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Updated: May 31, 2025
To refer to a trotter as a thoroughbred is to suffer social ostracism, and to obfuscate a side-wheeler with a single-footer is proof of degeneracy. This applies equally to the ethics of the ballroom or the livery-stable. In Kentucky they read Richard's famous lines thus: "A saddler! a saddler! my kingdom for a saddler!"
The flagship Hartford took the lead, with the Albatross lashed to her port side, next the Richmond with the Genesee, the Monongahela with the Kineo, and last the side-wheeler Mississippi alone. The Essex and Sachem remained at anchor below, with the mortar boats, to cover the advance. An hour later a rocket shot up from the bluff and instantly the Confederate batteries opened fire.
When, after watching others, seeing their little boats tossed like cockle shells upon the sands, and hearing how thoroughly drenched with salt water many of the people were while landing, I gave it up, and remained on board. For five days we lay anchored outside, while stevedores loaded supplies from the "Bertha" on barges towed ashore by the side-wheeler "Sadie."
The first successful steamboat for commerce was, as is well known, Robert Fulton's flat-bottomed side-wheeler Clermont, which in August, 1807, made the 150 miles from New York to Albany in 32 hours. During the war of 1812 Fulton designed for coast defense a heavily timbered, double-ender floating battery, with a single paddle-wheel located inside amidships.
The boat we went by was the same little side-wheeler we had come down on, crowded with wounded now, mud-stained, blood-stained, just as they had come from the trenches across the water, with no place to lie but the bare deck. The stifling hold was packed with them; they curled up about the engine-room gratings for it was cold that night yet there was no complaint.
She was a side-wheeler, a model which still holds favor on the lower lakes, though virtually abandoned on the ocean and on Lake Superior. An oil painting of this little craft, still preserved, shows her without a pilot-house, steered by a curious tiller at the stern, with a smokestack like six lengths of stovepipe, and huge unboxed wheels.
Moreover, he don't hop, your horned toad don't, like them Eastern toads; he stands up on his toes an' paces he's what we-all calls on the Ohio River back in my childhood's sunny hours, "a side-wheeler." Also, he's got a tail.
When Gadabout poked her head out of the creek, she saw a queer looking craft busy on the James. It was a government buoy-tender, an awkward side-wheeler with a derrick forward, and big red sticks and black ones lying on deck. As we passed the tender, it was moving the red buoy at the mouth of our creek farther out into the river. Evidently the shoals were encroaching upon the channel.
We ferried across the river to New London. At Lyme there is a very steep descent to the Connecticut River, which is a broad estuary at that point. The ferry is a primitive side-wheeler, which might carry two automobiles, but hardly more. It happened to be on the far shore. A small boy pointed out a long tin horn hanging on a post, the hoarse blast of which summons the sleepy boat.
I mention these apparently unnecessary details merely that the reader may not think that the tale is fiction, for two years or so after, Captain Carpenter corroborated my friend's story. Carpenter was in command of a Chinese Government despatch vessel a side-wheeler which was immediately under the Viceroy's orders. She was but lightly armed, but was very fast, as fast went in those days.
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