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Steamboats were the antebellum era’s Internet. (Now that’s what the kids down in the copy room call a lede — well, maybe not.) I mention this because, on this day in 1809, Robert Fulton patented his design for a steam-powered watercraft. Fulton, renowned as one of the great inventors of his age, then turned his attention to his real passion: becoming fabulously wealthy.
Robert Fulton neither invented nor perfected the steamboat. The former story is one marked by industrial espionage and fierce international competition, and so remains somewhat shrouded by secrecy. The latter tale is even murkier, a narrative so diffuse as to defy comprehension. Western entrepreneurs spent years improving steamboats, trying to wrest more profitability — through increased speed and cargo capacity — from them while attending to their unfortunate tendency to explode without warning. Despite their best efforts, though, the region’s lay engineers never worked out the lingering design kinks. The boats blew up, scattering burning merchandise and broken bodies into the rivers they plied, until they largely fell into disservice at the end of the nineteenth century. Not, incidentally, because of their combustibility, but because other transportation technologies, especially railroads, supplanted them.
But all of that wanders too far afield from our precious lede. Fulton, when he sought his patent, had tested his steamboat, the Clermont, on the Hudson River, in New York. But he believed that his invention would prove most useful on the 15,000 navigable miles of the Mississippi River system, a web of waterways stretching from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Two years later, with partners Robert Livingston (of Louisiana Purchase fame) and Nicholas Roosevelt (Teddy’s grand-uncle), Fulton brought another steamboat prototype to the Mississippi River, making the trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. The era of steam had begun in the West. Sort of.
The era was slow out of the gate because the Fulton group had, in 1811, secured a monopoly of use on the Mississippi River from the Orleans territorial legislature. Such a thing, an exclusive right to navigate a huge river’s waters, sounds absurd to our ears. We believe that monopolies create unfair advantages for a privileged few, infringe on the public’s rights, and tamper with the workings of an ostensibly free market. But in the Early Republic, government at all levels, cash-poor but craving development, often turned to the private sector to construct public works. In exchange for their initial outlay of capital, corporations received monopolies.
For the Orleans legislators, then, the grant to the Fulton group made sense. By 1811, boosters had long viewed New Orleans’s commanding situation near the Mississippi’s mouth as evidence that “Nature” had chosen the city for greatness. This myth dictated that the river would sweep trade downstream from throughout the city’s vast hinterland. But, the Mississippi’s current also clouded these visions of commercial empire by raising questions about access to the river valley’s upper reaches.
Skeptics wondered how New Orleans could succeed so long as upstream navigation proved so difficult. And with good reason, because struggling with the river was an annual rite for traders who floated produce downriver to market, and then faced a grueling journey home: using a combination of wind power, poling, rowing, or the cordelle, a heavy rope, fastened to the bow of a riverboat, which allowed a crew to play a months-long game of tug-of-war with the Mississippi’s current. Dangerous and unpredictable, the trip upstream could take “three or four, and sometimes nine months.” Because of the voyage’s length and difficulty, valley traders typically made only one trip to market at New Orleans per year. Consequently, the river’s current captivated New Orleanians who pondered the Mississippi’s power, confident that business would boom in their city if people could somehow overcome its flow.
The Fulton group guaranteed that it would do exactly that. The partners offered the Orleans territorial government hope that places that had been removed from the city by thousands of miles and the river’s current would be within easy reach after steamboats tamed the Mississippi. In short, they promised to control nature.
But if the territorial legislators had hoped to spur economic growth, they instead forestalled it. With the Fulton group enjoying the “sole privilege of using Steam Boats” in Orleans Territory, other vessels avoided the region for six years. Until, finally, in 1817, Henry Shreve (for whom Shreveport is named) sued to open the river and won. In the year after that, fourteen new steamboats began working the lower Mississippi. By 1827, there were more than 100 steamboats afloat on the river. And by 1859, in excess of 250 steamboats made more than 3,500 stops at New Orleans’s waterfront, accounting for well over $100 million in receipts there.
