The lower reaches of the Mississippi River bore among rivermen, during the early days of the century, very much such a reputation as the Spanish Main bore among the peaceful mariners of the Atlantic trade. They were the haunts of pirates and buccaneers, mostly ordinary cheap freebooters, operating from the shore with a few skiffs, or a lugger, perhaps, who would dash out upon a passing vessel, loot it, and turn it adrift. But one gang of these river pirates so grew in power and audacity, and its leaders so ramified their associations and their business relations, as for a time to become a really influential factor in the government of New Orleans, while for a term of years they even put the authority of the United States at nought. The story of the brothers Lafitte and their nest of criminals at Barataria, is one of the most picturesque in American annals. On a group of those small islands crowned with live-oaks and with fronded palms, in that strange waterlogged country to the southwest of the Crescent City, where the sea, the bayou, and the marsh fade one into the other until the line of demarkation can scarcely be traced, the Lafittes established their colony. There they built cabins and storehouses, threw up-earthworks, and armed them with stolen cannon. In time the plunder of scores of vessels filled the warehouses with the goods of all nations, and as the wealth of the colony grew its numbers increased. To it were attracted the adventurous spirits of the creole city. Men of Spanish and of French descent, negroes, and quadroons, West Indians from all the islands scattered between North and South America, birds of prey, and fugitives from justice of all sorts and kinds, made that a place of refuge. They brought their women and children, and their slaves, and the place became a small principality, knowing no law save Lafitte's will. With a fleet of small schooners the pirates would sally out into the Gulf and plunder vessels of whatever sort they might encounter. The road to their hiding-place was difficult to follow, either in boats or afoot, for the tortuous bayous that led to it were intertwined in an almost inextricable maze, through which, indeed, the trained pilots of the colony picked their way with ease, but along which no untrained helmsman could follow them. If attack were made by land, the marching force was confronted by impassable rivers and swamps; if by boats, the invaders pressing up a channel which seemed to promise success, would find themselves suddenly in a blind alley, with nothing to do save to retrace their course. Meanwhile, for the greater convenience of the pirates, a system of lagoons, well known to them, and easily navigated in luggers, led to the very back door of New Orleans, the market for their plunder. Of the brothers Lafitte, one held state in the city as a successful merchant, a man not without influence with the city government, of high standing in the business community, and in thoroughly good repute. Yet he was, in fact, the agent for the pirate colony, and the goods he dealt in were those which the picturesque ruffians of Barataria had stolen from the vessels about the mouth of the Mississippi River. The situation persisted for nearly half a score of years. If there were merchants, importers and shipowners in New Orleans who suffered by it, there were others who profited by it, and it has usually been the case that a crime or an injustice by which any considerable number of people profit, becomes a sort of vested right, hard to disturb. And, indeed, the Baratarians were not without a certain rude sense of patriotism and loyalty to the United States, whose laws they persistently violated. For when the second war with Great Britain was declared and Packenham was dispatched to take New Orleans, the commander of the British fleet made overtures to Lafitte and his men, promising them a liberal subsidy and full pardon for all past offenses, if they would but act as his allies and guide the British invaders to the most vulnerable point in the defenses of the Crescent City. The offer was refused, and instead, the chief men of the pirate colony went straightway to New Orleans to put Jackson on his guard, and when the opposing forces met on the plains of Chalmette, the very center of the American line was held by Dominique Yon, with a band of his swarthy Baratarians, with howitzers which they themselves had dragged from their pirate stronghold to train upon the British. Many of us, however law-abiding, will feel a certain sense that the romance of history would have been better served, if after this act of patriotism, the pirates had been at least peacefully dispersed. But they were wedded to their predatory life, returned with renewed zeal to their piracies, and were finally destroyed by the State forces and a United States naval expedition, which burned their settlement, freed their slaves, razed their fortifications, confiscated their cannon, killed many of their people, and dispersed the rest among the swamps and forests of southern Louisiana.
