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    The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs: Natchez to New Orleans, 1870–1920
    The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs: Natchez to New Orleans, 1870–1920
    The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs: Natchez to New Orleans, 1870–1920
    Ebook224 pages1 hour

    The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs: Natchez to New Orleans, 1870–1920

    By Dover Publications

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    About this ebook

    Life on the Mississippi in the heyday of the steamboat lives in our imaginations through the artistry of Mark Twain, Edna Ferber, and Hollywood films, or perhaps a glimpse of a salvaged riverboat living out its last years as a theme restaurant. Surely the Mississippi steamboat era is among the most colorful and romantic in our history. But what was it really like, beyond our secondhand notions of stalwart river pilots, wayward boys and runaway slaves, of gamblers in tall hats and ladies in hoopskirts, of cotton, cakewalks, and carpetbaggers.
    This extraordinary book of recently discovered photographs, taken by a father and son who were professional photographers in Natchez, Mississippi, brings us for the first time a stunning array of images of steamboat life as it really was — from its glory days in the post-Civil War era to its demise in the years immediately following World War I.
    The photographers are Henry Norman and his son Earl. With boundless enthusiasm and curiosity, and the consummate skills of pictorial artists, they captured the beauties and rigors of a half-century of life on the Mississippi. Their priceless legacy has been preserved by Joan and Thomas Gandy, who recently acquired the extremely rare and valuable negatives and here present a collection of 170 of the most spectacular and arresting photographs of steamboat life.
    Together with an extremely informative text, replete with detailed information and fascinating anecdotes, the photographs make up a splendid account of the major steamboats that plied the great waterway and their essential social and economic role in river life. Vivid, beautifully composed images of stately ships, luxurious interiors, shipboard life, picturesque river towns, busy landings, paddle wheelers laden with cotton and other cargoes, and the disasters that claimed so many of these proud craft, comprise a stunning firsthand account of a long-lost — but now accurately, lovingly recaptured — way of American life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJul 3, 2012
    ISBN9780486142067
    The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs: Natchez to New Orleans, 1870–1920

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    Book preview

    The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs - Dover Publications

    The Mississippi River: A Brief Sketch

    A weary, tattered Hernando de Soto and his decimated band of Spanish soldiers hacked their way through dense and tangled brush in the lush river land where they marched in search of gold and riches. They found instead disaster, death and disappointment. Their travels took them to the great river that cuts and winds through the continent over nearly 3,000 miles before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico—the Mississippi. They were the first white men known for certain to have reached its banks¹ but were unaware of their place in history. In 1542 de Soto died and was buried in the mile-wide river.

    Other explorers, trappers, voyagers and, finally, settlers followed the Spaniards into the rich river valley over the next 200 years. In 1682, La Salle descended nearly the entire length of the Mississippi to the mouth, where he claimed all lands drained by the river for his native France. In 1699, the Frenchman d’Iberville led a party from the mouth of the river up into Natchez Indian territory and in 1716, the French established Fort Rosalie, the first permanent white settlement on the river and today the site of Natchez, Mississippi. New Orleans was founded two years later.

    Navigation of the river developed rapidly during the eighteenth century. New Orleans, located near the mouth, became an international port as valuable furs and other goods floated down the river to be shipped to European countries. The settlement at Natchez grew as a result of land rich for agriculture and its protected location on the high bluffs. Flimsy rafts and flatboats made the long and often treacherous trip downstream where, at their destination in Natchez or New Orleans, they were taken apart and their wood sold for lumber.

    During the late 1700s, the westward-moving nation came to depend more and more on the Mississippi River for the transportation not only of goods, but also of people. The need for a boat that could return up the river was crucial to increasing profits as well as to giving travelers an alternative to such thief-infested land routes as the Natchez Trace. These needs led to the development of the keelboat. Sturdy and skillfully proportioned to carry dozens of tons of freight in its rounded bottom, the keelboat was equipped with poles by which a hardy crew of men propelled it forward against the current. Some keelboats had sails to aid in navigation; in some situations the crew hauled the boat upstream by a rope from the riverbank; and other times they simply rowed.

    Returning north by river instead of land did not assure passengers’ safety, however. Hostile Indians, river pirates and the river itself with its unpredictable current, snags and sandbars made the journey a gamble. The keelboatmen were a rough, tough breed, suited to the rigors of the life they had chosen. Mark Twain described them in Life on the Mississippi as:

    rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sites like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane . . . yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous.

    Many of the most raucous river tales grew out of the days when keelboats ruled the Mississippi and the boatmen stopped at landings in Memphis, New Orleans and Natchez (known then as Natchez Under-the-Hill) to carouse. They fought, gambled, hustled prostitutes and often destroyed property. Legend has it that Natchez was the favorite stopover, offering the best brothels and bars. This colorful breed of river man survived for several generations, even into the days of the steam-driven boats.

    Steam came to the Mississippi in 1811. The New Orleans, designed by Robert Fulton, carried three passengers: Nicholas Roosevelt, his pregnant wife and their dog. The crew included a captain, an engineer, six deck hands, a cook and three servants. Though some in Pittsburgh, where the journey began, considered it scandalous for Roosevelt to take his pregnant wife on the risky journey, for Mrs. Roosevelt it was, in her words, jolly. She had, after all, spent her honeymoon in 1809 on a flatboat trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans.

    The New Orleans arrived in the city for which it was named in January 1812, having survived hostile Indians, a fire on board, the New Madrid earthquake and the birth of Mrs. Roosevelt’s baby. Before New Orleans, however, was Natchez, where the entire town had gathered at the Natchez Under-the-Hill landing to greet the boat. As the captain had allowed his fires to slow and his steam to diminish, he found the boat drifting too far downstream with the swift current. The boat slipped past Natchez as the onlookers’ anticipation turned to dejection. Additional fuel and a new surge of steam set the boat on course again, however, and it turned back up the crowd-filled shore. When it left town, the New Orleans carried a load of cotton, the first ever to be shipped by steamboat from Natchez.

    For all its success in going down the river, the New Orleans proved to be poorly designed for travel any farther north than Natchez. Fulton’s boat resembled his Hudson River steamboats, which had hulls too deep for the Mississippi’s snags, sandbars and swift currents. It took a Mississippi River man to understand the application of steam there. That man was Henry Shreve, who had navigated pirogues, flatboats and keelboats for several years by the time the New Orleans made its maiden voyage. Shreve knew that a Mississippi River steamboat should have a shallow hull, and that it in fact should be very similar to a keelboat in design. In 1816 he designed such a boat, the Washington, which traveled up from New Orleans to Louisville in 24 days, a trip that might have taken a keelboat six months. Shreve’s design opened the river to steam navigation, and all Mississippi River steamboats in the following years copied the basic design of the

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