On This Day in the Old West: May 12

 On this day in the Old West, the first steamboat successfully navigated the Upper Mississippi. On May 10, 1823, the steamboat Virginia arrived at Fort St. Anthony (renamed Fort Snelling two years later), making the 729-mile trip from St. Louis in twenty days. The Virginia traveled to within eight miles of St. Anthony Falls with “a few passengers and a cargo of military supplies” bound for the site of present-day St. Paul, Minnesota. This marked the first time a steamboat traveled up the Mississippi all the way to the head of navigation.

Other boats, of course, had used the upper river for years: piroques, canoes, flatboats, and keelboats. The Virginia heralded a new era. Under steam power, people and cargo could be transported upstream far more quickly and efficiently, and in greater quantities, than on a boat with sails or poles or oars. Beginning around 1817, steamboats began to ply the lower Mississippi (and the Ohio) in large numbers, and travel from New Orleans to Pittsburgh soon became routine. But the upper Mississippi, more turbulent and filled with obstructions, was a different story. Long after the Virginia left St. Louis, skeptics postulated whether she would ever return. Some expected her to founder or give up when she reached the fearsome Des Moines Rapids. The Virginia did get stuck in the rapids, but removed cargo to lighten her load and was able to escape.

Despite “frequent groundings and delays, stormy weather, and a lack of navigational charts for the last two hundred miles,” Virginia reached Fort St. Anthony on May 10, having supplied other forts along her way. The journey was quite slow, with daylight travel only. Virginia took twenty days to cover seven hundred miles. At one point, a Native passenger named Great Eagle, irritated that the ship’s pilot had chosen the wrong channel, leaped from the boat and swam ashore to join his fellow Sauk tribesmen, who were walking upstream. By the time Virginia reached her next stop, the Sauks had already arrived, set up camp, and were dickering with fur traders. Still, sluggish as Virginia may have been, she proved a steamboat could conquer the upper Mississippi. The Virginia made two more supply runs during 1823 and before long, a fleet of steamships was carrying lead, furs, and grain down the Mississippi—and settlers upstream. The river remained an indispensable thoroughfare for decades, especially in the upper Midwest, where no railroad would reach St. Paul until after the Civil War.

After 1823, steamboat traffic grew quickly. One measure was the number of times steamboats docked at the upper river’s port cities. St. Paul recorded 41 steamboat arrivals in 1844 and 95 arrivals in 1849. By 1857, St. Paul had become a bustling port, with over 1,000 steamboat arrivals each year. But as quickly as the number of boats increased, they just couldn’t keep up with the demand. In 1854, a St. Paul newspaper, the Minnesota Pioneer, reported that every steamboat which arrived overflowed with passengers and freight, and that “the present tonnage on the river is by no means sufficient to handle one-half the business of the trade.” Every boat that docked created new business and an even greater backlog, as more and more immigrants disembarked to start farms and businesses. From famine to feast in just over thirty years—steamboat traffic had finally arrived in the upper Mississippi. 

Of course, the river hadn’t changed. Trees filled and surrounded it. Hundreds of islands and sand bars divided the channel. Above St. Paul, rocks and rapids kept the river unmanageable. Not until after the Civil War would the country look at creating a navigable channel in the Mississippi. The 1866 River and Harbor Act directed the Corps of Engineers to survey the river from St. Anthony Falls to the Rock Island Rapids and “ascertain the feasible means, by economizing the water of the stream, of insuring the passage, at all navigable seasons, of boats drawing four feet of water….”  In other words, Congress was asking the Corps to figure out how to create a continuous four-foot channel that would remain clear in high water or low. Low water was defined as the height of the water during the 1864 drought, so the Corps would need to ensure the river was at least four feet deep at that level. In 1867, they initiated a program of dredging sandbars, snagging, clearing overhanging trees, and removing sunken vessels to create that four-foot channel. This project didn’t greatly change the river’s character and didn’t actually improve the river much for navigation, but it started a series of navigation projects that would, in the end, do both. And it all started on May 10, 1823.

Your characters would have either taken a steamboat ride on their way West, or at the least, would know of the riverboats of the Mississippi. Just remember that the upper river would not have been as navigable until after the Civil War.

J.E.S. Hays
www.jeshays.com
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