steamboat

(click to enlarge)
Steamers Robert E. Lee and the Natchez in the race from New Orleans to St. Louis, … (credit: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

Watercraft propelled by steam; more narrowly, a shallow-draft paddle-wheel steamboat widely used on rivers in the 19th century, particularly the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Though U.S. experiments with steam-powered boats began in 1787, the first regular steamboat service, operating on the Mississippi, was not established until 1812. Until c. 1870 the steamboat dominated the economy, agriculture, and commerce of the middle of the U.S. Because the paddle wheel created turbulence that eroded the banks of narrow channels, river steamboats worked best on broad rivers. The first ocean voyage of a steamboat occurred along the eastern coast of the U.S. in 1809, and Europeans soon developed steamboats capable of crossing Europe's stormy, narrow seas. The first transatlantic steamboat journey was made by the Savannah in 1819, and the first commercial shipping line, the Cunard Line (see Samuel Cunard), was established in 1840. The screw propeller replaced the paddle wheel in oceanic steamers in the later 19th century. See also ocean liner.

For more information on steamboat, visit Britannica.com.

n. a boat that is propelled by a steam engine, especially a paddle-wheel craft of a type used widely on rivers in the 19th century.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The origin of steam-powered boats in America is typically traced to Robert Fulton's experiences on the Hudson River with the Clermont in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The idea dates at least to sixteenth-century Spain, when Blasco de Garay, a native of Barcelona, experimented with a steamer. Work on the concept continued in England and France through the eighteenth century, but in almost every case, the boats were too heavy, unwieldy, and underfinanced. By 1784, innovation met demand when the Scotsman James Watt and others improved the efficiency of the steam engine at about the time America needed better transportation systems for its struggle westward.

James Rumsey, on the Potomac River, and John Fitch, on the Delaware, worked with steamboat ideas in the 1780s that were used by future entrepreneurs. With the successful commercial application of steam by Fulton and his financier, Robert R. Livingston, boats were soon plying the Hudson, Delaware, Connecticut, and Providence Rivers, as well as Lake Champlain. The first steamboat on western waters, the 116-foot sternwheeler New Orleans, was built by Nicolas J. Roosevelt, a partner of Fulton's and ancestor of the future presidents, in Pittsburgh.

The most dramatic improvements in steamboat design came at the hands of Henry Shreve, whose name lives on in the river city in Louisiana. Shreve's second steamboat, the 148-foot-long sidewheeler Washington, featured the machinery and a high-pressure engine on the upper deck (rather than below deck), allowing the flat, shallow hull to draw less water and more safely navigate the treacherous shoals, rapids, and chutes of the Mississippi River system. His round trip from Louisville to New Orleans in 1816 took forty-one days, a journey that would have taken a keelboat several months to complete. Shreve also deserves credit for the design of the snagboat, first seen in the Heliopolis; a snagboat was a steamer with a Samson's chain, A-frame, and block-and-tackle system at its bow that could remove trees and other obstructions from inland waters.

More specialized steamboats, with higher tonnage, were constructed for the Great Lakes beginning in 1818. The following year, the first ship with steam power, the Savannah, crossed the Atlantic to Europe, although it ran mostly under sail and it was thirty years until regular steamship service began on the ocean. By 1825, the steamboat, fueled by wood or coal, was becoming the vehicle of choice for long-distance inland travel, replacing the keelboat, flatboat, barge, and canoe. Ten years later, 700 boats were registered in U.S. waters. The cost of shipping raw materials and manufactured goods dropped considerably, beginning at the deep-water ports of the lower Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico, and after the work done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, shallower ports in other inland river systems. Steamboats soon plied the Red, Colorado, Rio Grande, Arkansas, Savannah, Sacramento, and Columbia Rivers. Ocean steamships, powered by coal and drawing four times as much water as steamboats, began to use a screw propeller instead of paddle-wheels as early as 1851.

The first steamboats were crude, dangerous contraptions with short life spans. Fires, boiler explosions, collisions, snags, ice, and rot took their toll throughout the steamboat era. Various estimates put the average life of an inland steamboat at between three and five years. Shreve's Washington, for example, exploded on the Ohio River on 9 January 1819, killing eight but sparing the captain. Perhaps the worst inland shipping disaster in U.S. history came on 27 April 1865, when the steamer Sultana, carrying more than 2,300 people (mostly Union soldiers returning from Confederate prison camps) exploded seven miles up the Mississippi from Memphis, killing more than 1,700.

In the early years, captains tended to be boat owners, but corporations soon replaced them. By the 1850s, the fancy packets and floating palaces made famous by Mark Twain were churning American rivers. Steam lines like those owned by Diamond Joe Reynolds on the Mississippi and the Fall River line on the East Coast fought smaller firms in court and at the wharves. Boats increased in tonnage and opulence: bars, staterooms, dance halls, and lounges decorated the upper decks, while orchestras, stewards, chefs, and barbers served the needs of travelers. One of the most opulent steamboats was the third boat named J. M. White, finished in 1878 at Louisville for $200,000. It was 325 feet long, powered by 10 boilers—each 34 feet long—and had cylinders 43 inches in diameter. Its cabin stretched 260 feet, featuring chandeliers and a single piece of Belgian carpet 19 feet wide, and its hold carried 8,500 bales of cotton. It could easily carry 300 cabin passengers, 500 deck passengers, and 90 roustabouts. The boat burned only eight months into service.

Steamboat racing was a popular activity. Many captains needed only a slight excuse to start a match with a rival, even with a load of dry goods and decks full of passengers. Perhaps the most famous race took place in 1870 from New Orleans to St. Louis between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez. The Robert E. Lee won the race in a time of three days, eighteen hours, and fourteen minutes. Racing added to the romance of the steamboat era, which also took in gambling, drinking, music, and other pursuits as part of life on the waters.

During the Civil War, steamboats were used to transport troops and in battle, but the coming of the railroad (it had reached the Mississippi in 1854) was a warning sign. The peak period of the steamboat lasted from about 1850 to 1875. With the exception of the great lumber boom of the 1880s in the northern forests of Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin and the shipping of cotton from the Mississippi Delta, steamboats were reduced to short runs, day trips, and ferrying by the early twentieth century. After World War I, diesel-powered towboats and barges increasingly provided the muscle to move goods on the inland rivers; by the end of the twentieth century, only a handful of working steamboats, including the Delta Queen, were in operation as tourist attractions.

Bibliography

Corbin, Annalies. The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers: Archaeological Evidence from the Missouri River. New York: Kluwer Academic, 2000.

Dayton, Frederick Erving. Steamboat Days. New York: Tudor, 1939. Written by a former riverman.

Hunter, Louis C. Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949. The definitive economic history.

Morrison, John H. History of American Steam Navigation. New York: Stephen Daye Press, 1958. The original edition was published in 1903.

Petersen, William J., Steamboating on the Upper Mississippi. Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1968. An anecdotal account.