for the most part, which are the people who carry things on and off the boat. So it's hard physical labor. Especially if you're wrestling with a cotton bale, you Know, trying to get it onto a boat. They don't have steam winches on these boats. You know, it's mostly done by human power. But then you also had enslaved people who were working as cooks on these boats. They were working as waiters, and occasionally they're working as a steward, which is somebody who is a little bit of authority, kind of like maybe a maitre d or a bell cap in a modern day hotel. And then you had a few women who worked on these boats as well, who were enslaved, and they were chambermaids, and they cleaned the rooms and they did the cleaning on the boats. In some ways, you could think of steamboats as being a combination of an 18 wheeler and a hotel. Because boats are transporting people, but they're also transporting commercial goods as well.
- [20:21]
Don Wildman
Exactly.
- [20:22]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
But for enslaved Americans who are working on these boats, they're not directly under the thumb of their enslaver. And as I said, they were typically, they're rented out, which means that the wages that they get paid are going not to the enslaved person, they're going to the owner of the enslaved person. So the captain of the boat is paying wages to the enslaver.
- [20:42]
Don Wildman
Yeah, sure.
- [20:43]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
But these people could also work for tips and for extra wages, and over time, they could save that money. And it was difficult, but it was possible to do self purchase in the American south. And there were a few people who ran away using steamboats as the way to do that. So they would fit in, like they would pretend to be a roustabout, and so they'd pick up things and, you know, they'd carry them on the boat, and then they would just kind of blend in with the crew. If the boat was going north, and then if it stopped in a place like Cincinnati, then they'd get off in Cincinnati.
- [21:15]
Don Wildman
Sure.
- [21:15]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Now, there weren't a lot of escape attempts because the authorities would have shut these down, but there were some very visible there.
- [21:22]
Don Wildman
It's important, you know, we're going to talk about the romance of this in a moment, and yet important to keep it all in balance with what was not romantic at all. The steamboats link these cities you mentioned, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati. All of these commercial centers become tighter and tighter as a network, and therefore the economies grow as well and draw people to them. It has everything to do with the development of this whole settlement of the middle west. So after this short break coming up, we'll come back to talk about what it was like on board these ships. I mean, we've all seen the movies. We've all seen the Broadway show. Let's talk about the reality of what was it like? I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
- [22:07]
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- [22:37]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [22:58]
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- [23:44]
Don Wildman
So welcome back. We're talking to Professor Robert Goodmansed and we're discussing the context of the golden age of the steamboat, what it was like to be on board these ships. Obviously, if you were a paid passenger, it was very different from being an enslaved person who's working on them. But what would it be like as you walked around on one of those boats?
- [24:02]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Well, first you have to understand the geography of the boat, so to speak. The boat had different levels. So the first level was the deck and you had deck passengers on the deck and you also had the engine and the boilers on the deck. And then above that was another level. It was called the boiler deck because its floor was above the boilers. And that was where cabin passengers were. And so these people are paying a lot more money to travel on steamboats. And then above that you had the hurricane deck because there was an ever present breeze on it. And that was sometimes for storage and sometimes for crew. Above that even was the Texas deck. It was called the Texas deck because it was added on in the 1840s, like Texas was added on to the United States. The crew mainly stayed on the Texas deck. And above that was the pilot house. And the pilot house could be 40ft above the main deck. So it's a high structure, if you will.
- [25:03]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [25:04]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Mark Twain described it as a wedding cake without all the complications because of all the layers.
- [25:09]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [25:10]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
So your passengers are segregated. They're not segregated by race for the most part. They're segregated by class. So you have your cabin passengers who are on the boiler deck, so they're one level up. And you have your deck passengers who are on the main deck. So who do you want to hear about first?
- [25:32]
Don Wildman
I want to know about the gamblers.
- [25:34]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Okay, well, the gamblers were on both decks, but that was a real thing.
- [25:40]
Don Wildman
It wasn't at the saloons.
- [25:41]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
It was. Yeah, well, they used a different kind of deck to gamble when they're on the decks, but that's another story. But yeah, gamblers, the area, that's the public space for cabin passengers. So on the boiler deck, you have cabins, individual cabins for people that were small. I mean, think like, I don't know, cruise ship cabin, you know, maybe 10ft by 5ft, very small, two beds in them, like bunk beds. But then you had an open area that was a public area, and that's called the saloon. And the saloon was where socializing happened. And it's also where the meals happen as well. So the people, you know, I mentioned them earlier, the waiters, they would have to set up the tables for food and then set up all of the cutlery and the dishes and then bring the food and then tear it all down. And then you've got this open space. And so in the saloon. So it's not like a saloon in the old West. It's a different version of that. You have chairs, you have people reading. Sometimes you have people singing, people reading newspapers, people engaging in conversation. And then you also have people gambling, because you're always going to have smaller tables set up with chairs around them. And the stereotype of the riverboat gambler, that phrase has entered American history for a reason is a guy who's maybe very well dressed and maybe has a cane or, you know, he looks the part that is completely false.
