The Great American Steamboat Race (11 page)

When Robert Fulton at last persuaded Robert Livingston to lift his eyes and see the great opportunity that lay beyond the Northeast, Nicholas J. Roosevelt was the man the partners picked to build a steamboat that would voyage down the Mississippi River and become the first one to do so. Fulton and Livingston’s objective was to acquire a steamboat monopoly on the lower Mississippi as they had on the Hudson and thereby establish control of commercial shipping on two of the country’s most important waterways. But before asking the Louisiana territorial government to grant them a monopoly and before building the steamboat, Fulton and Livingston wanted to make sure the boat they envisioned could indeed make the voyage across the length of the Ohio and down the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans. To assure themselves, they proposed to send Roosevelt to Pittsburgh to have a boat built and make a test run that, if successful, would prepare the way for the coming of the steamboat. The test run would be made in a flatboat, propelled mainly by the rivers’ currents.

Roosevelt (whose brother became the grandfather of Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States) was, like Livingston, from an old, respected New York family. His father, Isaac, had been a member of the New York legislature and was for many years president of the Bank of New York. Roosevelt’s foundry and boat works, however, where he had built the experimental steamboat for Livingston and John Stevens, had fallen on hard times, and Roosevelt had become open to new propositions.

In the spring of 1809 he was forty-one years old and recently married to eighteen-year-old Lydia Latrobe, with whom he had fallen in love when she was a precocious fourteen-year-old. High-spirited and strong-minded, she was the daughter of architect, engineer and inventor Benjamin Latrobe, with whom Roosevelt had participated in several business ventures and who had become Roosevelt’s close friend. Agreeing to help Fulton and Livingston pur

sue their plan for a Mississippi River steamboat, Roosevelt would make the rugged journey over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh to build a boat aboard which he would drift through the heart of America, down to New Orleans. With him would go his courageous, venturesome young wife, who would not let him go without her. The trip would be for them, still newlyweds, like a honeymoon voyage.

They set out for Pittsburgh in the spring of 1809 and upon their arrival there immediately began to design their flatboat and arrange to have it built. Pittsburgh was then a town of about four thousand residents and a place where boat-building was a thriving industry, many freight-carrying flatboats originating there and there beginning their one-way voyage down the river.

The boat that Nicholas — and Lydia, the architect’s daughter — designed was essentially a houseboat with two cabins. The aft cabin — which Lydia called “a huge box”— contained a bedroom, a dining room and a pantry for the couple. The forward cabin, the larger of the two, housed the five-man crew — the vessel’s pilot, a cook and three deckhands, one of whom would man the tiller and two who would man the sweeps, the long-handled oars that provided additional propulsion when needed. The forward cabin also included a stone or brick fireplace where the cooking would be done. The top of the boat formed a flat, upper deck that was covered by an awning and had seats on it.

The boat carried or towed a large rowboat from which soundings could be taken to determine the depth of the water and the speed of the current in advance of the boat’s reaching shoals, eddies, white water or dangerouslooking obstructions. Those measurements and the locations at which they were taken would be meticulously recorded by Roosevelt in a notebook he would keep throughout the voyage and in which he would also draw maps so that they and the notes could be referred to when the proposed steamboat, with a deeper draft, would later venture into the same waters.

In June 1809 the Roosevelts’ flatboat was ready for them, and they cast off from the dock at Pittsburgh to start their two-thousand-mile journey of exploration, gliding down to the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers and entering the Ohio at its beginning. They traveled by day and tied up to the riverbank each night as darkness came on. Nicholas soon found that his days would not be leisurely spent with Lydia beneath the awning of the upper deck. Instead, he was usually out in the rowboat taking soundings, making observations and taking notes.

The first major port of call was Cincinnati, about four hundred and fifty river miles from Pittsburgh, a town of about twenty-five hundred residents. Nicholas and Lydia were greeted and entertained by some of the town’s officials and leading citizens and after a short stay, they resumed their voyage. The next significant stop was at Louisville, about a hundred and thirty miles farther downriver, a community of about twelve hundred persons. Again they were warmly received. They were also warned of a serious danger that lay ahead of them — the Falls of the Ohio, a stretch of the river that dropped twentysix feet over a three-mile distance, creating rapids that coursed over and through menacing rocks and stone ledges against which their boat could be dashed to splinters. The warning gave Nicholas pause. He took three weeks to study the falls, measuring distances and the depth and speed of the water.

