Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History

To

ALICE BERGLAND

and

JEAN G. HUNTER

Copyright

Copyright © 1949 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Copyright © renewed 1977 by Louis C. Hunter.

Introduction to the Dover Edition copyright © 1993 by John H. White.

All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 1993, is an unabridged, slightly corrected republication of the work originally published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., in 1949. For this edition a new Introduction to the Dover Edition by John H. White has been added.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunter, Louis C.

Steamboats on the western rivers : an economic and technological history / Louis C. Hunter ; with the assistance of Beatrice Jones Hunter ; with a new introduction by John H. White. — Dover ed. p. cm.

Unabridged, slightly corrected republication of the work originally published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., in 1949 — Verso t.p.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780486157788

1. Inland water transportation — West (U.S.) 2. River steamers — United States. I. Hunter, Beatrice Jones. II. Title.

HE627.H8 1993

386’.3’0978 — dc20

93-31494

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y 11501

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

THIS BOOK IS THE BEST GENERAL REFERENCE VOLUME AVAILABLE ON the subject of American riverboats. Few survey histories in any subject area are as deep and broad as Professor Hunter’s book, for it delves into just about every aspect of river boating from engineering to finances, to the eating habits of passengers. The author begins with the introduction and expansion of steamboats on the inland waters. He next devotes two chapters to the technical aspects of steamboat design and construction. River improvements, especially with a view to overcoming impediments such as snags, sandbars and rapids, are discussed in another chapter. The everyday life of officers, pilots, engineers and deck hands is handled in other chapters. Even wages and health care are explained. As an economic historian, Hunter pays special attention to traffic, competition, capital needs and the bottom line — profits and losses. Human traffic is treated in two separate chapters. The comforts and luxuries awaiting first-class or cabin passengers are contrasted with the hardships and privations endured by the steerage or deck passengers. Other sections deal with such diverse subjects as the river during the Civil War, competition from railroads, efforts to regulate river traffic, the slow decline of the packet trade and the succession of the towboat and barge traffic.

Before closing this brief account, we must relate something about the author himself, Louis C. Hunter. He was born in 1898 in Wellsburg, West Virginia, an Ohio River town some 15 miles south of Wheeling. Later his family moved west, and Hunter graduated from high school in Moline, Illinois — another river town, but this one situated on the banks of the mighty Mississippi. It would appear that young Louis was never far from the sight or sound of a sternwheeler. He completed his undergraduate work in nearby Knox College in 1920, but was uncertain what career path to follow. Engineering ranked high in his estimation because of two older and much-admired cousins who had both gone into that field. During his student days, Louis had some exposure to practical mechanics as well, for he worked briefly as a machinist and as an electrical switch tester during summer recesses. A strong math background was yet another reason to enter the world of applied science. A superior academic record at Knox — he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa — helped Hunter receive a Harvard Engineering School fellowship. After two years at Harvard, his enthusiasm for engineering declined to such a point that he decided to change majors. The shift was a rather dramatic one, for he selected American history and came to specialize in economic history. He had at last found the right niche and, ever the diligent student, Hunter received his master’s degree in 1922 and his doctor’s six years later. His dissertation topic on Pittsburgh’s early iron industry was as much a technical discussion as it was an economic history. While working on the iron industry, he spent endless hours reading through early regional newspapers housed in the Carnegie Institute Library.

It is thought by one of his surviving friends, Lynwood Bryant, that in the course of these readings, Hunter came upon abundant references to steamboats and so decided to pursue this avenue of study once the dissertation was concluded. It would also seem logical to assume that the exposure to river traffic during his youth may have stimulated an interest in the subject. But one can be sure that the interest, once ignited, was not casual or short-lived. Hunter spent at least twenty years in the preparation of this work. In most of his relationships, Louis Hunter was a congenial and even an entertaining person, but when it came to his research, he could be difficult. Editing the book was a long and troublesome task for both the author and the publisher. Only the mediation and encouragement of Professor Arthur H. Cole, Chairman of the Committee on Research in Economic History at Harvard and one of Hunter’s former teachers, helped guide the warring factions along the path to publication.

The book was favorably received when it came out in 1949. The American Historical Association awarded it the Dunning Prize just three years later. Some years earlier, 1937 to be exact, Hunter had become associated with American University, Washington, D.C., where he would remain for another thirty years as a professor of history. Most of his time and energy was consumed in teaching, traveling and raising a family, but there was also time for research: Hunter took on an ambitious project he came to call A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930. Never one to think small, he mapped out a three-volume study of water, steam and electrical power. The first of the trilogy, Water Power, was published by the Hagley Foundation and The University Press of Virginia in 1979. This monumental piece of scholarship, bolstered by his previous work, won Professor Hunter the Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology in 1983. The other two volumes appeared posthumously. Steam Power was published in 1985 by The University Press of Virginia, and the electrical volume The Transmission of Power (co-authored by Lynwood Bryant) was brought out by MIT Press in 1991, some seven years after the author’s demise.

Dr. Louis C. Hunter died on March 22,1984 at the Harvard Community Health Plan Hospital in Boston at the age of 85. He had been living in Brookline, Massachusetts, previous to that time to be near his two daughters, Jean and Grennelle, who resided in the area. The man is gone but his work lives long and is now, once again, available to a new audience through the present edition.

Hayfield

Marshall, Virginia

JOHN H. WHITE

FOREWORD

The development of steam navigation upon the great internal rivers of our West is a phase of American economic history too long relegated to the writers of romance or at best to authors who, though sometimes productive of excellent monographs, have been concerned with quite limited objectives. The most scholarly previous survey of a general character is Professor F. H. Dixon’s little known Traffic History of the Mississippi River System, buried in a National Waterways Commission report of 1909 — which also, it may be noted, was compounded some time ago. No one, prior to Professor Hunter, has had the fortitude and scholarly capacities to gather together the multitude of individual data regarding technology, operation, and governmental intervention — obviously extending his net much more widely than Professor Dixon — and then to build his fragments into a consistent, sound, and yet readable whole.