- [27:16]
Don Wildman
Oh.
- [27:18]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Because if you're going to make your living as a gambler, you don't want to be known that you're a professional card player. You want to look like a, if you will, regular cabin passenger. So these professional gamblers posed as a planter from the South. They posed as a farmer or an attorney from Illinois or Indiana. They had these complex backstories that they would tell people because again, you know, people aren't sitting around, you know, scrolling on Instagram or playing Candy Crush on these boats. For the most part, they're interacting with one another. Sure. And so these people had to have these elaborate stories to be able to convince others that they were just, you know, traveling from St. Louis to New Orleans for a day.
- [28:09]
Don Wildman
Robert, was it a glamorous experience or am I just looking through the lens of history?
- [28:13]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
It was a glamorous experience. If you're on one of the elite boats.
- [28:20]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [28:21]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
There was the JM White, There was a few others. There were a few other boats. This would be like staying at a five star hotel, I'm told. I've never stayed at a five star hotel. These are the boats that they've got plush carpeting, they have chandeliers. One even had a bust of Andrew Jackson on one end of the saloon and a bust of Henry Clay on the other end of saloon. They were mortal enemies in politics. One was a Whig, one was a Democrat. Right. They have top notch food, they have better service, you know, because they're paying more for it. You know, they're paying higher wages, so they have higher expectations for their employees. But then they're also charging more, so they're more exclusive.
- [29:01]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [29:01]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
So on those boats, if you're in cabin passage, you could argue that it was a glamorous experience. Although by our standards, it's not glamorous. I mean, your toilet facility, you don't have running water.
- [29:15]
Don Wildman
Sure.
- [29:16]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
So you're using a bowl.
- [29:19]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [29:19]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Chamber pot that the wait staff is going to take out of your, your room every day. There's no air conditioning. You are literally above the boilers. And these boats, of course, are powered by steam. And so you have constant fires that are heating the boilers. If you're in Natchez in July on one of these boats, it's probably got to be 80 degrees in one of those cabins.
- [29:42]
Don Wildman
Yeah. Right.
- [29:43]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
So by our standards, it's not glamorous. By their Standards, it was glamorous. But then, of course, you have, like, ratty old boats. These are what they were described as at the time. These are the ones that are kind of the Super 8 of the steamboat world.
- [29:58]
Don Wildman
Interesting.
- [30:00]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
You're not getting much.
- [30:01]
Don Wildman
There's a lot of opposing realities on these things. Obviously, you have the elite decks, but down below, you have the boilers as you're working. Let's talk about that. I mean, you can imagine the ocean liner as a metaphor of this. And down below, you got those guys shoveling the coal. Well, this is the days before that, so. Or not. I mean, are they powering these things with coal?
- [30:18]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Coal and wood.
- [30:20]
Don Wildman
Wood, yeah.
- [30:21]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
For the most part, it's more wood than coal because wood is cheaper and it's more available, especially south of St. Louis and Cincinnati.
- [30:30]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [30:30]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
There's more coal up in, you know, around Pittsburgh area.
- [30:33]
Don Wildman
Sure.
- [30:34]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
You know, as a lot of Americans know, and in Kentucky. But south of that, there aren't any coal mines, for the most part. And so it's wood. And so there were wood yards, and boats had to stop at wood yards to take on more wood. A cord of wood was, you know, two to three dollars per cord. But if you were a deck passenger. We haven't really talked about deck passengers a lot. You're paying a minimum price, and you're getting literally a position on the deck. Or there was a central room that you could be in that was close to the boiler room. So you're very close to. You're next to the roustabouts. You're next to the people who are doing the labor on the boats. And that's an indignity if you're a white Southerner, that you are literally, like, living alongside an enslaved person who's throwing wood into the furnace or shoveling coal.
- [31:24]
Don Wildman
And it wouldn't have been below decks. I mean, you're talking about a very shallow drought.