Even in retrospect, the numbers boggle the mind, but observers at the Port of New Orleans were more impressed by the gathering together of goods and people from the distant reaches of the continent. Whiskey from Kentucky distilleries, apples from western New York orchards, corn from central Illinois farms, furs from the Canadian backcountry, cotton from upper Louisiana’s alluvial soil, cheese from Wisconsin’s dairyland, as well as starched visitors from London, Creole traders hawking wares, African-American firemen cleaning soot from their faces, so-called “Kaintucks” napping beside battered flatboats, genteel couples ambling arm-in-arm and taking in the sights — all these mingled on the banks of the Mississippi at New Orleans.
Today, we’ve become used to multicultural crowds. And we take for granted grocery stores stocked with goods from around the world. Refrigeration, vacuum packing, airplanes, freight trains, interstate trucking, and other technologies allow us to buy bagged Florida oranges in the produce aisle, plastic-wrapped Texas beef at the deli counter, and bottled Italian balsamic vinegar in the foreign foods section. If we hear Spanish, or French, or Portuguese, or Mandarin, or Wolof while we wait in line to check out, we don’t usually bat an eye. The world’s goods are at our fingertips; we buy without thinking about a product’s place of origin, or how it came to be in our hands. And the diversity of our population is a given. For most antebellum observers, though, a walk along New Orleans’s levee was an unprecedented experience. And the people there understood that steamboats had assembled the collage before them.
How did that happen? Mostly because of increasing veolcity and the predictability steamboats imposed on the Mississippi River system. The first steamboat, the Washington, to travel upstream from New Orleans to Louisville took twenty-five days to make the trip in 1817. Then, later that fall, the Shelby covered the same route in just over twenty days. In 1828, the Tecumseh arrived in Louisville just eight days out of New Orleans. By 1850, a passenger could leave Louisiana on Sunday for a Friday engagement in Louisville, confident that she would arrive on time. Steam travel collapsed time and space, as a kind of technological alchemy first turned six months hard labor into one month’s comparatively luxurious travel. Less than twenty years later, further innovation transformed that month-long voyage into a journey of less than a week. It seemed as though steamboats had compressed the Mississippi Valley’s geography like an accordion, bringing the upper Ohio River and the lower Mississippi together as easily as one might fold a map, leaving Baton Rouge astride Pittsburgh. One commercial commentator wrote of the steamboat’s impact: “distance is no longer thought of in this region—it is almost annihilated by steam.”
And there’s the rub, the final plot point on our narrative’s arc. Scholars don’t often talk about steamboats anymore. The railroad remains much in vogue for Western historians — as I fritter away this evening, Richard White is probably finishing up his massive tome on the subject — and other transportation technologies command the attention of students in a number of fields. Steamboats, though, apparently seem antiquarian, Olde Timey, with their decks piled high like the layers of a cake and their twee whistles. But there’s more there than meets the eye. Steamboats annihilated space and time long before the Internet was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.
18 comments
February 12, 2008 at 12:06 am
Vance Maverick
I think steamboats were just a bit ahead of railways at first, and then they worked together for a long phase. Looks like 1830 was a big year for the development of rail. And I’m sure we could multiply transportation technologies that shaped the period (any period) — say macadam.
I guess my point is that even though Moore’s law was formulated with regard to computers, we’ve lived for two centuries already in the regime of continuous technological growth it implies — a continuity composed of the overlapping rises and falls of many technologies. One rise and one fall do make a story, but perhaps an artificial one.
February 12, 2008 at 12:10 am
ari
Would you mind if I appended your second paragraph to the bottom of my post and then pretended that it was my conclusion. I think I ran out of energy (steam?) there at the end.
February 12, 2008 at 12:17 am
teofilo
Your writing seemed to be going in fits and stops for a while there.
February 12, 2008 at 4:51 am
Jim
Fascinating.
February 12, 2008 at 7:04 am
dware
Maybe steam packets seem quaint to historians, particularly western ones, because we all had a good laugh in seminar (or over a couple of pitchers afterwards) over Fogel’s “water, not (necessarily) rails” thesis. If one is in grad school in Laramie or Boulder, it’s easy to get a grin out of the idea of water transport being a viable competitor to rail in the West. I now work within sight of the navigable Arkansas River, so this whole steamboat “thing” makes more sense.