Accordingly, the Committee on Research in Economic History welcomed the opportunity some three or four years ago to participate in the underwriting of Professor Hunter’s book. Subsequently, it volunteered to see the manuscript through the press; and its offer was accepted by the other organizations — the American Historical Association and the American Council of Learned Societies — which were also concerned with the project. Unhappily for the author, as well as for scholars who might sooner have had the benefit of Professor Hunter’s findings, this transfer of responsibility resulted in delays beyond those for which the author could be held accountable. At all events, the Committee takes pleasure on behalf of the associated institutions as well as itself in offering Professor Hunter’s exhaustive study to all those interested in the evolution of steamboating on our western rivers.

ARTHUR H. COLE

Chairman, Committee on

Research in Economic History

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM INDEBTED TO MANY INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS FOR ASSISTANCE in one form or another in the collection of materials and their presentation in this study. A place on the title page is the least recognition that can be made of the very great contribution of my wife in time, thought, and tedious labor, devoted in large part to the most exacting but least rewarding aspects of research and writing. On the difficult technological sections, assistance in the form of comments, criticisms, and suggestions has been received from many, especially Frederick Way, Jr., T. R. Tarn, S. Colum Gilfillan, Greville Bathe, John Earle, W. Mack Angus, Frank A. Taylor, Donald T. Wright, and Harry D. Knox. Herbert Ashton, Leland D. Baldwin, Merle Curti, Ludwig M. Homberger, Arthur G. Peterson, and George R. Taylor have read portions of the manuscript and given me the benefit of their comments and suggestions. Virginia Goodwin, Florence Kane, and Harold M. Somers have given valuable assistance in the search for materials in distant libraries. Credit for the maps goes to Isabella Brockway Walker and for the graphs and drawings to Frederick Kemp. Katherine A. Bamford, Jane H. Roberts, and Sylvia F. Rosenbloom bore the main burden of the typing. The patient reader no less than the author owes much to Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck and Catherine Sturtevant for their careful editing of the manuscript. Although the several publishing houses which have in turn assumed responsibility for the publication of this study have at times seemed more of a burden than an aid to historical research, I am grateful to the members of their editorial and technical staffs for the essential contributions they have made to the final product.

The role of the library, the archives, and the museum is so fundamental and all-embracing that it is easy to take it for granted, as those of us who spend much of our time in their confines are wont to do. As major collaborators in research, the following institutions are listed:

The American Antiquarian Society

The American University Library

The Baker Memorial Library of Dartmouth College

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

The Cincinnati Public Library

The Campus Maritus State Memorial of the Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society

The Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio

The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania

The Library of Congress

The Louisville Free Public Library

The Missouri Historical Society

The National Archives

The New York Public Library

The River Museum of the Sons and Daughters of Pioneer Rivermen

Although there is a certain unfairness in singling out members of the staffs of institutions, I have obtained such special or repeated assistance from some individuals that formal acknowledgment of this aid is desirable: Anne Jensen, of the American University Library; Ann Duncan Brown, Beverley H. Brown, Stewart Dickson, Donald G. Patterson, Thomas S. Shaw, and Harold O. Thomen, of the Library of Congress; Colleen C. Armantrout, Hermine M. Baumhofer, Mary Jane Christopher, Forrest R. Holdcamper, and John E. Nolen, of the National Archives; A. Edmund Johnson, of the United States Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation; and the late William M. Lytle, of the United States Department of Commerce.

For assistance in research, I am indebted to the Social Science Research Council for two grants-in-aid. The publication of this study was originally planned under the sponsorship of the American Historical Association’s Committee on the Carnegie Revolving Fund for Publications, under the successive chairmanships of Sidney R. Packard and Ray A. Billington. Professor Packard’s persistent efforts during the war years to overcome the difficulties of obtaining a publisher and securing the necessary funds deserve a special word of appreciation. The circumstances which have delayed publication some five years beyond the date originally contemplated were outside his control and that of his successor. The steady rise in the costs of publication presented obstacles that have been surmounted only by means of the generous grants of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Committee on Research in Economic History of the Social Science Research Council, supplementing the original subsidy of the American Historical Association.

The transfer of sponsorship to the Committee on Research in Economic History in the fall of 1947, dictated primarily by financial considerations, resulted in placing upon its chairman, Arthur H. Cole, a burden for seeing the work through publication which ought never to have been his. For his understanding, patience, and ill-requited labors, I am particularly indebted.

Washington, D.C.

LOUIS C. HUNTER

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE - The Steamboat as an Economic Instrument

CHAPTER 1 - THE INTRODUCTION AND EXTENSION OF STEAM NAVIGATION IN THE WEST

CHAPTER 2 - THE STRUCTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE WESTERN STEAMBOAT

CHAPTER 3 - THE MECHANICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE WESTERN STEAMBOAT

CHAPTER 4 - THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE RIVERS

CHAPTER 5 - THE TECHNIQUES OF STEAMBOAT OPERATION

CHAPTER 6 - STEAMBOAT ACCIDENTS

PART TWO - The Steamboat as a Business Institution

CHAPTER 7 - THE ORGANIZATION OF STEAMBOAT TRANSPORTATION

CHAPTER 8 - LEDGERS AND BALANCES

CHAPTER 9 - CABIN PASSAGE

CHAPTER 10 - DECK PASSAGE

CHAPTER 11 - STEAMBOAT LABOR

PART THREE - Peak and Decline

CHAPTER 12 - THE CRITICAL DECADE

CHAPTER 13 - THE MOVEMENT FOR STEAMBOAT REGULATION

CHAPTER 14 - WAR AND POSTWAR YEARS

CHAPTER 15 - THE TRIUMPH OF THE RAILROADS

CHAPTER 16 - YEARS OF ADJUSTMENT

Appendix

INDEX

A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS - IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST

DOVER MARITIME BOOKS

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE - The Steamboat as an Economic Instrument

