The river trade reached its zenith between 1840 and 1860, in the two decades previous to the Civil War, that period before the railroads began to parallel the great rivers. It was a time which saw the rise of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas, and which witnessed the spread of the cotton kingdom into the Southwest. The story of King Cotton's conquest of the Mississippi South is best told in statistics. In 1811, the year of the first voyage which the New Orleans made down the Ohio River, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi exported five million pounds of cotton. In 1834 these same States exported almost two hundred million pounds of cotton. To take care of this crop and to supply the cotton country, which was becoming wealthy, with the necessaries and luxuries of life, more and more steamboats were needed. The great shipyards situated, because of the proximity of suitable timber, at St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville became busy hives, not since paralleled except by such centers of shipbuilding as Hog Island in 1917-18, during the time of the Great War. The steamboat tonnage of the Mississippi Valley (exclusive of New Orleans) in the hustling forties exceeded that of the Atlantic ports (exclusive of New York City) by 15,000 tons. The steamboat tonnage of New Orleans alone in 1843 was more than double that of New York City.
Those who, if the old story is true, ran in fear to the hills when the little New Orleans went puffing down the Ohio, in 1811, would have been doubly amazed at the splendid development in the art of boat building, could they have seen the stately Sultana or Southern Belle of the fifties sweep swiftly by. After a period of gaudy ornamentation (1830-40) steamboat architecture settled down, as has that of Pullman cars today, to sane and practical lines, and the boats gained in length and strength, though they contained less weight of timber. The value of one of the greater boats of this era would be about fifty thousand dollars. When Captain Bixby made his celebrated night crossing at Hat Island a quarter of a million dollars in ship and cargo would have been the price of an error in judgment, according to Mark Twain, ¹ a good authority.
The Yorktown, built in 1844 for the Ohio-Mississippi trade, was typical of that epoch of inland commerce. Her length was 182 feet, breadth of beam 31 feet, and the diameter of wheels 28 feet. Though her hold was 8 feet in depth, yet she drew but 4 feet of water light and barely over 8 feet when loaded with 500 tons of freight. She had 4 boilers, 30 feet long and 42 inches in diameter, double engines, and two 24-inch cylinders. The stateroom cabin had come in with Captain Isaiah Sellers's Prairie in 1836, the first boat with such luxuries ever seen in St. Louis, according to Sellers. The Yorktown had 40 private cabins. It is interesting to compare the Yorktown with The Queen of the West, the giant British steamer built for the Falmouth-Calcutta trade in 1839. The Queen of the West had a length of 310 feet, a beam of 31 feet, a draft of 15 feet, and 16 private cabins. The building of this great vessel led a writer in the New York American to say: "It would really seem that we as a nation had no interest in this new application of steam power, or no energy to appropriate it to our own use." The statement—written in a day when the Mississippi steamboat tonnage exceeded that of the entire British Empire—is one of the best examples of provincial ignorance concerning the West.
On these steamboats there was a multiplicity of arrangements and equipments for preventing and for fighting fire. One of the innovations on the new boats in this particular was the substitution of wire for the combustible rope formerly used to control the tiller, so that even in time of fire the pilot could "hold her nozzle agin' the bank." Much of the great loss of life in steamboat fires had been due to the tiller-ropes being burned and the boats becoming unmanageable.
The arrival of the railroad at the head of the Ohio River in the early fifties brought the East into an immediate touch with the Mississippi Valley unknown before. But however bold railway engineers were in the face of the ragged ranges of the Alleghanies, they could not then out-guess the tricks of the Ohio, the Mississippi, or the Missouri, and railway promoters could not afford to take chances on having their stations and tracks unexpectedly isolated, if not actually carried away, by swirling, yellow floods. The Mississippi, too, had been known at times to achieve a width of seventy miles, and tributaries have overflowed their banks to a proportionate extent. It was several decades ere the Ohio was paralleled by a railway, and the Mississippi for long distances even today has not yet heard the shrill cry of the locomotive. So the steamboat entered its heyday and encountered little competition. Until the Civil War the rivers of the West remained the great arteries of trade, carrying grain and merchandise of every description southward and bringing back cotton, rice, and sugar.
The rivalries of the great lines of packets established in these days of the steamboat, however, equaled anything ever known in railway competition, and, in the matter of fast time, became more spectacular than anything of its kind in any line of transportation in our country. With flags flying, boilers heated white with abundance of pine and resin, and bold and skillful pilots at the steering wheels, no sport of kings ever aroused the enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands to such a pitch as did many of the old-time races northward from New Orleans.
The J. M. White and her performances stand out conspicuously in the annals of the river. Her builder, familiarly known to a generation of rivermen as Billy King, deserves to rank with Henry Shreve. Commissioned in 1844 to build the J. M. White for J. M. Converse of St. Louis, with funds supplied by Robert Chouteau of that city, King proceeded to put into effect the knowledge which he had derived from a close study of the swells made by steamboats when under way. When the boat was being built in the famous shipyards at Elizabeth, on the Monongahela, the wheel beams were set twenty feet farther back than was customary. Converse was struck with this unheard-of radicalism in design, and balked; King was a man given to few words; he was resolved to throw convention to the winds and trust his judgment; he refused to build the boat on other lines. Converse felt compelled to let Chouteau pass on the question; in time the laconic answer came: "Let King put the beams where he pleases."
Thus the craft which Converse thought a monstrosity became known far and wide for both its design and its speed. In 1844 the J. M. White made the record of three days, twenty-three hours, and nine minutes between New Orleans and St. Louis. ¹ Of course the secret of Billy King's success soon became known. He had placed his paddle wheels where they would bite into the swell produced by every boat just under its engines. He had transformed what had been a handicap into a positive asset. It is said that he attempted to shield his prize against competition by destroying the model of the J. M. White, as well as to have refused large offers to build a boat that would beat her. But it is said also that an exhibition model of the boat was a cherished possession of E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War, and that it hung in his office during Lincoln's administration.
¹ This performance is illustrated by the following comparative table showing the best records of later years between New Orleans and St. Louis, a distance estimated in 1844 as 1300 miles but in 1870 as 1218 miles, owing to the action of the river in shortening its course.