In 1809 a New York man, by name Nicholas J. Roosevelt, set out from Pittsburg in a flatboat of the usual type, to make the voyage to New Orleans. He carried no cargo of goods for sale, nor did he convey any band of intended settlers, yet his journey was only second in importance to the ill-fated one, in which the luckless Amis proved that New Orleans must be United States territory, or the wealth of the great interior plateau would be effectively bottled up. For Roosevelt was the partner of Fulton and Livingston in their new steamboat enterprise, having himself suggested the vertical paddle-wheel, which for more than a half a century was the favorite means of utilizing steam power for the propulsion of boats. He was firm in the belief that the greatest future for the steamboat was on the great rivers that tied together the rapidly growing commonwealths of the middle west, and he undertook this voyage for the purpose of studying the channel and the current of the rivers, with the view to putting a steamer on them. Wise men assured him that on the upper river his scheme was destined to failure. Could a boat laden with a heavy engine be made of so light a draught as to pass over the shallows of the Ohio? Could it run the falls at Louisville, or be dragged around them as the flatboats often were? Clearly not. The only really serviceable type of river craft was the flatboat, for it would go where there was water enough for a muskrat to swim in, would glide unscathed over the concealed snag or, thrusting its corner into the soft mud of some protruding bank, swing around and go on as well stern first as before. The flatboat was the sum of human ingenuity applied to river navigation. Even barges were proving failures and passing into disuse, as the cost of poling them upstream was greater than any profit to be reaped from the voyage. Could a boat laden with thousands of pounds of machinery make her way northward against that swift current? And if not, could steamboat men be continually taking expensive engines down to New Orleans and abandoning them there, as the old-time river men did their rafts and scows? Clearly not. So Roosevelt's appearance on the river did not in any way disquiet the flatboatmen, though it portended their disappearance as a class. Roosevelt, however, was in no wise discouraged. Week after week he drifted along the Ohio and Mississippi, taking detailed soundings, studying the course of the current, noting the supply of fuel along the banks, observing the course of the rafts and flatboats as they drifted along at the mercy of the tide. Nothing escaped his attention, and yet it may well be doubted whether the mass of data he collected was in fact of any practical value, for the great river is the least understandable of streams. Its channel is as shifting as the mists above Niagara. Where yesterday the biggest boat on the river, deep laden with cotton, might pass with safety, there may be to-day a sand-bar scarcely hidden beneath the tide. Its banks change over night in form and in appearance. In time of flood it cuts new channels for itself, leaving in a few days river towns far in the interior, and suddenly giving a water frontage to some plantation whose owner had for years mourned over his distance from the river bank. Capricious and irresistible, working insidiously night and day, seldom showing the progress of its endeavors until some huge slice of land, acres in extent, crumbles into the flood, or some gully or cut-off all at once appears as the main channel, the Mississippi, even now when the Government is at all times on the alert to hold it in bounds, is not to be lightly learned nor long trusted. In Roosevelt's time, before the days of the river commission, it must have been still more difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, the information he collected, satisfied him that the stream was navigable for steamers, and his report determined his partners to build the pioneer craft at Pittsburg. She was completed, "built after the fashion of a ship with portholes in her side," says a writer of the time, dubbed the "Orleans," and in 1812 reached the city on the sodden prairies near the mouth of the Mississippi, whose name we now take as a synonym for quaintness, but which at that time had seemingly the best chance to become a rival of London and Liverpool, of any American town. For just then the great possibilities of the river highway were becoming apparent. The valley was filling up with farmers, and their produce sought the shortest way to tide-water. The streets of the city were crowded with flatboatmen, from Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, and with sailors speaking strange tongues, and gathered from all the ports of the world. At the broad levee floated the ships of all nations. All manual work was done by the negro slaves, and already the planters were beginning to show signs of that prodigal prosperity, which, in the flush times, made New Orleans the gayest city in the United States. In 1813 Jackson put the final seal on the title-deeds to New Orleans, and made the Mississippi forever an American river by defeating the British just outside the city's walls, and then river commerce grew apace. In 1817 fifteen hundred flatboats and five hundred barges tied up to the levee. By that time the steamboat had proved her case, for the "New Orleans" had run for years between Natchez and the Louisiana city, charging a fare of eighteen dollars for the down, and twenty-five dollars for the up trip, and earning for her owners twenty thousand dollars profits in one year. She was snagged and lost in 1814, but by that time others were in the field, first of all the "Comet," a stern-wheeler of twenty-five tons, built at Pittsburg, and entering the New Orleans-Natchez trade in 1814. The "Vesuvius," and the "Ætna."