CHAPTER 1 - THE INTRODUCTION AND EXTENSION OF STEAM NAVIGATION IN THE WEST

CHAPTER 2 - THE STRUCTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE WESTERN STEAMBOAT

CHAPTER 3 - THE MECHANICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE WESTERN STEAMBOAT

CHAPTER 4 - THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE RIVERS

CHAPTER 5 - THE TECHNIQUES OF STEAMBOAT OPERATION

CHAPTER 6 - STEAMBOAT ACCIDENTS

PART TWO - The Steamboat as a Business Institution

CHAPTER 7 - THE ORGANIZATION OF STEAMBOAT TRANSPORTATION

CHAPTER 8 - LEDGERS AND BALANCES

CHAPTER 9 - CABIN PASSAGE

CHAPTER 10 - DECK PASSAGE

CHAPTER 11 - STEAMBOAT LABOR

PART THREE - Peak and Decline

CHAPTER 12 - THE CRITICAL DECADE

CHAPTER 13 - THE MOVEMENT FOR STEAMBOAT REGULATION

CHAPTER 14 - WAR AND POSTWAR YEARS

CHAPTER 15 - THE TRIUMPH OF THE RAILROADS

CHAPTER 16 - YEARS OF ADJUSTMENT

Appendix

INDEX

A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS - IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST

DOVER MARITIME BOOKS

PART ONE

The Steamboat as an Economic Instrument

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER 1

THE INTRODUCTION AND EXTENSION OF STEAM NAVIGATION IN THE WEST

THE STEAMBOAT WAS THE PRODUCT OF THE THOUGHT AND INGENUITY OF many men. During the second half of the eighteenth century numerous experimenters in England, on the continent, and in this country were working on the problem of applying steam power to the propulsion of vessels.¹ In America both the experimental and the practical beginnings of steam navigation occurred on the rivers of the North Atlantic seaboard, but the new mechanism was quickly transferred to the western rivers. Here the steamboat attained a leading position in inland transportation and commerce within a few years and held it for a full generation. In the development of the greater part of the vast Mississippi basin from a raw frontier society to economic and social maturity the steamboat was the principal technological agent. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century the wheels of commerce in this extensive region were almost literally paddle wheels. The western steamboat came to be regarded as the typical American steamboat, partly because in the West there was greater dependence on steam navigation and more extensive use of it, and partly because the distinctive features of design, construction, and operation of the western steamboat made this vessel widely known throughout the world.

The history of the steamboat has been told primarily in terms of the activities and achievements of the individual inventors associated with its development. The economic, social, and technological conditions that prepared the way for the steamboat by creating a need for it and by placing it within the range of practical achievement deserve greater emphasis. Overland transportation at the end of the eighteenth century lagged far behind that on the open sea. The great strides made in the art of building and sailing ships during the preceding centuries had not been paralleled on land. In America roads were especially poor, the costs of carriage high, and the time of trips very slow. Except to serve local needs highway transport played a minor role in commercial intercourse. Rivers made up the principal inland waterways, but the conditions of river navigation did not permit the use of sails on most streams except in a very minor way. Unable to exploit the power of the winds and with the power of running water available only in a downstream direction, river men were handicapped by their reliance on human energy for propulsion. The problems of internal transportation and communication were further accentuated by the great distances presented by a nation of continental expanse. Our population, wrote an American, James Renwick, in 1830, with the wants and curiosity of the highest civilization, is still so scattered over a vast region, as to demand rapid means of communication, and great foreign importations. ² The urgent need of the time was for a source of power by which vessels could be propelled quickly and cheaply both up stream and down on our great inland waterways.

It was in the trans-Appalachian West that a new mode of transportation was most needed and it was the steamboat which supplied the need. The invention of the steamboat, declared a communication to the Cincinnati Gazette in 1815, was intended for us. The puny rivers of the East are only as creeks, or convenient waters on which experiments may be made for our advantage. ³ So long as the nation’s population was concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard, the older methods of communication were fairly adequate. The Atlantic Ocean with its bays, sounds, and tidal rivers provided a trunk and branch system joining all parts of the tidewater and adjacent regions. On this system ships running in the coasting trades supplied transportation service that reasonably satisfied the economic organization and needs of the time. The smaller classes of sailing vessels could navigate the lower reaches of the larger rivers and, favored by the depth, breadth, and comparative straightness of the Hudson, could beat their way as far up as Albany. The situation, however, changed greatly with the advance of settlement west of the Appalachians and the spread of population through the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. The maintenance of economic and cultural contacts between the older and newer sections of the country and within the vast interior basin presented great difficulties. Sails were of little value in the navigation of the shallow, winding, and often narrow rivers which formed the principal waterways of the interior. The advantage of swift currents for downstream traffic was largely nullified by the added labor of moving boats upstream. Upstream traffic had to be moved almost entirely by muscle power, and, save for an occasional experiment with horse boats, the burden of this heavy work fell upon men.

When steam power was introduced into this country, therefore, the great need for it was not in industry, where water and horse power were quite adequate to most requirements, nor in the coasting trade or foreign commerce, but rather in the field of inland commerce, above all in the commercial intercourse of the interior basin of the continent. Hence it was quite natural that most of the early experimentation with the steam engine in this country should have been carried on by men seeking to apply it to the navigation of rivers. Here, too, we have the basic reason for the lead which Americans early assumed and long held in the development of steam navigation on inland waterways. The chief object of their [American] engineers has been to render steam useful in navigation, ran an English comment upon this subject, and considering the importance to America of navigating her immense rivers, it is not surprising that the application of the power of steam to propelling vessels should by persevering efforts have been first carried into successful practice on that continent. ⁴

