1870 as 1218 miles, owing to the action of the river in shortening its course.
YEAR BOAT TIME
1844 J. M. White 3 d. 23 h. 9 m.
1849 Missouri 4 d. 19 h. —
1889 Dexter 4 d. 9 h. —
1870 Natchez 8 d. 21 h. 58 m.
1870 R. E. Lee 3 d. 18 h. 14 m.
The steamboat now extended its service to the West and North. The ancient fur trade with the Indians of the upper Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Arkansas, had its headquarters at St. Louis, whence the notable band of men engaged in that trade were reaching out to the Rockies. The roll includes Ashley, Campbell, Sublette, Manuel Lisa, Perkins, Hempstead, William Clark, Labadie, the Chouteaus, and Menard–men of different races and colors and alike only in their energy, bravery, and initiative. Through them the village of St. Louis had grown to a population of four thousand in 1819, when Major Long’s expedition passed up the Missouri in the first steamboat to ascend that river. This boat, the Western Engineer, was built at Pittsburgh and was modeled cunningly for its work. It was one of the first stern wheelers built in the West; and the saving in width meant much on streams having such narrow channels as the Missouri and the Platte, especially when barges were to be towed. Then, too, its machinery, which was covered over or boarded up, was shrouded in mystery. A fantastic figure representing a serpent’s open mouth contained the exhaust pipe. If the New Orleans alarmed the population of the Ohio Valley, the sensation caused among the red children of the Missouri at the sight of this gigantic snake belching fire and smoke must have thoroughly satisfied the whim of its designer.
The admission of Missouri to statehood and the independence of Mexico mark the beginning of real commercial relations between St. Louis and Santa Fe. In 1822 Captain William Becknell organized the first wagon train which left the Missouri (at Franklin, near Independence) for the long dangerous journey to the Arkansas and on to Santa Fe. In the following year two expeditions set forth, carrying out cottons and other drygoods to exchange for horses, mules, furs, and silver.
Despite the handicaps of Indian opposition and Mexican tariffs, the Santa Fe trade became an important factor in the growth of St. Louis and the Missouri River steamboat lines. In 1825 the pathway was “surveyed” from Franklin to San Fernando, then in Mexico. This Santa Fe trade grew from fifteen thousand pounds of freight in 1822 to nearly half a million pounds twenty years later.
By 1826 steamboat traffic up the Missouri began to assume regularity. The navigation was dangerous and difficult because the Missouri never kept even an approximately constant head of water. In times of drought it became very shallow, and in times of flood it tore its wayward course open in any direction it chose. “Of all variable things in creation,” wrote a Western editor, “the most uncertain are the action of a jury, the state of a woman’s mind, and the condition of the Missouri River.” A further handicap, and one which was unknown on the Ohio and rare on the Mississippi, was the lack of forests to supply the necessary fuel. The Missouri, it is true, had its cottonwoods, but in a green state they were poor fuel, and along vast stretches they were not obtainable in any quantity.
The steamboat linked St. Louis with that vital stretch of the river lying between the mouth of the Kansas and the mouth of the Nebraska. From this region the great Western trail ran on to California and Oregon. In the early thirties Bonneville, Walker, Kelley, and Wyeth successively essayed this Overland Trail by way of the Platte through the South Pass of the Rockies to the Humboldt, Snake, and Columbia rivers. From Independence on the Missouri this famous pathway led to Fort Laramie, a distance of 672 miles; another 800-mile climb brought the traveler through South Pass; and so, by way of Fort Bridger, Salt Lake, and Sutter’s Fort, to San Francisco. The route, well known by hundreds of Oregon pioneers in the early forties, became a thoroughfare in the eager days of the Forty-Niners.*
* For map see “The Passing of the Frontier,” by Emerson Hough (in “The Chronicles of America”).
