The Great American Steamboat Race (13 page)

She goes up in seven or eight days, and descends in two or three, stopping several times for freight and passengers. She stays at the extreme of her journey, Natchez and New Orleans, about four or five days to discharge or to take in loading.

Before long, Nicholas had a falling out with Fulton and Livingston, apparently over his failure to give the partners regular reports of the boat’s operations, and Fulton sent his wife’s brother, John Livingston, to New Orleans to take over the boat’s records and the boat itself. At first Nicholas refused to turn over the boat, but when John Livingston threatened a lawsuit, Nicholas gave in, and Livingston assumed possession of the
New Orleans
and took charge of its operation.

Nicholas and Lydia eventually reached a financial settlement with the Fulton-Livingston partnership, compensating Nicholas for his contributions to the partners’ steamboat success, and the couple later moved to the quiet little town of Skaneateles in the picturesque Finger Lakes area of upstate New York. There they lived until Nicholas’s death on July 30, 1854, at age eightysix. Lydia died in 1871, at age eighty.

The
New Orleans
, the steamboat that had made them famous and had conquered the mighty Mississippi, lasted not nearly so long. It had a hole punched in its hull when it became impaled on a stump and it sank near Baton Rouge on July 14, 1814.

By the time the
New Orleans
wrecked and sank, the Fulton-Livingston partnership had put another steamboat on the Mississippi — the
Vesuvius
, one hundred and sixty feet long, thirty feet in the beam and drawing six feet of water. It was built in Pittsburgh under the supervision of John Livingston and while steaming down the Ohio on the way to New Orleans on its maiden voyage it achieved an average speed of ten and a half miles an hour. It arrived in New Orleans in May 1814. Fulton had intended it to run between New Orleans and Louisville, but when its hull, like that of the
New Orleans
, proved too deep for the vessel to regularly navigate the shallow waters of the Mississippi above Natchez, Fulton had to change the plan.

The proof of its inability to navigate shallow western waters came dramatically when
Vesuvius
ran aground off the Tennessee shore on its first trip from New Orleans to Louisville and lay like a beached whale for five months before it could be refloated. After that, its service was limited to the New Orleans-to-Natchez run, through deeper water. Despite all his engineering powers, Fulton was having difficulty understanding that boats designed like deep-hulled seagoing vessels, although satisfactory for rivers in the East, would not work well on the Mississippi and other western rivers. They simply drew too much water.

Fulton and Robert Livingston, even before the
New Orleans
made its historic maiden voyage, had gained from Louisiana the monopoly they wanted. They were granted exclusive rights to steamboat navigation on the Mississippi for eighteen years, and although their privilege did not extend beyond the limits of the present-day state of Louisiana, it did include the all-important stretch of river that gave access to the port of New Orleans, a situation that was only bound to be challenged. Daniel French, a Pittsburgh inventor and entrepreneur, was the first to do so.

the
Comet
and the
Despatch
. In an attempt to cope with shallow rivers, French built his boats small enough and light enough to avoid drawing a lot of water. The
Comet
was only fifty-two feet long and eight feet in the beam. He also put a more powerful engine in them. Unlike Fulton’s vessels, which used lowpressure steam engines, the
Comet
was driven by a high-pressure engine, which French had designed. In 1813 he launched the
Comet
into the Ohio and sent it down to New Orleans. Sources vary on whether the Fulton-Livingston partnership chased the
Comet
away with a threat of seizure or simply ignored it. In any case, the
Comet
withdrew to Natchez. It turned out that despite its small size it could not dependably navigate above Natchez, and French gave up on it, removing its engine and selling it to run a cotton gin.

French then built a bigger boat, the
Enterprise
, eighty feet long and twenty-nine feet in the beam,
¹
and in late 1814 he hired twenty-nine-year-old Henry Miller Shreve to captain it and take it to New Orleans, def ying the Fulton-Livingston monopoly.