The Roosevelts’ stay in Louisville lasted long enough for them to make friends in the community, friends they would see again. As they had at Cincinnati, they told people what they were doing — scouting out the Ohio and Mississippi in preparation for running a steamboat on the rivers. And as at Cincinnati, they were met by much skepticism, the popular belief being that although a boat driven solely by a steam engine might make it
down
the rivers, it could never travel
up
them, against the currents. When at last Nicholas was satisfied that his study was complete, he hired a special pilot, as most boatmen did, to steer him through the falls and he and Lydia and their crew, now joined by the local pilot, boarded the flatboat and shoved off to brave the perilous falls.

They were as fearsome as had been expected, but the pilot succeeded in getting the boat through them, and once they were passed, the river resumed its tranquility, and the party of exploration continued on its way, passing through a world of woods that bordered the river on both banks. Only occasionally did they see human life, isolated settlers who came out to the water’s edge to hail them, or the crewmen of other boats making their way downstream. Some days the Roosevelt boat stopped to let its crew fish or hunt to replenish the food supply. One day Nicholas discovered two beds of coal on the riverbank, about one hundred and twenty miles below the falls, and he made a note of their location so that a quantity of coal could be dug out later and used as fuel for the planned steamboat. Most days, though, the boat pushed slowly on, and Nicholas continued to measure and sound and make entries in his notebook.

When they had come a distance that Nicholas estimated to be a thousand miles from Pittsburgh (it’s actually slightly less), the boat reached the mile-wide Mississippi, and the crew deftly steered the flatboat out into the muddy mainstream of the mighty river, the blue water of the Ohio turning gray as it was absorbed into the larger flow. With the entry into the Mississippi came new dangers, including floating and imbedded objects of many descriptions, particularly fallen trees that created snags in the stream, any of which might smash or rip open the boat’s hull, and, not the least threat, hostile Indians who could reach the boat in their canoes, dangers that their friends in Louisville had warned them about. One night the boat was indeed boarded by Indians. Lydia wrote about the incident : “Mr. Roosevelt was aroused in the night by seeing two Indians in our sleeping room, calling for whiskey, when Mr. Roosevelt had to get up and give it to them before he could induce them to leave the boat.”
¹

Stopping only briefly at New Madrid, a town on the west bank of the river in the Missouri territory, the Roosevelts and their crew continued languidly down the broad Mississippi, slowly slipping southward, past great wooded stretches and occasional cultivated fields, hearing the sounds of birds and wild animals breaking the encompassing silence of the river. Deeper into the southland they drifted, where the land became more settled looking, with fields stretching away from the river. Then at last they came upon Natchez, the great cotton gathering center, its riverfront crowded with motley boats and rough shacks, its handsome commercial and residential areas standing serenely aloof on the hill that rises from the water’s edge. At Natchez they were heartily greeted by the town’s luminaries and there they received an offer for their flatboat, one that was, Nicholas felt, too good to refuse, unlikely as it was to be matched in New Orleans. Since they were now within days of their destination, Nicholas decided to sell the boat that had been their comfortable home for so many weeks and make the rest of the voyage in the large, open rowboat from which he had been making his soundings and observations.

The honeymoon was now over. “Our pilot,” Lydia reported, “who had lived all his life as a boatman on these waters, assured us that there would be no difficulty in finding lodgings for the few nights we should be out. But it appeared the inhabitants on the river had been so often imposed on by travelers whom they had received into their houses, that they refused all applications.”
²
After long, tiresome days in the rowboat, unprotected against the sun and weather, the couple did the best they could to rest at night. They spread a buffalo robe across a large trunk at the stern of the boat to make a bed and spent four nights trying to sleep that way in the boat, which was partly drawn out of the river. All the while, Lydia recalled, they were “hearing the alligators scratch on the sides [of the boat], taking it for a log ; [and] when a knock with a cane would alarm them..., they would splash down into the water.”
³