- [31:27]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
No, you're on the deck. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Below deck was storage. On a few of the early steamboats, there was space below deck. But they found out very quickly that that was a design flaw. And so people are on the main deck and above. Right.
- [31:44]
Don Wildman
And these boilers. I mean, this happened everywhere. These boilers were very hazardous. I mean, they could explode. And did on a frequent basis.
- [31:51]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
They did. Because especially in the 1830s and 1840s, there is no regulation of these boilers. And as boats got older, the boilers showed their signs of wear. And some boilers would crack or some boilers would have a slight seam or the seam in them wasn't it Began to weaken.
- [32:13]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [32:14]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
And boiler explosions were common on western river steamboats because these are high pressure engines and boilers were long tubes and you'd have water in the tubes. And then, of course, you're heating the water, making it into steam, and then you're pumping more water into the boilers. But you're taking the water from the Mississippi river and it's muddy. And there was supposed to be a way to filter the water. It was a machine called the doctor, but it didn't work very well. And so boilers would also get sediment in them. And if too much sediment build up, that would be a problem for the boilers as well. And I talked about before that Americans loved fast steamboats and there were actually steamboat races. And we can talk about that if you want to. But captains like to have a fast start from a port. So if they're leaving Memphis, they wanted to have a fast start because that would get people talking, There'd be a buzz about the steamboat. And one way to do that was to sort of preserve the steam and then have it shoot into the boiler at one time. But this was a problem because your boilers, if they weren't heated well enough, they could when the steam hit them. And if there was a crack in the boiler, that would cause an explosion. And so this mania for speed led to boiler explosions. It wasn't the only reason, but it increased the number of boiler explosions. And so there are a lot of boiler explosions that happen right when a boat was starting because the walls of the boilers weren't ready for the steam to hit them. And then when the boiler exploded, it was a bomb going off and you'd have scalding water and people were literally scalded to death.
- [34:00]
Don Wildman
Yeah, right. Charles Dickens made a famous tour around America. He expressed his disdain for steamships because of their tendency to blow up. American steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in the season. Is that a fair assessment?
- [34:15]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
That's an exaggeration.
- [34:16]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [34:17]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
It was not one to two per week, but they were common enough that people didn't get stirred up when all of a sudden a steamboat blew up. It's like, oh, this hasn't happened in two or three months. Now, I calculated in my book as best I could the danger, if you will, of steamboat travel on the Mississippi River. So these are southern steamboats compared to flying.
- [34:41]
Don Wildman
Okay.
- [34:42]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
You know, accidents. And it was a thousand times riskier to travel on a Mississippi river steamboat than to fly in a modern commercial airliner.
- [34:52]
Don Wildman
That's crazy. There's a one particular incident I mean, there's many you could talk about even in New York Harbor. There's some famous ones as well. The Moselle exploded on the 25th of April, 1838. As you said, just after leaving from the Cincinnati waterfront. The captain was trying to set a speed record. These guys are competitors. They're out to prove themselves. Enormous loss of life. 120 to 160 passengers died out of a 300 passenger load. Amazing. Another one. I'll just go through these. Steamboat Sultana exploded and sank on 27 April in 1865, toward the end of this era, just north of Memphis, Tennessee, killed 1864 people. The worst maritime disaster in US history. And I hadn't even heard of this until. Still prepping for this conversation. Crazy.
- [35:41]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
It really is. And the Sultana is a bit of a special case because most of the men who died in that explosion were Union soldiers.
- [35:50]
Don Wildman
Oh, gosh.
- [35:51]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Some of them were former prisoners of war. Some of them were being mustered out of the service.
- [35:57]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [35:58]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
And they were put on this boat. And the Sultana was a well known boat. It was a passenger boat. Yeah, it was very famous. And then during the war, it was used as a cargo boat that, that the US Put into service. A lot of steamboats that were carrying cargo for Union soldiers, you know, ammunition and food and clothing, that kind of thing. So the, the Sultana had long been used by the federal government as a transport, mainly for war material instead of people. But they're trying to get these men home. So they're going to go upriver from Memphis and that's one of the reasons they pack these guys, the soldiers onto the boat because they want to get as many home as quickly as they can.
- [36:38]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [36:39]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Not paying any attention to any kind of safety codes. And the boat actually started to tip because there's so many soldiers on it. And some people speculate that that's one of the reasons that caused the boat to explode is that it was. It was tipping sideways and there was a. Again, a weakness in the boiler. And then you have this explosion and. Yeah, massive, tremendous loss of life.
- [36:59]
Don Wildman
I don't see any lifeboats on those steamships I've seen pictures of.
