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Updated: June 21, 2025
As this run between New Orleans and Natchez came to be one of the most profitable in the United States in the early days of steamboating, less than fifteen years later, the experience of these "Flying Dutchmen" affords a very pretty proof that something more than a means of transportation is needed to create commerce.
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.
The boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure has furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman which I desire to offer in this place. I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush times of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination the marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there.
Mining, storekeeping, liquor-selling, gambling, steamboating, all were occupations which men followed as necessity or convenience prompted. A citizen gained repute by the manner in which he deported himself, not by reason of the nature of the commodity in which he dealt. Such, at least, was the attitude of the "old-timers."
The Negros hung enchanted upon a great story of her experiences, interrupting her all along with eager questions, with laughter, exclamations of delight, and expressions of applause; and she was obliged to confess to herself that if there was anything better in this world than steamboating, it was the glory to be got by telling about it.
It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboating times plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days. But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has always been attractive. Even Mrs.
One doesn't hit a rock or a solid log craft with a steamboat when he can get excused. You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried a large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed steamboating days. Indeed they did.
Cairo has since been built into a considerable town by dyking out the rivers, and was an important naval and military point during the Civil War.... This is my thirteenth day of steamboating, the usual time across the Atlantic, and I have four days more at least. You may well suppose that a hundred passengers are put to their trumps for amusement.
It will easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too.
River steamboating was his life, and sand-bars were his excitement. On one occasion, I said, "Oh! Captain, do you think we shall get off this bar to-day?"
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