You mention in passing that railroads are in vogue for Western historians, but this goes in fits and starts. There was a panel at the WHA this last year (full disclosure: I was one of the culprits) but the same proposal had been submitted the year before, only to be rejected with a cheery note suggesting that we come up with a panel talking about “why don’t railroads matter to western historians anymore?” Go figure.
February 12, 2008 at 7:35 am
Vance Maverick
Sure, Ari, help yourself.
dware, you’re pointing at why this kind of story is multidimensional. From the perspective of early-1800s Americans looking west across the enormous continent, there are many, many opportunities and different ways to exploit them. Steamboats had one set of virtues and disadvantages (many readymade navigable routes, but digging canals was hard, and going uphill essentially impossible), railroads had another. Thus the two technologies played out differently, but as part of the same larger surge of exploitation.
February 12, 2008 at 7:59 am
rdale
I write often about the exploration of the Green and Colorado Rivers, and always make the point that after Dominguez and Escalante mistook the Sevier River in central Utah in 1776, which is an interior stream, for the Green, which they had named the Rio De San Buenaventura and which they already knew, somehow, was connected with the Rio Colorado and thus had an outlet to the sea, a whole westering generation came searching, indeed expecting, a water route to the Pacific. D&E’s mapmaker, Miera, showed the Rio De San Buenaventura cutting straight across the Great Basin to the Pacific Coast. Miera’s map, in the archives in Mexico City, was seen by Alexander von Humboldt and published. This myth persisted for another fifty years. Lewis and Clark, the earliest example, expected a more northerly water route, but others like the trappers in the Ashley days of the 1820s knew that there was some connection between what they called the Seeds-Kee-Dee Agie (Prairie Hen River, the Green) and the Colorado. The Bartleson-Bidwell party of 1841, who came overland on what would become the California/Mormon trail, brought boat-building tools so they could build craft to float to California. Another great example, my favorite, is William Manly, who joined the Gold Rush in 1849, hooking up with an overland party that got a late start. At the crossing of the Green in what is now SW Wyoming, the leader told him that the party would not try to cross the Sierras that year; I don’t know that what had happened to the Donners a few years before was common knowledge, or if it was just common sense, but he told the drivers that they were going to winter over among the Mormons in Salt Lake. Manly had just come from Missouri and was none too thrilled about this, especially after they had encountered a party of Mormon scouts on the plains, of which he wrote: “They were dressed in buckskin and moccasins with long spurs…and each one carried a gun, a pistol, and a big knife. They were rough-looking fellows with long matted hair, long beards, old slouch hats, and a generally backwoods get-up air in every way. I had heard much about the Mormons…and some way or other I could not separate the idea of horse thieves from this party, and I am sure I would not like to meet them if I had a desirable mule that they wanted, or any money, or a good-looking wife.” (Death Valley in ’49, p. 61). Added to this was the fact that Manly’s group had been accompanied part of the way by a troop of US Dragoons, on their way to Oregon. The surgeon of the Dragoons was well-read, and told them that the river they were coming to was connected to the Colorado River Of The West, and came out in California. That was enough for Manly and a number of his companions, who found an old ferryboat and left the party, to take their chances floating down the Green to California. They found more rocks than water and left the river in the Uinta Basin, to make their way overland to Salt Lake, on horses provided by Wakara, a chief of the Utes. (they obtained the horses by passing themselves off as Mormons, with whom Wakara had friendly relations at the time). Manly eventually made it to California by the southern route, through what would become the ill-famed Mountain Meadows, after almost perishing in Death Valley. The point of this overly-long comment is that it was a simple decision for these men, and others, to take to the river, as they came from an area and a generation for which travel by river was a way of life. It was another 20 years, until after Powell’s 1869 voyage, that the idea that the Green and Colorado could provide a route to California was finally put to rest. Even then, it found expression in the Brown-Stanton railroad survey of 1889-90, which envisioned a water-level railroad all the way from Colorado to southern California.