- [37:03]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
No, no. Steamboats did not have lifebo boats. You went into the water, you were fending for yourself.
- [37:08]
Don Wildman
Exactly.
- [37:09]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
There were a few life preservers, but nothing. Nowhere near the number that you would need for the number of people on the boat.
- [37:16]
Don Wildman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back when the federal government wasn't regulating things, there was a downside to that steamboat. They also faced a Lot of hazards in the water, which I mentioned before as one of the reasons for the design. You had big snags in the water. You had lots of debris in the water on any given day. I mean, I have a boat and on the Hudson river you'd have to check the water to know what's coming down river. It's a big part of having a boat on a river because anything can sink you, puncturing the hulls and so forth. Then you had collisions with other ships in the night. Did they do many night trips? Was it a multi day kind of thing?
- [37:48]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
At first there were no night trips because it was too dangerous to travel at night. Because as you alluded to, you could not see a snag. Today we use hitting a snag as a way, you know, we encountered an obstacle. Yeah, that's where this enters the language is Mississippi river steamboats. Most people don't know what a snag was. They notice wood. But the Mississippi was constantly changing its course. And it would erode its banks as it sort of went, say east or west. And as it eroded the bank, it would bring trees into the river. But these trees have their root system intact. And those would get planted into the bed of the river. And so now you've got this tree that's sort of like a spear, if you will, because the smaller sticks get stripped off because of the current. And sometimes they were just above the water. And if they kind of bobbed above the water, they're called sawyers because it looked like they were sawyers.
- [38:50]
Don Wildman
Oh, interesting.
- [38:51]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
If they're below the water, they were called planters because you couldn't see them.
- [38:54]
Don Wildman
Wow.
- [38:54]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
But you could kind of sometimes tell, you know, the way that the water moved around them. But physically you couldn't see the wood.
- [39:00]
Don Wildman
I have to jump in. There's the origin of the name Tom Sawyer, isn't it? I didn't know that.
- [39:04]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Yeah.
- [39:04]
Don Wildman
Because Samuel Clemens was a riverboat captain. Interesting.
- [39:07]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
He was a riverboat captain and Tom Sawyer. It was a way to measure the water ahead of the steamboat. So you're calling out navigation, if you will, and depth of the water. And you have somebody at the front who's looking for these obstacles. So you're exactly right. Tom Sawyer is related to a steamboat snag. And you're trying to avoid those snags. Obviously there's so many of these in the rivers in the 1820s and 1830s that you're not traveling at night. It's just too dangerous.
- [39:35]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [39:36]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
What the federal government did was there was a man named Henry Shreve who created a snag boat. In fact, he built three snag boats and they were government owned vessels that took care of these snags. They either bashed into them and broke them off. So there was a basically like a battering ram in front of it. It was a horizontal bar that was metal on the outside of it, or they had cranes and winches. So you had guys who would get into the water, wrap chains around a snag, and then the boat would go as fast as it could going backwards and yank these snags out of the water. So these boats became known as Uncle Sam's tooth pullers. They were extraordinarily effective because shipping insurance rates plummeted after the federal government went in and got rid of these snag fields. And in fact, the biggest snag field, it was a dam, which at that time they called a raft. So it was in the Red river and it was by present day Shreveport, hence the name of Shreveport. So Shreve went there and the dam was thick enough where it had silted together and new trees were growing out of it. And you could ride a horse across this dam. Shreve went in there, pulled this dam apart, and now the river is free. And that's why you have Shreveport established in Louisiana.
- [41:01]
Don Wildman
There you go.
- [41:02]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
So the last thing is having these snags removed on the Mississippi river and tributaries. Now you can travel at night because you're pretty well assured that there's not going to be a snack. Of course, you had to be on the lookout for sandbars. These boats caught fire at an alarming rate. They broke down as well.
- [41:21]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [41:22]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
You know, and things could follow. Paddle wheels and that kind of thing.
- [41:24]
Don Wildman
And yet the era thrived up until its ending. And when we come back after this break, we're going to discuss the decline of the steamboat and its legacy. Spoiler alert. Has something to do with the Civil War. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
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- [42:20]
Don Wildman
And we're back. Robert, how does this decline come about for the steamboat? What marks the end of the golden age?
- [42:27]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Well, I'm going to use the R word. Railroads.
- [42:30]
Don Wildman
Oh, yes.
