History repeats itself, as the old adage says. Again the scoffers gathered by the dock and river bank, laughed at the queer construction and predicted that the boat would never reach New Orleans.
When it became known that Mrs. Roosevelt intended to accompany her husband she was warned of her folly; indeed, Mr. Roosevelt was openly reproved for allowing his wife thus to imperil her life. The boat was supposed to carry passengers, but none appeared. Nevertheless, plans were carried out and during the autumn of 1811, on a bright October day, the New Orleans triumphantly steamed forth from Pittsburgh, in the presence of a great crowd of people. They cheered as the boat went down the river, but they openly prophesied that she could never come up!
From city to city the steamboat made its brave way. When, during the fourth night out, Louisville was reached in bright moonlight, the steam whistle aroused the sleeping town and the people hurried to the river, thinking that the comet of that year had fallen into the stream! When morning dawned and they could see that Mr. Roosevelt’s promised steamboat had arrived, the citizens complimented his perseverance and gave a banquet in his honor. But they all agreed that the queer vessel never could go up the river against the current, no matter how successfully she could steam down.
So Mr. Roosevelt played a good joke on them. He invited a number of friends to a dinner in the cabin of the boat. While the feast was at its height, a strange rumbling brought the frightened guests to their feet; they rushed up on deck to discover that the boat had cast off from the dock, had turned in the river, and was actually steaming up stream, in spite of all their warnings that it never could!
After they had passed Louisville, while they waited for the water to rise high enough to pass through the rapids, Roosevelt took the time to turn the boat back as far as Cincinnati, to show doubters in that city that the feat was quite possible. The voyage through the rapids was exciting but the boat darted like an arrow through them and again accomplished the so-called “impossible.”
The year 1811 was one of strange happenings. A comet blazed in the skies, a flood covered the lands in the valley, causing an epidemic of sickness, and earthquakes shook the whole region from the Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico. Small wonder that the Indians who lived in the forests along the Ohio and Mississippi paddled away in fright from the steamboat as it approached. They thought it was an evil thing.
The voyage came to an end, and a happy incident marked its close, for just before the steamboat reached the city of New Orleans, a tiny passenger arrived on board to give it final blessing, for a little child was born to Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt.
The boat was kept at New Orleans to use as a packet between that city and Natchez, but as pioneer it had proved the possibility for other steamboats to navigate the big river successfully, and they rapidly multiplied. Within twenty years after the voyage of the New Orleans hundreds of steam-propellers were paddling their easy way up and down the river. Steam navigation was a proved fact upon the Mississippi.
In this connection it is interesting to read the following extract from a letter Fulton wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson, on April 7th, 1813. It outlines a still more extended system of steam navigation: