A Time Before Steamboats

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As you travel the mighty Mississippi River with the American Queen, you are struck by the steady procession of river traffic you encounter. And while the towboats and barges are the workhorses of the river, and the gilded casino boats festooned with lights and filigree are precisely the opposite, there is still a flavor of what the river once was. The beauty of a journey on the river creates a palpable sense of history. It’s not hard to imagine another time more than 200 years ago when the parade of river traffic was composed entirely of steamboats.

Of course, the fabulous Antebellum décor of the American Queen contributes to that ability, even though the boat itself is a modern marvel with every contemporary safety device, electronic navigational aid and modern amenity. It’s as if the designers first created a boutique hotel and then outfitted it to resemble a steamboat of years gone by. Our guests tell us that is the charm of an American Queen Steamboat Company voyage. It is a supremely comfortable, exquisitely elegant yet thoroughly relaxed experience flavored by the history of the river and the cultures of the towns we visit.

But there was a time before the riverboat when travel on America’s watery byways was anything but comfortable and the towns quite a bit less refined. On the American Queen, you can travel the length of the river in just a couple of weeks. For the frontiersmen, it was a considerably longer and more arduous journey.

Mark Twain was quick to explain the hardships of these early years of man’s battle with the currents of the mightiest of rivers in his magnificent book Life on the Mississippi:

“The river's earliest commerce was in great barges -- keelboats, broadhorns,” Twain wrote. “They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months. In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous.”

“By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty years, these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamers did all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boats in New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers.”

“But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a deck hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructed in the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi.”

“In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been trying to describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy, -- an acre or so of white, sweet-smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more, three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm-quarters, -- and I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride.”

For any travelers joining us for the first time, we highly recommend reading Life on the Mississippi. Because once you are comfortably ensconced in the stunning surroundings of the American Queen, it can be hard to imagine that there was ever any other way to travel on the Mississippi or any river.

So much has changed on the Mississippi River since Twain’s day but one thing has remained the same: the genuine friendliness of the people you meet as you pass them on the river or encounter them in their riverside towns. Their hospitality is a reminder of the days when an adventurous boy could swim out to a raft and float downstream. We encourage you to let your imagination do the same.