New Orleans Steamboat Stories: The Brief Lives of Mississippi Riverboats Kindle Edition

Great civilizations throughout history have been established along the major rivers of the world. In Africa, the Egyptians had the Nile. The Babylonians had the Tigris and Euphrates. In Europe, they had the Danube, the Rhine, the Tiber, and the Seine. And it was no different in America where the Missouri River, the Ohio River, and scores of other tributaries combine to form the Mississippi River as it twists its sinuous way south from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.Steamboats shaped America’s future, its economy, and its culture while expanding trade and expanding the country’s footprint into new territories. This economic expansion was not limited to New Orleans, but also to Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Memphis, Louisville, Nashville, St. Paul, Kansas City, and Chattanooga. A round trip voyage from Pittsburgh to New Orleans that once took six months could now be accomplished in forty-five days. At the same time steamboats made it possible to circulate and disseminate the news and the mail, to spread the various immigrant cultures, food, and music.It is sometimes remarkable that steamboats came to New Orleans at all, but as Fulton, Livingston, and Roosevelt knew, the river would bring everything downriver to New Orleans and was vital to bring people and goods where there were few roads and fewer railroads, where travel by stagecoach was improbable if not impossible.Between 1804 and 1820 there were eight steamboats enrolled in New Orleans with the United States Custom House that registered St. Louis as their home port. That number would increase steadily over the next few decades until it reached thirty-six between 1861 and 1870. However, by the 1850s the typical Mississippi River steamboat had reached the zenith of marine design. From that point forward, the modifications and improvements were more superficial such as the explosion of Victorian gingerbread decoration throughout the interior spaces. Between 1840 and 1880 more than 4,800 steamboats were constructed. In New Orleans as in other bustling river cities like Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Memphis, businessmen who had the available cash or the banking connections to mortgage their assets to raise the necessary cash would race to build steamboats, lured by the promise of quick profits.The steamboat continued to be the primary form of transportation even as the railroads continued to expand their influence into freight transportation. Newer, bigger steamboats were built and by the end of the 1860s the cotton trade had recovered and had surpassed their output from a decade earlier.New Orleans Steamboat Stories brings you the stories of a handful of the different steamboats and the people who lived and worked on the Western rivers. They are brief in nature as the average life of a steamboat was generally short. But their impact culturally and commercially, esthetically and economically, made a lasting impact on the development of America. Read more