Steamboats in the 1800s
Steamboats in the 1800s played an integral role in shaping the American West.
Imagine the Wild West and you might conjure up images of wild horses, longhorn cattle, chuckwagons, or maybe some dusty cow town in the middle of nowhere. Wherever you look people are of course riding horses and using horsepower to pull wagons, plows, and anything else that is heavy. While the American frontier certainly was a largely unindustrialized place (not many machines), the truth is that industrialization (the use of machines) had a huge impact on the settlement of the west.
If you’ve been reading History of the West with Sam Payne: And the Wagons Rolled you’ve probably gotten to the point in the story where Sam gets his first job on a steamboat in New Orleans. The story takes place in 1860, and by that time New Orleans would have been home to steady steamboat power.
If you remember your high school history class, you’ll remember learning about a guy named James Watt who learned how to effectively harness the power of steam in 1769. This of course kicked off the Industrial Revolution. Like I tell my students, the Industrial Revolution can be summarized as the time when we started to use machines to do work that people, animals, and forces of nature (wind and water) used to do. It was called a revolution for a reason and is a pretty big deal.
People who lived during this time probably appreciated the power of machines infinitely more than we do today. In one example, in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little House in the Big Woods, she mentions how highly Pa thought of the first threshing machine he ever used. In the book Wilder remembers Pa’s reaction like this:
“It would have taken Henry and Peterson and Pa and me a couple of weeks apiece to thresh as much grain with flails as that machine threshed today. We wouldn’t have got as much wheat, either, and it wouldn’t have been as clean.
“That machine’s a great invention!” he said.
In this passage, you can clearly see how a man who had labored his entire life valued the astonishing power of a machine. What’s this all got to do with steamboats? Well, steamboats essentially harnassed the power of steam to move tremendous amounts of goods against the stiff current of America’s great rivers. It shouldn’t surprise us that Americans were crazy about steamboats in the 1800s and quickly adapted their use in many situations.
While the first models of steamboats appeared in the late 1700’s, it wasn’t until 1807 when Robert Fulton’s famous boat Clermont made its historic first trip up the Hudson River. This really marked the birth of the steamboat as far as practical use was concerned. For geographic reasons, the prime region for steamboat travel in those days was the Mississippi River basin. The rivers there were long, numerous, and offered the best option for transportation. It wasn’t long before many ships were churning up and down the snaking waterways of America's interior. Not coincidently, as steamboat traffic increased the population of this region increased as well. Why?
Steamboat in the 1860s. Photo via loc.gov.
As you might already know, life on the American frontier was rough. There are plenty of stories about how difficult it would have been just to stay alive. Not only was it dangerous, but people had to be self-reliant. It took a special person to live on the frontier, and they weren’t as common as we tend to believe. With the invention of steamboats goods became more reliable. This allowed access to new products in the further reaches of the interior. Traveling to a far-off region was also easier by steamboat and people were more likely to take the chance at moving. If it didn’t work out, they could simply climb on the boat and go back home.
Steamboats were necessarily what we’d call fast. They generally moved at 5-8 miles per hour. This however was a constant speed, unlike traveling by horse and wagon where you had to stop and rest the horses. It was also a speed that could be maintained with large amounts of cargo on board. As a result, more people were willing to make the move further west. Like almost everything else machines touch, American civilization spread faster with steam power.
Here is a brief video talking about how steamboats work.
Steamboats in the 1800s were fairly well adapted to the rivers they worked. A man named Henry Miller Shreve was one engineer who designed boats well-suited for the Mississippi and its tributaries. In fact, Shreve developed a boat with a sort of mechanical jaw on it’s bow to remove snags from the river. These jaws grabbed the submerged tree and then hoisted them on deck. Once on deck, they were run through a sawmill on the deck of the boat itself. It was a very important invention to making river traffic safer.
Snags were one of the many dangers steamboats in the 1800s faced. In fact, one source indicates that over 289 steamboats sank during the mid 19th century on the Mississippi River. Another indicates that over 4,000 people died in riverboat accidents during the same time period. If it wasn’t snags that sent them to the bottom it could have been a sudden explosion of the engine. Steamboats operated at very high pressures, and apparently tested the engineering of the day. Boiler explosions were not uncommon.
Towns popped all along the banks of those rivers the boats frequented. Much like railroad towns would be developed later, these river towns were soon the busiest places on the frontier. One important city was Nebraska City. Nebraska City, and several other cities, were important because they were the closest steam-powered boats could get to some of the western settlements. One of the really surprising findings I had while doing research for the book was how many people were living in the West by 1860. Colorado for example, boasted a population of over 34,000 people by 1860. These people needed goods and the riverboats brought those things in bulk as close as they could. That closest point was often Nebraska City. It was the job of the bullwhackers to close the distance. That was why frontier trails saw armies of bullwhackers during the mid-1800s until the railroad was complete.
Here is a birds-eye view of Nebraska City in 1868. Photo via loc.gov.
As mentioned, oftentimes we imagine the frontier as a place void of machines and motors. While that can be true depending on time and place, the impact of steam power rippled through the entire region. If it hadn’t been for riverboats carrying people, goods, and ideas up the rivers in bulk, it may not have been possible for some of the early settlements to pop up as quickly as they did. By today’s standards riverboats were definitely dangerous, dirty, and slow. However, to people who were born into a world without steam, they were incredible tools capable of completing a remarkable amount of work.