The earliest overland stage line to Great Salt Lake was established by Hockaday and Liggett. After the founding of the famous Overland Stage Company by Russell, Majors, and Waddell in 1858, stages were soon ascending the Platte from the steamboat terminals on the Missouri and making the twelve hundred miles from St. Joseph to Salt Lake City in ten days. Stations were established from ten to fifteen miles apart, and the line was soon extended on to Sacramento. The nineteen hundred miles from St. Joseph to Sacramento were made in fifteen days although the government contract with the company for handling United States mail allowed nineteen days. A host of employees was engaged in this exciting but not very remunerative
enterprise–station-agents
and helpers, drivers, conductors who had charge of passengers, in addition to mail and express and road agents who acted as division superintendents. In 1862 the Overland Route was taken over by the renowned Ben Holliday, who operated it until the railway was constructed seven years later. Freight was hauled by the same company in wagons known as the “J. Murphy wagons,” which
were made in St. Louis. These wagons went out from Leavenworth loaded with six thousand pounds of freight each. A train usually consisted of twenty-five wagons and was known, in the vernacular of the plains, as a “bull-outfit”; the drivers were “bull-whackers”; and the wagon master was the “bull-wagon boss.”
The old story, however, was repeated again here on the boundless plains of the West. The Western trails streaming out from the terminus of steamboat traffic between Kansas City and Omaha had scarcely time to become well known before the railway conquerors of the Atlantic and Great Lakes regions were planning the conquest of the greater plains and the Rockies beyond. The opening of the Chinese ports in 1844 turned men’s minds as never before to the Pacific coast. The acquisition of Oregon within a few years and of California at the close of the Mexican War opened the way for a newspaper and congressional discussion as to whether the first railway to parallel the Santa Fe or the Overland Trail should run from Memphis, St. Louis, or Chicago. The building of the Union Pacific from Omaha westward assured the future of that city, and it was soon joined to Chicago and the East by several lines which were building toward Clinton, Rock Island, and Burlington.
But the construction of a few main lines of railway across the continent could only partially satisfy the commercial needs of the West. True, the overland trade was at once transferred to the railroad, but the enormous equipment of stage and express companies previously employed in westward overland trade was now devoted to joining the railway lines with the vast regions to the north and the south. The rivers of the West could not alone take care of this commerce and for many years these great transportation companies went with their stages and their wagons into the growing Dakota and Montana trade and opened up direct lines of communication to the nearest railway. On the south the cattle industry of Texas came northward into touch with the railways of Kansas. Eventually lateral and trunk lines covered the West with their network of lines and thus obliterated all rivalry and competition by providing unmatched facilities for quick transportation.
In the last days previous to the opening of the first transcontinental railway line a unique method of rapid transportation for mail and light parcels was established when the famous “Pony Express” line was put into operation between St. Joseph and San Francisco in 1860. By relays of horsemen, who carried pouches not exceeding twenty pounds in weight, the time was cut to nine days. The innovation was the new wonder of the world for the time being and led to an outburst on the part of the enthusiastic editor of the St. Joseph Free Democrat that deserves reading because it breathes so fully the Western spirit of exultant conquest:
“Take down your map and trace the footprints of our quadrupedantic animal: From St. Joseph, on the Missouri, to San Francisco, on the Golden Horn two thousand miles–more than half the distance across our boundless continent; through Kansas, through Nebraska, by Fort Kearney, along the Platte, by Fort Laramie, past the Buttes, over the Mountains, through the narrow passes and along the steep defiles, Utah, Fort Bridger, Salt Lake City, he witches Brigham with his swift pony-ship through the valleys, along the grassy slopes, into the snow, into the sand, faster than Thor’s Thialfi, away they go, rider and horse–did you see them? They are in California, leaping over its golden sands, treading its busy streets. The courser has unrolled to us the great American panorama, allowed us to glance at the home of one million people, and has put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes. Verily the riding is like the riding of Jehu, the son of Nimshi for he rideth furiously. Take out your watch. We are eight days from New York, eighteen from London. The race is to the swift.”*
* Quoted in Inman’s “The Great Salt Lake Trail,” p. 171.