The early experimentation with steamboats in this country took place along the rivers of the Atlantic seaboard where the great bulk of the population and trade of the country and the greatest technical resources were concentrated. Here two decades of activity by numerous experimenters, particularly Oliver Evans, John Fitch, Robert Fulton, James Rumsey, and John Stevens, culminated in the practical success that is popularly associated with the name of Fulton. As early as 1790 John Fitch operated for a time a steamboat of his own design and construction in commercial service between Philadelphia and Trenton. Continuous commercial operation of steamboats in this country dates from the inauguration of service on the Hudson River in 1807 and 1808 by Fulton and Livingston and on the Delaware River in 1809 by John Stevens.⁵

The traditional account which, pictures the voyages of the Clermont on the Hudson in 1807 and the New Orleans on the Ohio and Mississippi in 1811—12 as epochmaking events with Robert Fulton playing a role in American technology comparable to that of Watt in England has been substantially changed by the results of the research of recent years in this field. There is good reason to question whether Fulton’s name should be placed much if any higher than the names of John Fitch, John Stevens, or even Oliver Evans. Exclusive privileges of navigation and the financial support deriving from his partnership were mainly responsible for a certain priority of achievement which Fulton established over most other men active in the field. The controversies which have raged over the authorship of major mechanical innovations lose much of their significance in the face of the general recognition today of the social character of inventions. The steamboat, like practically every mechanical complex of importance, was the product of many men working with a common heritage of technical knowledge and equipment and impelled by a common awareness of need.

The Development of Steam Navigation in the West

Within five years of the practical successes of Fulton and Stevens in the East, steamboat navigation was begun on the western waters.⁶ Of the men prominently identified with the beginnings of steam navigation in this country nearly all were aware of the peculiar significance of the steamboat for the West. Rumsey, Fitch, Evans, and Fulton, easterners all, carried on their experimentation with the western rivers in mind. As early as 1785 James Rumsey in a letter to Washington expressed his conviction that boats of passage may be made to go against the current of the Mesisipia or Ohio river . . . from sixty to one hundred miles per day.⁷ Rumsey appears to have gone no further than this, but Fitch, Evans, and Fulton made and prosecuted plans for exploiting the western field.

Having lived for years in the trans-Appalachian country, John Fitch had a firsthand knowledge of its conditions and needs. He long cherished the hope of introducing steamboats on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Repeatedly he proclaimed the ability of steam to conquer the currents of these great rivers and urged the immense value of the new mode of navigation to the West. At one time he sought to persuade a well-to-do citizen of Pittsburgh to finance the building of a steamboat at that place, pledging his reputation that the vessel would make one hundred miles a day against the current of the Ohio. More than once he sought to enlist the support of Robert Morris in a scheme for operating steamboats from New Orleans to Kentucky or the Illinois River, preparing detailed estimates of cost, expenses, profits, and traffic. At one despairing period when the Virginia grant to him of exclusive rights was about to expire, Fitch pleaded with the members of his steamboat company to supply the funds needed to complete a second vessel. With the additional aid of a land grant from Congress he proposed to take a steamboat from the Delaware by sea to New Orleans and thence upstream to the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. Our expectations of extensive profits, you well know, he reminded the stockholders, were built on exclusive rights to navigate the Western Waters.⁸

Oliver Evans too was impressed with the great importance of steam navigation for the West. As early as 1785, according to his account, he sought to convince a western acquaintance of the great value of steam-propelled boats for the western rivers, and in 1802 he entered into an arrangement with certain western men to build a steamboat to run on the Mississippi.⁹ This project neared completion in the following year when an engine and machinery built by Evans at Philadelphia were shipped to New Orleans for installation in the waiting hull. The steamboat was ready for trial in the spring of 1803, when a flood carried the vessel half a mile inland, leaving it high and dry. The return of the steamboat to the water was found to be impractical, and the machinery was removed to a sawmill.¹⁰

Evans continued, however, to advocate the use of steamboats to overcome the difficulties of western river navigation.¹¹ His enthusiasm was based in part on his conviction that only his high-pressure engine could supply the power necessary to counter the swift currents of the Ohio and Mississippi. He believed that the Boulton and Watt low-pressure engine employed by Fulton was quite inadequate, and he sought to convert the Fulton group to the use of his own engine. Although the high-pressure type of engine, which Evans was the first to develop in this country and which he introduced widely for industrial purposes in the West, came into general use on western steamboats, Evans made little direct contribution to steam navigation. Only one steamboat, the Oliver Evans (renamed the Constitution) was built by the Evans firm at Pittsburgh. Begun in 1812 but not finished for several years because of financial difficulties, this vessel brought embarrassment rather than fame to the inventor because of a disastrous explosion.¹²

Fulton’s interest in the steam navigation of the western rivers was evidently awakened at an early date. James Renwick, whose biography of Fulton was based in part on a firsthand acquaintance with his subject, declared that Fulton and Livingston, though seeking and obtaining an exclusive grant from the state of New York for the steam navigation of its waters, had not, before the maiden voyage of the Clermont, fully realized the great opportunities presented by the Hudson River. They looked to the rapid Mississippi and its branches as the place where their triumph was to be achieved; and the original boat, modelled for shallow waters, was announced as intended for the navigation of that river. ¹³ The New York newspaper, the American Citizen, in describing the maiden voyage of the Clermont, referred to Mr. Fulton’s Ingenious Steam Boat, invented with a view to the navigation of the Mississippi from New Orleans upwards . . . It is said it will make a progress of two [miles per hour] against the current of the Mississippi, and if so it will certainly be a very valuable acquisition to the commerce of Western States. Describing a trial trip of the Clermont, some days before her maiden voyage, Fulton wrote to Livingston: Whatever may be the fate of steamboats for the Hudson, everything is completely proved for the Mississippi, and the object is immense. ¹⁴ In expressing to Joel Barlow his satisfaction in the performance of the Clermont, Fulton added, It [the steamboat] will give a cheap and quick conveyance to the merchandise on the Mississippi, Missouri, and other great rivers, which are now laying open their treasures to the enterprise of our countrymen. ¹⁵ Within two weeks of the successful maiden voyage Fulton was writing to obtain information regarding Mississippi River navigation: the velocity of the current, the size and form of boats, the number of hands, the size of cargo, the upstream speed of boats, and the amount of upstream traffic.¹⁶