February 12, 2008 at 8:09 am
rdale
Sorry for the duplication! Not sure how that happened.
February 12, 2008 at 8:26 am
ari
Not to worry, I’ll delete one of the comments.
February 12, 2008 at 9:03 am
Michael
This has been very interesting. My 10 year old just read and reported on a biography of Fulton. This means that I have to ask a minute little question (sorry for this), but wasn’t Fulton’s native state PA? When he moved back to the US he lived and died in NY.
February 12, 2008 at 10:03 am
ari
Sorry, I had Roosevelt on the brain. I had just spent 45 minutes figuring out how Teddy was related to Nicholas. And I’m still not convinced that I’ve got it right, though I can show my work on the family tree I drew.
February 12, 2008 at 10:48 am
Vance Maverick
I think steampunk (and even without taking it too seriously, its existence tells us something) reflects an intuition that the rises and falls of particular technologies are contingent, while the rise and rise of technology as a whole is a firmer social and even psychological fact.
February 12, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Josh
This post reminds of me of this blog, which has the greatest name ever.
February 12, 2008 at 1:11 pm
ari
I love that blog. But they don’t post often enough, so I forget to go there.
February 12, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Josh
Trying to make sure no one makes that mistake with this place?
February 12, 2008 at 1:25 pm
urbino
Excellent post.
One quibble:
Today, we’ve become used to multicultural crowds . . . If we hear Spanish, or French, or Portuguese, or Mandarin, or Wolof while we wait in line to check out, we don’t usually bat an eye.
This remains an urban phenomenon, though this is less true than it once was. Despite the reach of steam, rail, roads, and wires of various kinds, this vast country still has lots of rural, inland regions where multicultural is just a word you sometimes hear on the news. The produce of the world penetrates to more of these places — thanks to supermarket chains that like to have more or less the same products on the same shelves in every store — than the people of the world do.
February 14, 2008 at 8:25 pm
andrew
1. Schwantes’ book on steam travel in the Northwest is beautifully illustrated. (As is his railroad book on the same region, which may have been the first to come out, though chronologically the sequel.) Just thought I’d recommend it, though I haven’t read the text.
2. As dware points out, railroads have not actually been in vogue in western history for a while. They might become so in the future if they aren’t already becoming so. (Disclosure: I came very close to writing a railroad dissertation.) I have the impression that some of the better regarded railroad-related books to come out more recently weren’t western railroad books.
3. I suspect steamboats lose out for a couple of reasons.
There’s the perception that their era didn’t last very long – the fact that you can start talking about railroads in the 1830s overshadows the fact that the east-(mid)west routes were not completed until later (the 1850s? I don’t remember the precise dates). And it takes a while for (railroad) Chicago to supplant (Mississippi River) St. Louis.
There’s the perception that their impact was still quite localized even considering its reach. You can have competition on the Mississippi but it’s pretty much all on the Mississippi. Competition between railroads involved competing routes in different sections of the country and competing communities along those routes. In terms of ports, you’ve got New Orleans as an endpoint on the one hand, and Boston vs. New York vs. Philadelphia vs. Baltimore on the other. It would be interesting to know if steamboats lack attention in histories of other regions. I assume they preceded railroads in a number of European colonies.
There’s the fact that they weren’t a new power source – steamboats and the steam engine were around already for ocean travel. And somewhat related to this is the fact that being able to get around the world sort of overshadows being able to get into the interior of a continent. But it can be argued that the steamship deserves more attention too. It certainly seems to get less attention than wind-based maritime exploration.
There’s the fact that water travel was already, and had long been, quicker than land travel. Traveling faster over a river is one thing; traveling faster overland – not being required to stick to (and build, in the case of canals) a watercourse – by an entirely new technology is quite another. A better boat is still a boat; a railroad is not a horse-drawn carriage.
4. Robert Fulton apparently thought that the submarine would, by being such an effective tool of war, force countries to make peace with one another rather than fight. He had some problems making this idea work in practice.
February 14, 2008 at 9:44 pm
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