The lifetime of many and many a man has covered a period longer than that interval of eighty-six years between 1783, when George Washington had his vision of “the vast inland navigation of these United States,” and the year 1869, when the two divisions of the Union Pacific were joined by a golden spike at Promontory Point in Utah. In point of time, those eighty-six years are as nothing; in point of accomplishment, they stand unparalleled. When Washington’s horse splashed across the Youghiogheny in October, 1784, the boundary lines of the United States were guarded with all the jealousy and provincial selfishness of European kingdoms. But overnight, so to sneak these limitations became no more than mere geometrical expressions. “Pennamite,” “Erie,” and “Toledo” wars between the States, suggesting a world of bitterness and recrimination, are remembered today, if at all, only by the cartoonist and the playwright. The ancient false pride in mock values, so cherished in Europe, has quite departed from the provincial areas of the United States, and Americans can fly in a day, unwittingly, through many States. Problems that would have cost Europe blood are settled without turmoil in the solemn cloisters of that American “international tribunal,” the Supreme Court, and they appear only as items of passing interest in our newspapers.
In unifying the nation the influence of the Supreme Court has been priceless, for it has given to Americans, in place of the colonial or provincial mind, a continental mind. But great is the debt of Americans to the men who laid the foundations of interstate commerce. No antidote served so well to counteract the poison of clannish rivalry as did their enthusiasm and their constructive energy. These men, dreamers and promoters, were building better than they knew. They thought to overcome mountains, obliterate swamps, conquer stormy lakes, master great rivers and endless plains; but, as their labors are judged today, the greater service which these men rendered appears in its true light. They stifled provincialism; they battered down Chinese Walls of prejudice and separatism; they reduced the aimless rivalry of bickering provinces to a businesslike common denominator; and, perhaps more than any class of men, they made possible the wide-spreading and yet united Republic that is honored and loved today.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The history of the early phase of American transportation is dealt with in three general works. John Luther Ringwalt’s “Development of Transportation Systems in the United States” (1888) is a reliable summary of the general subject at the time. Archer B. Hulbert’s “Historic Highways of America,” 16 vols. (1902-1905), is a collection of monographs of varying quality written with youthful enthusiasm by the author, who traversed in good part the main pioneer roads and canals of the eastern portion of the United States; Indian trails, portage paths, the military roads of the Old French War period, the Ohio River as a pathway of migration, the Cumberland Road, and three of the canals which played a part in the western movement, form the subject of the more valuable volumes. The temptation of a writer on transportation to wander from his subject is illustrated in this work, as it is illustrated afresh in Seymour Dunbar’s “A History of Travel in America,” 4 vols. (1915). The reader will take great pleasure in this magnificently illustrated work, which, in completer fashion than it has ever been attempted, gives a readable running story of the whole subject for the whole country, despite detours, which some will make around the many pages devoted to Indian relations.
For almost every phase of the general topic books, monographs, pamphlets, and articles are to be found in the corners of any great library, ranging in character from such productions as William F. Ganong’s “A Monograph of Historic Sites in the Province of New Brunswick” (“Proceedings and Transactions” of the Royal Society of Canada, Second Series, vol. V, 1899) which treats of early travel in New England and Canada, or St. George L. Sioussat’s “Highway Legislation in Maryland and its Influence on the Economic Development of the State” (“Maryland Geological Survey,” III, 1899) treating of colonial road making and legislation thereon, or Elbert J. Benton’s “The Wabash Trade Route in the Development of the Old Northwest” (“Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science,” vol. XXI, 1903) and Julius Winden’s “The Influence of the Erie Canal upon the Population along its Course” (University of Wisconsin, 1901), which treat of the economic and political influence of the opening of inland water routes, to volumes of a more popular character such as Francis W. Halsey’s “The Old New York Frontier” (1901), Frank H. Severance’s “Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier” (1903) for the North, and Charles A. Hanna’s “The Wilderness Trail”, 2 vols. (1911), and Thomas Speed’s “The Wilderness Road” (“The Filson Club Publications,” vol. II, 1886) for Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. The value of Hanna’s work deserves special mention.