Fulton’s partner, Robert Livingston, had several years earlier negotiated the Louisiana Purchase. Who was in a better position to understand the commercial needs and opportunities of the Mississippi Valley and to realize the significance of steam navigation for the rivers which afforded the main channels of communication for this vast region? Moreover, the Chancellor’s brother, Edward, attracted by the promise of the country, had gone west in 1804 to restore his broken fortunes, practicing law at New Orleans, where he remained for many years and attained a position of some prominence in public affairs. Edward Livingston was, therefore, not only familiar with the commercial situation in the Mississippi Valley and able to keep his brother informed of conditions, but by being on the spot he could do much to advance the interests of Fulton and his associates in political and legal matters.¹⁷

As far as Fulton was concerned, the plan to operate steamboats between Pittsburgh and New Orleans was simply part of a vaster scheme suggested by his fertile imagination and elastic ambition. At this period, according to a biographer, Fulton meditated nothing less than the introduction of steam navigation throughout the civilized world. ¹⁸ While the western project was in preparation he was attempting, with the assistance of an English correspondent, to interest English capital in steamboat projects on the Thames and other English rivers. In 1811 he sought from the Russian czar the exclusive privilege of running steamboats between St. Petersburg and Kronstadt and in the following year he entered into an agreement with an Englishman to introduce steamboats on the Ganges.¹⁹ In the spring of 1813 Fulton wrote to Jefferson that within four or five years he would have a line of steamboats from Quebec to Mexico and St. Mary’s. The route is up the St. Lawrence, over Lake Champlain, down the Hudson to Brunswick, down the Delaware to Philadelphia, by land carriage to Pittsburgh, down the Ohio and Mississippi, to Red river, up it to above Natchitochez.²⁰

In preparing to extend their activities to the West, Fulton and Livingston sought to smooth the way and protect their investment by obtaining exclusive steam navigation rights similar to those granted them by the state of New York. Securing monopoly rights on the western rivers was a far more difficult task, since for all but a small portion of their courses the trunk lines of the Ohio and Mississippi were interstate boundaries. For this reason grants from all the bordering states were desirable if not indispensable. Undaunted by this difficulty, the partners sent petitions to the authorities in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Upper Louisiana Territory. In their petition to the Kentucky legislature they explained that the federal patent which they possessed was of too short duration to meet their needs, in view of the difficulties and expenses involved.²¹ Declaring that their vessels would carry goods in one-third less time and at one-third less cost than was customary at that time, they requested exclusive privileges for a twenty-year period as a reward for building one steamboat, with an extension of five additional years for each of the next two boats. In a letter to the governor of Upper Louisiana Territory the partners noted further that to obtain the $200,000 required to put their project into operation it was necessary to hold out the prospect of adequate protection in their rights. ²²

The reception of the petitions of Fulton and Livingston was unfavorable. From the legislature of Indiana they sought and obtained a charter of incorporation, but their requests for grants of exclusive privileges were denied or ignored in all but one legislative body. This response was not surprising. Westerners, harboring a grievance against the commercial East for what they believed to be indifference to western interests, naturally viewed eastern schemes with suspicion. Public sentiment, particularly in the West, did not take kindly to monopoly. The idea of patenting inventions took hold slowly in this region and was not encouraged by the uncertainty, confusion, and litigation growing out of the defects of the federal patent law and its administration. ²³ The suits, threats of suits, and countersuits in the West resulting from the conflicting patent claims of Fulton, Evans, French, and others with respect to steam engines and steam navigation were not calculated to promote acceptance of state grants of exclusive rights.²⁴ Moreover, the growing property interests at stake in the navigation of the western rivers were too great to be placed lightly in jeopardy. As the report of the committee of the Kentucky legislature, rejecting the petition of Fulton and Livingston, concluded: It would . . . be dangerous and impolitic to invest a man or set of men with the sole power of cramping, controlling, or directing the most considerable part of the commerce of the country for so great a period. ²⁵

The one favorable response to the petitions of the eastern partners came from the Territory of Orleans (Louisiana after 1812), strategically placed athwart the Mississippi in its lower reaches. This success was due to their good fortune in winning the support of the governor of the Territory, W. C. C. Claiborne, and to the influence of Edward Livingston, by this time well established at New Orleans. On a visit to the East in 1810 Claiborne had met and talked with both Fulton and Livingston and had ridden on their steamboat. He was greatly impressed with the possibilities of steam navigation for the Mississippi River, and on his return to New Orleans he personally presented to the legislature their petition for exclusive rights on the waters of the Territory and urged favorable action.²⁶ The legislature responded with a grant of the desired monopoly for a base term of eighteen years on certain stipulated conditions of performance and rates.²⁷

Western opinion, especially that centering in Ohio River towns, was incensed by the Orleans grant. Editorials and communications to the newspapers denounced the attempt to monopolize what was almost a public necessity to the people of a large section of the country and demanded the annihilation of the swindling patent rights.²⁸ The legislature of Orleans, it was declared, might as well have extended the restriction to a total interdict of the navigation of the Mississippi within the border of the State or shut the port of New Orleans against us.²⁹ Our road to market, read one protest in the Cincinnati Western Spy, "must and will be free; this monopolizing disposition of individuals will only arouse the citizens of the West to insist on and obtain recognition of their rights, viz. the privilege of passing and repassing, unmolested, on the common highway of the West."³⁰ Mass meetings protesting against the monopoly were held, and at least two state legislatures, those of Ohio and Kentucky, passed resolutions denouncing the monopoly and urging congressional intervention.³¹