—volcanic names which suggested the explosive end of too many of the early boats—were next in the field, and the latter won fame by being the first boat to make the up trip from New Orleans to Louisville. Another steamboat, the "Enterprise," carried a cargo of, powder and ball from Pittsburg to General Jackson at New Orleans, and after some service on southern waters, made the return trip to Louisville in twenty-five days. This was a great achievement, and hailed by the people of the Kentucky town as the certain forerunner of commercial greatness, for at one time there were tied to the bank the "Enterprise" from New Orleans, the "Despatch" from Pittsburg, and the "Kentucky Elizabeth" from the upper Kentucky River. Never had the settlement seemed to be so thoroughly in the heart of the continent. Thereafter river steamboating grew so fast that by 1819 sixty-three steamers, of varying tonnage from twenty to three hundred tons, were plying on the western rivers. Four had been built at New Orleans, one each at Philadelphia, New York, and Providence, and fifty-six on the Ohio. The upper reaches of the Mississippi still lagged in the race, for most of the boats turned off up the Ohio River, into the more populous territory toward the east. It was not until August, 1817, that the "General Pike," the first steamer ever to ascend the Mississippi River above the mouth of the Ohio, reached St. Louis. No pictures, and but scant descriptions of this pioneer craft, are obtainable at the present time. From old letters it is learned that she was built on the model of a barge, with her cabin situated on the lower deck, so that its top scarcely showed above the bulwarks. She had a low-pressure engine, which at times proved inadequate to stem the current, and in such a crisis the crew got out their shoulder poles and pushed her painfully up stream, as had been the practice so many years with the barges. At night she tied up to the bank. Only one other steamer reached St. Louis in the same twelve months. By way of contrast to this picture of the early beginnings of river navigation on the upper Mississippi, we may set over some facts drawn from recent official publications concerning the volume of river traffic, of which St. Louis is now the admitted center. In 1890 11,000,000 passengers were carried in steamboats on rivers of the Mississippi system. The Ohio and its tributaries, according to the census of that year, carried over 15,000,000 tons of freight annually, mainly coal, grain, lumber, iron, and steel. The Mississippi carries about the same amount of freight, though on its turbid tide, cotton and sugar, in no small degree, take the place of grain and the products of the furnaces and mills.
But it was a long time before steam navigation approached anything like these figures, and indeed, many years passed before the flatboat and the barge saw their doom, and disappeared. In 1821, ten years after the first steamboat arrived at New Orleans, there was still recorded in the annals of the town, the arrival of four hundred and forty-one flatboats, and one hundred and seventy-four barges. But two hundred and eighty-seven steamboats also tied up to the levee that year, and the end of the flatboat days was in sight. Ninety-five of the new type of vessels were in service on the Mississippi and its tributaries, and five were at Mobile making short voyages on the Mississippi Sound and out into the Gulf. They were but poor types of vessels at best. At first the shortest voyage up the river from New Orleans to Shippingport—then a famous landing, now vanished from the map—was twenty-two days, and it took ten days to come down. Within six years the models of the boats and the power of the engines had been so greatly improved that the up trip was made in twelve days, and the down in six. Even the towns on the smaller streams tributary to the great river, had their own fleets. Sixteen vessels plied between Nashville and New Orleans. The Red River, and even the Missouri, began to echo to the puffing of the exhaust and the shriek of the steam-whistle. Indeed, it was not very long before the Missouri River became as important a pathway for the troops of emigrants making for the great western plains and in time for the gold fields of California, as the Ohio had been in the opening days of the century for the pioneers bent upon opening up the Mississippi Valley. The story of the Missouri River voyage, the landing place at Westport, now transformed into the great bustling city of Kansas City, and all the attendant incidents which led up to the contest in Kansas and Nebraska, forms one of the most interesting, and not the least important chapters in the history of our national development.