Three nights they spread their buffalo robe on the sandy river bank and tried to rest there, but “feeling every moment,” Lydia said, “that something terrible might happen before morning.”
⁴
Two other nights they managed to find shelter inside buildings, one the cabin of “an old French couple who allowed us to spread our buffalo robes on the floor before a fine, large fire, where we felt safe,” Lydia wrote, “though disturbed once or twice during the night by the people coming into the room we occupied, and kneeling before a crucifix which stood upon a shelf.”
⁵
The other building in which they found a night’s lodging was a tavern in Baton Rouge. The room, Lydia reported, “was a forlorn little place opening out of the bar-room, which was filled with tipsy men looking like cut-throats. The room had one window opening into a stableyard, but which had neither shutters nor fastenings. Its furniture was a single chair and dirty bed. We threw our cloaks on the bed and laid down to rest, but not to sleep, for the fighting and the noise in the bar-room prevented that. We rose at the dawn of day, and reached the boat, feeling thankful we had not been murdered in the night. It is many, many years ago; but I can still recall that night of fright.”
⁶

The exploration party finally reached New Orleans on December 1, 1809, but had little time to linger and recover. Instead, they sought out the first available ship leaving for the East Coast and quickly sailed away in it. That voyage, like the nine days the Roosevelts had spent in the open rowboat, was not much of a honeymoon either. “We had a terrible voyage of a month, with a sick captain,” Lydia wrote. “The yellow fever was on board. A passenger ... died with it.” The Roosevelts left the ship off the coast of Virginia and were taken by a pilot boat to Old Point Comfort and from there they took a stagecoach to New York, arriving in mid–January 1810. They had been gone nine months.

Nicholas promptly reported to Fulton and Livingston what he had learned. With that good news in hand, Fulton and Livingston entered into a contract with Nicholas. Some sources say the arrangement was a partnership that provided for Fulton and Livingston to supply the capital and Nicholas the expertise and time. Under the agreement, Nicholas would go back to Pittsburgh and there oversee the building of a steamboat according to Fulton’s specifications. Also under the terms of the agreement, Nicholas would take the steamboat down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans, retracing the journey he and Lydia had made in the flatboat. In honor of its city of destination, the new steamboat would be named the
New Orleans
.

Fulton’s plans called for a side-wheeler one hundred and sixteen feet long and twenty feet in the beam, drawing about seven feet of water (a specification which Nicholas was said to alter in order to reduce the vessel’s draft). Its hull would be rounded, like that of a seagoing vessel. The engine was to have a thirty-four-inch cylinder with an appropriately sized boiler mounted in the vessel’s hold. The
New Orleans
would have two cabins, one aft for women passengers and a larger one forward for men. The women’s cabin would contain four berths and would be comfortably furnished. According to one account, the vessel would have portholes and a bowsprit and would be painted light blue. It would have two masts and carry sails for use if needed. Timbers for the boat’s ribs, beams and knees would come from forests near Pittsburgh, the felled trees to be dragged into the Monongahela River and rafted downstream to the site where the boat would be constructed.

It would be built on the bank of the Monongahela, near Boyd’s Hill, at a location on which was later erected the depot of the Pittsburgh and Connellsville Railroad, close to Beelen’s foundry. Mechanics to build and install the engine and other mechanical equipment were brought from New York, but local boatwrights, under Nicholas’s oversight, would assemble the craft. The cost of the vessel would come to about $38,000, which Livingston thought excessive.

On September 27, 1811, the
New Orleans
was at last finished and ready to be launched on its history-making voyage. On board were Nicholas and Lydia, a captain whom the records leave unnamed, an engineer named Baker, a pilot named Andrew Jack, six deckhands, two maids, a male waiter, a cook and an enormous Newfoundland dog named Tiger. Friends of the Roosevelts implored Lydia, who was eight months pregnant, not to go, but she was determined to make the trip. Pittsburgh’s residents turned out in huge numbers to see them off and to see if the steamboat would actually work. They thronged along the banks of the Monongahela, waving handkerchiefs, tossing their hats into the air and shouting as the
New Orleans
shoved off, smoke rising like tall clouds from its two black smokestacks. It glided down to the confluence and at last disappeared from the crowd’s view as it passed behind the headlands on the west bank of the Ohio.