The outcry in the West against the monopoly grant seems understandable enough today; yet there was nothing new or unusual in the procedure adopted by Fulton and Livingston or in the action of the Orleans legislature. The use of exclusive rights to reward inventors goes back in this country to the colonial period, and in the years following the independence patents were issued by several of the states.³² These patents were the result of petition and special legislation, for no general patent laws existed at the time.³³ Most of the men engaged actively in experimentation with steamboats sought, through state grants, the protection and assistance of exclusive rights to the use of their inventions. Not only was John Fitch granted exclusive rights to steam navigation in five states — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia — but he hoped to obtain similar rights on the western rivers.³⁴ James Rumsey applied to seven Atlantic seaboard states for exclusive rights to the use of his boat inventions and in three states obtained favorable action.³⁵ Robert R. Livingston and John Stevens each secured grants of exclusive rights in at least one state.³⁶ Oliver Evans enjoyed the benefits of such grants in the case of certain inventions, and he favored this method of reward for those who should succeed in the steam navigation of the Mississippi.³⁷ On the failure of Fitch to develop his steamboat in compliance with the terms of the New York grant, the grant was revoked and then given to Livingston in 1798; in 1803 its renewal was sought and obtained jointly by Livingston and Fulton. In asking for exclusive privileges in the West the eastern partners simply acted according to what was the generally accepted pattern in the older states.

Having obtained a grant of exclusive rights on the lower Mississippi, Fulton and his associates proceeded with their plan of establishing steamboat service over the entire length of the rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. A preliminary survey of the rivers was made by Nicholas Roosevelt, one of the associates, and work on the first steamboat was soon under way. In late October 1811 this vessel, the New Orleans (371 tons), with Roosevelt in command, left Pittsburgh on her 2,000-mile maiden voyage to New Orleans.³⁸ After various stoppages and delays she reached her destination in the second week of January 1812. Thereafter the New Orleans was placed in the New Orleans-Natchez trade, where she ran profitably for her owners until her loss in 1814 as the result of striking a stump. Within the next several years three more steamboats of substantial tonnage were built and placed in operation by the eastern group: the Vesuvius (340 tons, 1814), the Aetna (360 tons, 1815), and the second New Orleans (324 tons, 1815).³⁹

In the meantime a group of men at Brownsville, some fifty miles above Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River, entered the new field, building and putting into operation several steamboats. This group included the competent mechanics and inventors Daniel French and Henry M. Shreve. With their first vessel, the diminutive Comet (25 tons, 1813), the French-Shreve group had little success, but the Despatch (25 tons, 1814), the Enterprise (75 tons, 1814), and the Washington (403 tons, 1816) established very favorable records. Encouraged by the practical success and reputed high profits of some of these pioneer boats and refusing to be intimidated by warnings and prosecutions by the Fulton group, other men entered the steamboat business. In 1817 fourteen and in 1819 thirty-one steamboats were reported running on western rivers, chiefly between Louisville and New Orleans.

The story of the legal contest between the monopolists and their opponents is incomplete and obscure in many of its details and need not be related here at length.⁴⁰ As the first independents to enter the field, Shreve and his Brownsville associates bore the brunt of the attack. Before their first boat, the Comet, had been taken out of the Ohio River, Fulton and Livingston initiated a suit against her owners and warned the public to buy only steamboats built under their patent rights.⁴¹ Research fails to reveal the outcome of this suit. The real fight began in 1815 when Shreve took the Enterprise to New Orleans in open disregard of the Fulton and Livingston privileges in Louisiana waters. The seizure of the Enterprise, her release on bail, and a second seizure a few months later were the first of a series of legal skirmishes in which the independents clashed with the monopolists over the right to operate on the lower Mississippi. In one instance a Brownsville boat, the Despatch, was forced to return from New Orleans without cargo, but in most cases the efforts to enforce the monopoly were balked by one means or another. Henry Shreve, as master of the Enterprise and later of the Washington, two of the vessels which in turn became involved in the dispute, received much attention for his success in evading the legal nets spread for him. When the trial of the Enterprise case was held in 1816, a lower state court held that the territorial legislature had exceeded its authority in making the exclusive grant.⁴² The case was first appealed by the plaintiffs and then for some reason dropped.

In 1817 suits were brought against the Washington, the Oliver Evans, and the Franklin in the Federal District Court at New Orleans, only to have the petitions of the plaintiffs dismissed on the ground that the court lacked jurisdiction. ⁴³ Although the Oliver Evans was the object of another suit in 1818, nothing appears to have come of it and for all practical purposes the issue was closed.⁴⁴ By this time both of the original grantees of the Louisiana franchise were dead. Their heirs, evidently discouraged by the difficulties in enforcing their claims and by the multiplication of interlopers, had by 1818 sold two of the three Fulton boats remaining in the West.⁴⁵ With the virtual abandonment of the monopoly, the freedom of steam navigation was established in effect six years before the decision of the Supreme Court in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) annulled the exclusive New York franchise of Fulton and Livingston. Thereafter steamboat navigation on the western rivers developed without legal check or hindrance.

The contest between the Fulton interests and the independents was to westerners something more than a clash of competing business enterprises. It appeared rather as a new attempt on the part of the East to keep the West in economic thralldom; Fulton was not so much the great benefactor whose inventive genius would remove the obstacles to the rapid development of the western country as the grasping mercenary whose schemes would confine western commerce within the strait jacket of monopoly.

With historians of a later generation — mostly from the West, it is true — this view was to carry much weight; the activities of the Fulton group have been written off as having had little value for the development of steam navigation on the western rivers.⁴⁶ The Fulton steamboats spent most of their time in the New Orleans—Natchez trade, covering barely three hundred miles along the deep and easy waters of the lower Mississippi. For the remainder of the 2,000-Mile distance between New Orleans and Pittsburgh their service was limited to a few trips to Louisville.⁴⁷ This failure to supply more adequately the transportation needs of the western country has been ascribed in part to a desire to limit the number of vessels employed to that which would bring in the largest net return on the invested capital but chiefly to the technical shortcomings of the Fulton steamboats, which according to this view, had too deep a draft and too little power to permit their use under the difficult conditions of navigation prevailing on a large part of the western river system. It was a new hero, Henry M. Shreve, who in disregard of personal interest and against heavy odds led the fight to free the West from eastern domination. It was Shreve who, almost singlehanded, worked out the structural and mechanical modifications without which the steamboat would have had a very limited usefulness in the West. In this sense it was Shreve, not Fulton, who invented the western steamboat.

