Page:History of Southeast Missouri 1912 Volume 1.djvu/248

 188 HISTORY OF SOUTHEAST MISSOURI expected to do this, and if be ever really in- tended it. He soon gave up the idea because the Clermont was put into use on the Hudson river, where it fovmd waiting for it the great- est river traffic in the world. But, if the Mississippi river was not to have the Cler- mont for its trade, it was not long to be de- prived of steamboats. In 1811 a company of men built in Pittsburgh a boat which they called the New Orleans. This boat made the trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and was for some time concerned in the traffic on the Mississippi river. In a very short time other boats were built and in 1816 the first steamboat passed up the Mississippi above the mouth of the Ohio. This was the General Pike and was com- manded by Captain Jacob Reed. This steam- boat was looked upon by all of the inhabitants as a very remarkable and wonderful thing indeed, but it was onlj- a little while imtil there were a great number of steamboats in operation. They possessed such' remarkable advantages over the keel-boat that they were adopted for traffic as fast as possible. The second boat to come up the river above the mouth of the Ohio was the Constitution ; it reached St. Louis in 1817. The change produced by these steamboats was remarkable. They lowered not only the time necessary for the journey, but thej' low- ered in a remarkable way the expense of transportation. The rates on the steamboats, even, were enormous, but they were lower than the rates on the keel-boats. In 1819 a contract was entered into between the owners of two steamboats and the United States gov- ernment to carry freight from St. Louis to Council Bluffs and the rate charged was $8.00 a hundred pounds. This is enormous com- pared to our present rates, but seemed reason- able in those days when compared to the rates necessarily charged by other means of trans- portation. Flint, who was a minister and traveled up and down the river very many times, has recorded the feeling of pleasure with which he took his first voyage on a steamboat. In speaking of his experience, he says: "It is now refreshing and imparts a feeling of energy and power to the beholder, to see the large and beautiful steamboats scudding up the eddies, as though on the wing; and when they have run out the eddy, strike the cur- rent. The foam bursts in a sheet quite over the deck. She quivers for a moment with the concussion, and then, as though she had collected all her energy and vanquished her enemy, she resumes her stately march and mounts against the current five or six miles an hour." And lo.st in admiration at the won- derful advance from the slow upward move- ment of the keel-boat, at the rate of six miles a day, he says. "A stranger to this mode of traveling would find it difficult to describe his impressions upon first descending the !Mi.ssissippi in one of the better steamboats. He contemplates the prodigious establish- ment, with all its fitting of deck, common, and ladies' cabin apartments. Overhead, about him and below him all is life and movement." Then, speaking of the time when he first trav- eled on these western waters, and before the era of the steamboat, he says, "This stream, instead of being plowed by a hundred steain- boats, had seen but one. The astonishing fa- cilities for traveling, by which it is almost changed to flying, had not been invented. The thousand travelers for mere amusement that we now see on the roads, canals and rivers, were then traveling only in books. The stillness of the forest had not been broken by the shouting of the turnpike makers. The IMississippi forest had seldom resounded ex-