The decade during which the steamboats and the flatboats still struggled for the mastery, was the most picturesque period of Mississippi River life. Then the river towns throve most, and waxed turbulent, noisy, and big, according to the standards of the times. Places which now are mere names on the map, or have even disappeared from the map altogether, were great trans-shipping points for goods on the way to the sea. New Madrid, for example, which nowadays we remember chiefly as being one of the stubborn obstacles in the way of the Union opening of the river in the dark days of the Civil War, was in 1826 like a seaport. Flatboats in groups and fleets came drifting to its levees heavy laden with the products of the west and south, the output of the northern farms and mills, and the southern plantations. On the crowded river bank would be disembarked goods drawn from far-off New England, which had been dragged over the mountains and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi; furs from northern Minnesota or Wisconsin; lumber in the rough, or shaped into planks, from the mills along the Ohio; whisky from Kentucky, pork and flour from Illinois, cattle, horses, hemp, fabrics, tobacco, everything that men at home or abroad, could need or crave, was gathered up by enterprising traders along three thousand miles of waterway, and brought hither by clumsy rafts and flatboats, and scarcely less clumsy steamboats, for distribution up and down other rivers, and shipment to foreign lands.
At New Orleans there was a like deposit of all the products of that rich valley, an empire in itself. There grain, cotton, lumber, live stock, furs, the output of the farms and the spoils of the chase, were transferred to ocean-going ships and sent to foreign markets. Speculative spirits planned for the day, when this rehandling of cargoes at the Crescent City would be no longer necessary, but ships would clear from Louisville or St. Louis to Liverpool or Hamburg direct. A fine type of the American sailor, Commodore Whipple, who had won his title by good sea-fighting in the Revolutionary War, gave great encouragement to this hope, in 1800, by taking the full-rigged ship "St. Clair," with a cargo of pork and flour, from Marietta, Ohio, down the Ohio, over the falls at Louisville, thence down the Mississippi, and round by sea to Havana, and so on to Philadelphia. This really notable exploit—to the success of which good luck contributed almost as much as good seamanship—aroused the greatest enthusiasm. The Commodore returned home overland, from Philadelphia. His progress, slow enough, at best, was checked by ovations, complimentary addresses, and extemporized banquets. He was the man of the moment. The poetasters, who were quite as numerous in the early days of the republic, as the true poets were scarce, signalized his exploit in verse.
| "The Triton crieth, |
| 'Who cometh now from shore?' |
| Neptune replieth, |
| ''Tis the old Commodore. |
| Long has it been since I saw him before. |
| In the year '75 from Columbia he came, |
| The pride of the Briton, on ocean to tame. |
| "'But now he comes from western woods, |
| Descending slow, with gentle floods, |
| The pioneer of a mighty train, |
| Which commerce brings to my domain.'" |
But Neptune and the Triton had no further occasion to exchange notes of astonishment upon the appearance of river-built ships on the ocean. The "St. Clair" was the first and last experiment of the sort. Late in the nineties, the United States Government tried building a torpedo-boat at Dubuque for ocean service, but the result was not encouraging.
Year after year the steamboats multiplied, not only on the rivers of the West, but on those leading from the Atlantic seaboard into the interior. It may be said justly that the application of steam to purposes of navigation made the American people face fairly about. Long they had stood, looking outward, gazing across the sea to Europe, their sole market, both for buying and for selling. But now the rich lands beyond the mountains, inviting settlers, and cut up by streams which offered paths for the most rapid and comfortable method of transportation then known, commanded their attention. Immigrants no longer stopped in stony New England, or in Virginia, already dominated by an aristocratic land-owning class, but pressed on to Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and Illinois. As the lands filled up, the little steamers pushed their noses up new streams, seeking new markets. The Cumberland, and the Tennessee, the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Red, the Tombigbee, and the Chattahoochee were stirred by the churning wheels, and over-their forests floated the mournful sough of the high-pressure exhaust.