The case thus made in behalf of Shreve is overstated. That Fulton’s boats were superseded does not alter the fact that they demonstrated the practicability of steam navigation in the West. Even had there been no obligation to supply Louisiana with a certain minimum service in return for monopoly privileges, there was every reason for the Fulton interests to give first attention to this part of the river system. Population distribution maps for 1810 and 1820 show plainly that the portion of the lower Mississippi region served by the New Orleans-Natchez trade contained the greatest concentration of inhabitants in the West outside of the Ohio Valley.⁴⁸ From Natchez to Louisville, a river distance of 1,000 miles, there was only a frontier wilderness with a thinly scattered population of backwoodsmen and no towns of importance to supply traffic and support to steamboats.

To place the first steamboat, the New Orleans, in the New Orleans— Natchez trade was the obvious first step in carrying out Fulton’s plans for establishing steamboat service the whole length of the rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans.⁴⁹ Disaster and misfortune delayed the completion of these plans. The second of Fulton’s boats, the Vesuvius, had hardly been placed in operation when the New Orleans was lost through sinking.⁵⁰ In the meantime the Vesuvius, which had been sent on her first trip to Louisville, grounded on a sandbar where she remained for six months, only to be forced on her release to return to New Orleans, where she again was grounded for many weeks.⁵¹ Taking the place of the New Orleans in the New Orleans-Natchez trade, she ran with success until, badly damaged by fire, she sank in July 1816.⁵² Financial difficulties led to the sale under the sheriff’s hammer of another Fulton boat, the unfinished Buffalo. Thus, during the greater part of the first three years of their operations in the West, the Fulton interests had but one vessel at their disposal, and this with good reason was kept in the New Orleans—Natchez trade. After 1814 when additional boats were available, the Aetna and somewhat later the Vesuvius were placed and ran successfully in the New Orleans-Louisville trade.⁵³ In the inevitable difficulties and costs of pioneering, in the loss of vessels through disaster, and, by 1815, in the death of Fulton and Livingston, the prime movers in the venture, there would seem to be explanation enough of the faltering of an enterprise that began with such ambitious plans. The Fulton group failed to justify socially the steamboat monopoly which they attempted to enforce, but the operation of their steamboats focused western attention upon the new mode of transportation and its possibilities, and by demonstrating a measure of practical success, gave an original impetus to western steamboating that was of genuine importance. To agree, however, that Fulton and his associates played an important pioneering role in the West is not to argue that their services were indispensable. In view of the previous awareness by many persons of the opportunities presented by the western rivers, the mechanical competence and originality shown by Evans, French, and Shreve, the technical resources of such rising industrial centers as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, and the promptness with which rival steamboat interests entered the field, there is little reason to believe that in the absence of the famous eastern group the West would have had to wait long for the coming of steam navigation.

In 1818, the year following the virtual collapse of efforts to enforce the Fulton and Livingston monopoly in the Louisiana courts, the records show a marked upturn in steamboat construction. Almost as many steamboats were built in this year as in all previous years together.⁵⁴ Shreve’s successful attack on the monopoly played a part in this expansion, but the now widely accepted account stresses the year 1817 as the turning point in the early history of western steamboating for a different reason — that in the spring of this year Shreve brought the Washington upstream from New Orleans to Louisville in the record time of twenty-five days.⁵⁵ This was the trip, declared M’Murtrie, writing in 1819, that convinced the despairing public that steamboat navigation would succeed on the western waters. ⁵⁶ After that memorable voyage of the Washington, wrote Lloyd a generation later, all doubts and prejudices in reference to steam navigation were removed. Ship-yards began to be established in every convenient locality, and the business of steamboat building was vigorously prosecuted. ⁵⁷ Other historians of transportation in the West simply repeat or paraphrase these statements.⁵⁸

The Washington, however, was not the first steamboat to ascend the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to Louisville. As most writers point out, she was preceded in this feat by the Enterprise, the Brownsville boat with machinery designed and built by Daniel French. As early as 1815 the Enterprise under Shreve’s command successfully mastered the currents of the Mississippi and Ohio, not only ascending from New Orleans to Louisville but advancing 600 miles further upstream to Pittsburgh and thence 50 miles up the Monongahela to her home port. She was, it is true, a much smaller boat than the Washington, which in 1817 was the largest steamboat on the western rivers, but her time to Louisville was virtually the same as the Washington’s and her feat received as much attention and favorable comment in the press at the time as did that of the Washington two years later.⁵⁹ The members of a committee of Congress reporting early in 1816 must have had the achievements of the Enterprise particularly in mind when they declared that the success of steamboat navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers was no longer in doubt.⁶⁰ Moreover, steamboats powered on French’s plan were not the only ones to ascend the Mississippi and Ohio rivers previous to the epochmaking voyage of the Washington in the spring of 1817. The record of the Fulton steamboat Aetna is one of special interest. When the Washington completed her second and record trip from New Orleans to Louisville in the spring of 1817, the Aetna had already made four such trips. The first was made in the autumn of 1815 when she had the misfortune, not uncommon in the early years, to break a shaft near the mouth of the Ohio. After spending fifteen days in a futile effort at repairs, her officers succeeded in bringing her up to Louisville on one paddle wheel, no mean feat in itself, with a port-to-port time of sixty days. The arrival and departure of this vessel, declared a Louisville reporter following the Aetna’s return to New Orleans, has excited a lively interest here, and has opened prospects of unparalleled trade and prosperity of the town of Louisville and the western country in general. ⁶¹ In the following year the Aetna made two more voyages from New Orleans to Louisville, the first during the spring in the port-to-port time of thirty-five days and a running time of less than thirteen days, and the second in midsummer, time unrecorded ⁶² A year later she arrived at the Falls of the Ohio for the fourth time from New Orleans, a week in advance of the Washington on her record voyage.⁶³ If the Aetna on this trip made much slower time, her cargo, judging by reported receipts, was more than half again as large as the Washington’s, with a freight bill amounting to more than $25,000.⁶⁴ "Whilst the Steam-Boats are in charge of such persevering and skillful officers as the Captains of the Aetna and the Buffalo [which had just arrived from Pittsburgh on her maiden voyage to New Orleans], ran an editorial comment on this trip, we need not fear of success in ascending the western waters to any navigable point."⁶⁵

