At left, far from the clamor and surge of the ocean the citizens of Hannibal , Missouri pursue their rounds in sunlit quietude. At the foot of the street is a restless, smoky steamboat which makes the Mississippi here , just south of Iowa, a highway to the ocean world. Painting by John Stobart. At right, one thousand or so feet above sea level, near Pierre, South Dakota on the Upper Missouri , the workaday City of Fort Pierre shuttles between corn, wheat and sheep country on the north bank, and cattle country on the south. Workaday she may be, but she has a certain jauntiness , a native sophistication of her own river world of the 1890s. Courtesy, The Waterways Journal, St. Louis .
in from it---or you could go out to it-by steamboat. Henry Miller Shreve's career spanned the transition of the United States from the original Atlantic Coast colonies to a continental nation-and contributed to bringing about that transition. Born in New Jersey right after the Revolution in 1785 , he grew up in the frontier town of Brownsville in western Pennsylvania , where his father moved to try farming on new lands bought by his wartime commander George Washington. Washington proved lenient about the rents from a less-than-successful operation run by an old colonel of the Continental Army and the family struggled on until Shreve's father died in the same year as his protector, 1799. Young Henry took to the river, trading down the Monongahela and Ohio by flatboat. Flatboats were rough-built of local timber, and could be poled down the waterways all the way to New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico , where their cargoes of produce and the timber they were built of were sold. The more sophisticated keelboats could go both ways, sweated upstream by men " half horse , half alligator. " The journey, 2,000 miles each way , took a month and a half downstream to New Orleans, four and a half months back upstream to Pittsburgh . With the rivers blocked by ice in winter, you could do one roundtrip a year. By 1807 , Shreve was able to build his own keelboat , which he took down the Ohio to Cairo, then on upstream on the Mississippi to St. Louis , where he picked up beaver pelts brought to town by boats coming in from the trappers working the virgin lands stretching to the west and far northwest along the Missouri. Then , instead of going down the Mississippi to the great seaport of New Orleans , he took his small-volume, high-value cargo back up the Ohio and transferred it to wagons which wound their way through mountain passes to Philadelphia, on the Atlantic seaboard. But the real traffic was to the Gulf of Mexico, and it is here that Shreve made his main contribution, getting steam navigation going to New Orleans , which President Jefferson had seen as the key to opening the middle reaches of the continent. His first steamer brought timely relief to Stonewall Jackson defending New Orleans in the last battle of the War of 1812 . Having delivered guns and ammunition from Pittsburgh, he went back to gather up three keelboats he had passed on the 2,000-mile trip and towed them in to the relief of the city in time to support its successful defense. The river towns were quick to recognize the value of the steamboat. Shreve 's dramatic voyage to the relief of New Orleans had been accomplished in just two weeks from Pittsburgh, instead of the customary month and a half. By 181 9 there were 100 steamboats in American waters, as against only 30 (a year later) in the heavily industrialized British Isles . The railroad cut into this burgeoning river traffic , and then the truck practically ended it-except for bulk cargoes poured into flotillas of barges pushed by powerful tugs. But , people are coming " back to the river, " as the people at Delta Queen Steamboat Company like to point out. There are a million reasons for this, perhaps all coming back to the idea of enjoying and getting nourishment out of one's passage through space and time-a changed idea from the idea of hustle and progress that gave the steamboat its initial edge, and the rivers their vital role as conduits for the goods and ideas which, with a little seasoning, make civilization . SEA HISTORY , SPRING 1987
It is certain that when civilization was young, it did not choose, but depended on the rivers. The trade in Italian wines reached Britain before Caesar did, current archaeological studies are telling us , through an amazing pattern of rivers, cutting through from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay, then through the tough neck of Brittany, and so across the Channel to England, where the stuff was taken inland as far as Stonehenge and beyond by sleepy streams suitable for nothing more than dreaming over today. Well, dreams are a kind of traffic, too. Rivers change, and change radically with the seasons. Standing under a high-arched bridge in Verona in northern Italy on a hot summer day [ looked at the pools and exposed rocks of the riverbed of the Adige and wondered how this great city had grown up on the traffic of such a barren waterway. But the high arches of the bridge told the story . In its season this river comes to life, and there is a superabundance of water, dancing and surging along the city waterfront and bringing it life-life carried , in the old days, by lovely tall-masted river craft which passed above the hot bare rocks I looked out on. And rivers change from year to year. Take the year 1910-the palatial steamboat Virginia hadn ' t been able to leave Pittsburgh since the previous July , due to lack of spring meltwater a year earlier, and a hot dry summer followed by a hard winter freeze . But come March, the river rose, and the Virginia set out. There was so much water, in fact, that she had to splash in over Mr. J. W. Williamson 's flooded cornfield to put a solitary passenger ashore at Willow Grove, halfway to Cincinnati. But when it came time to back off, she wouldn't budge-even though she was able to keep her 600 tons of cargo and 54 passengers and 30 crew afloat in waist-deep water. The river was falling and continued to fall, and left the steamboat high and dry for the next six months. People came from miles around to see the great boat out of water, and they came not to mock but to admire. The story is told by the singer John Hartford in Steamboat in a Cornfield (reviewed on page 42 of this SEA HISTORY)-a poet not really of T.S. Eliot's stripe , but one he would have enjoyed hugely , one feels. Our reviewer was so impressed that she was inspired to make this entrancing sketch of the Virginia-a vessel so at home in the countryside she serves that she can rest awhile in the fields , a bit frumpy and disheveled but queen of all she surveys, before raising steam and, in the Lord's good time , paddling away to leave another river story behind her . . . . .t
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