Shreve had already shown himself to be a remarkable young man and in time to come, he would prove even more remarkable. Born October 21, 1785, he was one of four sons of Israel Shreve and the fifth child of Israel’s second wife, Mary Cokely Shreve. At the time of Henry’s birth, Israel and Mary and their family were taking refuge at Israel’s brother’s home on Rancocas Creek in New Jersey following a fire that had destroyed their house. In 1788 the family moved to western Pennsylvania to live on land bought from George Washington, with whom Israel had served as a colonel in the Revolutionary Wa r .

Near the family’s new homesite, southeast of Pittsburgh, flowed the Youghiogheny River, a tributary of the Monongahela, and young Henry developed a fascination for it and for the distant places to which it might take him. When his father died in 1802, Henry went to work as a flatboat crewman and learned how to handle riverboats and how to make money running one. In the summer of 1807, when he was twenty-one years old, nearly six feet tall, slender and sinewy, he began building a boat of his own, a keelboat with which he planned to go into business carrying trade goods on the Ohio and Mississippi. In October 1807 the boat, built at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela, was finished, and Henry recruited a ten-man crew from the Brownsville riverfront to man the boat on a voyage down the Ohio and up the Mississippi to St. Louis. After stopping at Pittsburgh to buy an assortment of goods to sell in St. Louis, he began the descent of the Ohio. At the Ohio’s juncture with the Mississippi, his crewmen took to their sweeps and laboriously rowed upstream, reaching St. Louis six weeks after having left Pittsburgh. Shreve sold the goods he had brought to St. Louis, then bought a load of furs and headed his keelboat down the Mississippi, up the Ohio and back to Pittsburgh, where he loaded the furs onto wagons and shipped them to buyers in Philadelphia. That done, he took the boat back to St. Louis to repeat the process.

After three years of trading in furs, Shreve in 1810 tried a new venture, taking his boat up the Mississippi past St. Louis and into Indian country in Illinois, where white men other than British traders from Canada rarely traveled. With a shipload of goods he believed would appeal to the Indians — farming implements, metal pots and a variety of hardware — he and his crew slowly made their way up to the mouth of the Galena River, in the extreme northwestern corner of present-day Illinois, and entered the Galena. Fourteen days later, working the boat upstream, they arrived at a Sac and Fox Indian village that was the base of a Sac and Fox lead mine. Winning over the wary Indians, Shreve traded his goods for their smelted lead and loaded his boat with it. He built another boat there on the site, bought a third boat from another trader and loaded both of them with lead also. On July 1, 1810, he told his new Indian friends goodbye and shoved off for the Mississippi with his three boats and their cargo.

Riding the current, Shreve and his little flotilla swiftly descended fifteen hundred miles of the Mississippi to New Orleans. There he found a sailing ship that would take him and his cargo to Philadelphia, where he arrived that fall and sold the lead for an eleven-thousand-dollar profit. He then returned to Brownsville to have a new boat built and to win the hand of the girl with whom he had fallen in love, red-haired, nineteen-year-old Mary Blair. He married her in February 1811. Within a few months after the wedding he was back on the river, taking his new vessel, a capacious barge, and its freight to New Orleans.

It was apparently on that voyage that Shreve became keenly interested in steamboats. On his return trip from New Orleans he arrived in Louisville in time to see — and examine — the
New Orleans,
moored there while Nicholas Roosevelt waited for the Ohio to rise enough to pass the falls. Shreve was captured by the steamboat. Its possibilities were immediately obvious. No more would a riverboat have to be rowed, poled, warped or towed by crewmen trudging doggedly along the banks of the river, tortoise-slow, tedious and back-breaking work, but until the coming of the
New Orleans
, the only ways to move boats of size against the big river’s unremitting current.

Shreve made several more round trips between Brownsville and New Orleans in his own boat before he signed on to captain Daniel French’s
Enterprise
, a job that would give Shreve valuable experience running a steamboat, which was exactly what he wanted.