The references in standard secondary accounts to the public dinner given Shreve on the completion of his twenty-five-day trip fail to mention the fact that Captain Robeson de Hart of the Aetna was also invited. These two enterprising men, declared an editorial on the occasion, have gained much of public esteem by their success and enterprising exertions to demonstrate the practicability of navigating the Ohio and Mississippi, ‘the high seas of the western country,’ with steam vessels. ⁶⁶ Before the end of this season at least three other steamboats reached Louisville from New Orleans, of which one, the Vesuvius, rebuilt after her damage by fire, made the voyage twice, once in thirty-two days.⁶⁷ Carrying full cargoes she demonstrated again the ability of a Fulton boat to master the currents of the western rivers. Honors for the year, however, clearly went to the Washington, which in September completed her third round trip of the season between Louisville and New Orleans. ⁶⁸ If, as asserted, the year 1817 brought to a despairing West a renewal of faith in steam navigation the result was effected not by the Washington alone but by a number of steamboats, among which the Aetna and the Vesuvius were prominent.

Important though the technical triumphs of the Shreve and Fulton steamboats and the virtual overthrow of the Fulton monopoly on the lower Mississippi were, the boom in steamboat construction which began in 1818 rested no less on the hopes of gain aroused by reports of the handsome profits of steamboat operation. According to a detailed account of the New Orleans’ first year, which was given wide currency by the popular river guide The Navigator in its editions of 1814 and later, the owners cleared over and above expenses, repairs, and interest $20,000 on a capital investment of $40,000. This revenue, said the editor, was superior to [that of] any other establishment in the United States. ⁶⁹ It was reported that the Enterprise in the 1815 season would clear 40 per cent on her first cost, and 40 per cent, as a Cincinnati writer remarked, speaks plain to every understanding. ⁷⁰ Out of the returns from two round trips of the Washington between Louisville and New Orleans in 1817, Shreve was reported to have paid not only running expenses but the original cost of the vessel as well, leaving a surplus of $1,700 to be divided among the owners of the boat.⁷¹ The handsome freight bill of the Aetna on her trip to Louisville in the spring of 1817 has already been noted.⁷² The Vesuvius in a single trip in the same trade, probably in 1818, brought up a cargo reputedly worth $47,000 in freight charges, half of which sum was said to represent clear profit.⁷³ Even the little Franklin with hardly more than one-third the tonnage of the foregoing vessels and carrying but sixty-three tons freight and some passengers from New Orleans to Louisville in the spring of 1817 was reported as clearing some $6,500. ⁷⁴ The captain of the second New Orleans informed a traveler in 1817 that on a single trip from New Orleans to Natchez, about 270 miles, the vessel had made a net profit of $4,000.⁷⁵ Estwick Evans after a journey down the rivers in 1818, reported that a trip of a few weeks brought a return of 100 per cent upon the capital employed.⁷⁶ With reports of profits such as these in circulation, however much exaggerated in fact, the rush to engage in the new enterprise is readily understood. Such figures must have proved more persuasive than record trips which reduced the time of voyages a few days and must have outweighed any doubts occasioned by the legal uncertainties of the situation.

The significance of steam navigation was quickly grasped in the West, and the arrival at Louisville of the first steamboat cargoes from New Orleans was hailed as the beginning of a commercial revolution. No longer would farmers and merchants have to pay tribute to the East in the stream of specie which moved steadily across mountains in place of western products unable to bear the heavy costs of transmontane carriage. If we continue as we have done for the last twenty years, declared the author of a series of newspaper articles entitled Western Independence, or Steamboat Navigation of the Western Waters, "to be tributary to the Pennsylvania and Maryland waggoners, it would have been much better for us that we had never separated from Great Britain . . . The British Government felt no jealousy against any portion of the West, as is now felt by the mercantile states of the Atlantic and particularly by New England. Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York have and are now contending with each other which will monopolize the greatest portion of the trade of the western country, and these states have for many years succeeded in diverting the trade of the West from its natural channel (the Ohio and Mississippi) through the states of Pennsylvania and Maryland and over the rugged mountains which nature never intended for the transportation of merchandise for the western country." ⁷⁷ The trade of the West under these conditions, moreover, had been almost entirely an import trade, as ruinous to the West as the one-sided trade between England and the United States had been to the nation as a whole. If continued, the same writer argued, so unnatural a trade would mortgage the West to the traders and Jew bankers of Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Boston. ⁷⁸ The steamboat navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, bringing up merchandise and manufactures and carrying down western produce, would effect the economic emancipation of the western country. That this emancipation would result in difficulties for some was soon to be revealed in reports from western manufacturers to the census takers in 1820. A glass manufacturer at Pittsburgh, a salt manufacturer near Louisville, and a Kentucky ironmaster complained severally of losses suffered from the competition of foreign products brought up the river from New Orleans by steamboat.⁷⁹

As evidence of the changes effected by the steamboat, western writers observed that the East was at last being aroused from its indifference to western interests by the prospect of the diversion of western trade into new channels. A report to Congress in 1816 of the committee on the National Turnpike pointed out that unless the trans-Appalachian roads were much improved steam navigation would soon make New Orleans the sole emporium of western commerce, much to the injury of the seaboard cities. This, commented a Cincinnati