For the early phases of inland navigation John Pickell’s “A New Chapter in the Early Life of Washington” (1856), is an excellent work of the old-fashioned type, while in Herbert B. Adams’s “Maryland’s Influence upon Land Cessions to the United States” (“Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Third Series,” I, 1885) a master-hand pays Washington his due for originating plans of trans-Alleghany solidarity; this likewise is the theme of Archer B. Hulbert’s “Washington and the West” (1905) wherein is printed Washington’s “Diary of September, 1784,” containing the first and unexpurgated draft of his classic letter to Harrison of that year. The publications of the various societies for internal improvement and state boards of control and a few books, such as Turner Camac’s “Facts and Arguments Respecting the Great Utility of an Extensive Plan of Inland Navigation in America” (1805), give the student distinct impressions of the difficulties and the ideals of the first great American promoters of inland commerce. Elkanah Watson’s “History of the…Western Canals in the State of New York” (1820), despite inaccuracies due to lapses of memory, should be specially remarked.
For the rise and progress of turnpike building one must remember W. Kingsford’s “History, Structure, and Statistics of Plank Roads” (1852), a reliable book by a careful writer. The Cumberland (National) Road has its political influence carefully adjudged by Jeremiah S. Young in “A Political and Constitutional Study of the Cumberland Road” (1904), while the social and personal side is interestingly treated in county history style in Thomas B. Searight’s “The Old Pike” (1894). Motorists will appreciate Robert Bruce’s “The National Road” (1916), handsomely illustrated and containing forty-odd sectional maps.
The best life of Fulton is H. W. Dickinson’s “Robert Fulton, Engineer and Artist: His Life and Works” (1913), while in Alice Crary Sutcliffe’s “Robert Fulton and the ‘Clermont'” (1909), the more intimate picture of a family biography is given. For the controversy concerning the Fulton-Livingston monopoly, note W. A. Duer’s “A Course of Lectures on Constitutional Jurisprudence” and his pamphlets addressed to Cadwallader D. Colden. The life of that stranger to success, the forlorn John Fitch, was written sympathetically and after assiduous research by Thompson Westcott in his “Life of John Fitch the Inventor of the Steamboat” (1858). For the pamphlet war between Fitch and Rumsey see Allibone’s Dictionary.
The Great Lakes have not been adequately treated. E. Channing and M. F. Lansing’s “The Story of the Great Lakes” (1909) is reliable but deals very largely with the routine history covered by the works of Parkman. J. O. Curwood’s “The Great Lakes” (1909) is stereotyped in its scope but has certain chapters of interest to students of commercial development, as has also “The Story of the Great Lakes.” The vast bulk of material of value on the subject lies in the publications of the New York, Buffalo, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Chicago Historical Societies, whose lists should be consulted. These publications also give much data on the Mississippi River and western commercial development. S. L. Clemens’s “Life on the Mississippi” (in his “Writings,” vol. IX,1869-1909) is invaluable for its graphic pictures of steamboating in the heyday of river traffic. A. B. Hulbert’s “Waterways of Western Expansion” (“Historic Highways,” vol. IX, 1903) and “The Ohio River” (1906) give chapters on commerce and transportation. For the beginnings of traffic into the Far West, H. Inman’s “The Old Santa Fe Trail” (1897) and “The Great Salt Lake Trail” (1914) may be consulted, together with the publications of the various state historical societies of the trans-Mississippi States.
Various bibliographies on this general subject have been issued by the Library of Congress. Seymour Dunbar gives a good bibliography in his “A History of Travel in America,” 4 vols. (1915). The student will find quantities of material in books of travel, in which connection he would do well to consult Solon J. Buck’s “Travel and Description, 1765-1865” (“Illinois State Historical Library Collections,” vol. IX, 1914).