By that time, late 1814, the War of 1812 had been going on for more than two years, and the Mississippi River had become an important part of England’s strategy to contain — and perhaps regain — the United States. English warships were blockading America’s Atlantic and gulf coasts, and the Mississippi and its tributaries had become more vital than ever as a communication line and as a conduit for moving the nation’s goods. England’s plan in 1814 was to launch an invasion from the Gulf of Mexico and capture New Orleans, thereby gaining a stranglehold on the Mississippi. The British could then control the big river from Canada and the upper Midwest all the way to the gulf. The United States would be hemmed in, checked by enemy forces on all four sides — Canada to the north, the gulf to the south, the Atlantic to the east and the Mississippi to the west — and it would be forced to submit to whatever terms England might contrive.

On December 1, 1814, Major General Andrew Jackson arrived in New Orleans to take command of the city’s defense and soon set about assembling a rag-tag army made up of U.S. regular army troops, U.S. Navy sailors and Marines, Tennessee and Louisiana militiamen, Kentucky frontiersmen, free blacks, Choctaw Indians, an assortment of volunteers and Jean Lafitte’s buccaneers, the pirates of Barataria. To stop the invaders before they reached New Orleans, Jackson began erecting a first line of defense that would stand practically in the face of the enemy. He would position his infantry, including the long-rifle marksmen from Kentucky, and his artillery, including guns manned by Lafitte’s expert cannoneers, behind a protective wall of cotton bales and mud, stretching from the levee, across the cane field and into the swamp on the east side of the field.

On December 13 the fleet carrying the British invasion force arrived at Lake Borgne, a bay of the gulf, east of the mouth of the Mississippi. The British troops were disembarked into small boats and were rowed across Lake Borgne and up Bayou Bienvenue to reach the rear of the sugar-cane plantations that fronted on the Mississippi some ten miles below New Orleans. From there they planned to march on New Orleans.

Shreve had left Pittsburgh aboard the
Enterprise
on December 1, 1814, and he arrived at New Orleans on December 14. His cargo this time was artillery and ammunition for General Jackson’s army, still gathering in and around New Orleans. One of the first to learn of the
Enterprise
’s arrival was Robert Livingston’s younger brother Edward, who had moved to New Orleans from New York some years earlier. Robert Livingston had suffered a fatal stroke on February 25, 1813, and his death had thrown his steamboat interests into chaotic disarray, scattered among heirs and others. Out of the disarray eventually had come a new corporation that succeeded to the partnership’s Mississippi River steamboat monopoly and in which Edward Livingston was a major shareholder. A skillful lawyer, he immediately moved to have the
Enterprise
seized on the grounds that it was in violation of the corporation’s steamboat monopoly.

He was not quick enough. Before Livingston could obtain a court order for the boat’s seizure, General Jackson commandeered the
Enterprise
. He ordered Shreve, once its cargo had been discharged, to take the
Enterprise
up the river and find three keelboats that were supposed to be bringing a shipment of desperately needed small arms to supply Jackson’s army.

Preparatory to hunting down the three keelboats, Shreve was making repairs on the
Enterprise
when he was suddenly confronted by a number of marshals who boarded the vessel as it lay beside the wharf. They read a court order to him, told him they were seizing the boat and ordered him off. Shreve replied that he was unable to surrender the boat to them because it had been commandeered by General Jackson and he, Shreve, was under orders from the general to take the boat on a vital military mission upriver. If they wanted the
Enterprise
, they would have to see General Jackson. Defeated, the marshals withdrew. Livingston had been thwarted, for the time being.

Shreve then took the
Enterprise
up the river, searching for the errant keelboats, and found them north of Natchez. He brought their captains aboard the
Enterprise
, tied the keelboats to the
Enterprise
with tow lines and hauled them into New Orleans, arriving a week after he had left.

The all-out British attack came early in the morning on January 8, 1815, setting off a ferocious response from the American line. The defenders’ artillery and rifle fire cut like a scythe through the tight, European-style formations of the advancing British, easy targets as they marched forward without cover or concealment, and by the scores they fell lifeless or wounded onto the stubble of the muddy cane field. The battle quickly became a slaughter. Among the hundreds of British killed was their commander, Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, shot off his horse and mortally wounded as he attempted to rally his disintegrating army. Finally, mercifully, a retreat was effected, and the fighting ceased. Jackson and his motley American army had won a huge victory, and New Orleans had been saved, as Jackson had promised its citizens it would be.