- [42:31]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
So in the 1840s and the 1850s, for the most part, when you built a railroad near the western rivers, it was a short railroad that was designed to get products to a steamboat landing. But in the mid to late 1850s, you have a tremendous railroad boom that's going on in the United States. Now the railroad boom really begins in the Northeast. And the rivers in the Northeast are not as conducive to steamboats as they are in the Midwest of the Lower South. But once you get a higher population density in those areas and you get more economic capital in the United States and more investors, now you start building a network of railroads first in the Midwest states like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, et cetera, Wisconsin. And then you start getting a network in the south. Because railroads, I hate to say it, in some ways were superior to steamboats because you weren't at the mercy of low water.
- [43:33]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [43:34]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
And also you could build a railroad where you wanted it to go, for the most part, not where the rivers already existed. And so railroads over time began to pull business away from steamboats. And. And that gets accelerated by the Civil War.
- [43:55]
Don Wildman
Right now nobody wants to travel during the Civil War. I mean, they use it for obviously cargo and so forth. But what had been developing was this sort of culture of, I don't know, tourism's the wrong word for it, but passenger travel for sure. And of course that gets stemmed by the threat of war. How much were steamboats used in the war? I mean, as battleships of sorts.
- [44:15]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Steamboats were cutting edge. Well, well, ironclads were cutting edge technology between 1861 and 1865. So you had steam ships, those were ocean going vessels. And if people have heard of the Monitor versus the CSS Virginia, the first clash of ironclads in world history that took place just outside of Virginia. The waters of Virginia, that's one example. But on the Mississippi river system, you had the second largest Union fleet. It had 127 boats. And these are. Ironclads are ironclad steamboats. Right. And they assist the Union government, the Union armies, in attacking Confederate locations along the rivers. Because Confederates built a series of forts to try to prevent an invasion. The Union built a series of steamboats that would assist the armies in attacking these forts and penetrating Confederate territory.
- [45:17]
Don Wildman
That's fascinating. And it becomes a way of planners, war planners, to see where this is all going for shipping down the road and the advent of steel ships really has a lot to do with the ironclads and therefore steamships. The economy of the south was obviously destroyed by the Civil War. Had much to do with the fact that they could no longer use these steamships efficiently to move their product along. Not to mention they weren't growing it as much as possible. But all of this contributes to the conclusion of the Civil War and the conclusion of the steamboat era. So you can really chalk it up to both the Civil War and the advent of the railroad. It also boosted the building, though, for a while of the railroads, and that also contributed to it. The rise of the railroads through the Civil War had as much to do with the demise of the steamship into the Civil War. And all of this contributes to the reliance more and more on railroads. And they get killed by the trucks. So on and on it goes. These cause and effects. How do we live with this notion of the steamship now in our memories? I mentioned the romance of it. Of course, Showboat comes along in the early 20th century, the first half of the 20th century, glamorizing that whole era. The Lost Cause movement has to do with that as well. The sort of rise of this sort of, oh, look what we lost kind of idea. You've written the books on this. Where do we stand now on what the steamship meant to America in our memory?
- [46:32]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
The steamboat, as we think about it, you know, this multi tiered vessel. When we think about the Mississippi river steamboat, it's uniquely American because no other country has the same combination of a massive river system, the Mississippi river system that has this incredibly large economy tied to it, moving people up and down the river and the development of a boat that's going to carry both passengers and freight. You don't have anything like this in Europe. Now you do have steam boats, but they're small and the rivers that they're on are not this large net box. And if you think about a large network river, maybe think of the Amazon, but then you don't have the industrial development. So steamboats, as we think about them, are a unique thing to the United States. And Mark Twain, I think, is also responsible for the mythology of the steamboat. Yeah, and he was no lost caused apologist, but he, you know, through writing Tom Sawyer, of course, and Huck Finn, staples of American literature that a lot of Americans have read, those are deeply intertwined with steamboat. The idea of steamboats and what steamboats brought to American communities along the river.
- [47:53]
Don Wildman
Fundamental is a short way of putting it. Without the steamboat, you don't really develop the middle of the country and the rivers that we have today and so much that follows from that. It's fascinating history and you really want to dive into these stories in a much more detailed fashion thanks to this good man here. Professor Robert Gudmundsett has authored the books Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom and the Devil's Own Purgatory, the United States Mississipp River Squadron in the Civil War. I am fascinated by this. I can't wait to get these books. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.
- [48:23]
Professor Robert Gudmundstedt
Thanks. I had fun.
- [48:27]
Don Wildman
Thanks for listening to American history hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, dropping Mondays and Thursdays from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.