Early Steamboats First Steamboats  Captain Orin Smith Str. Northern Belle | Str. Northern Light | Str. Sucker State | Str. War Eagle   First Steamboats As early as the 17th Century a handful of explorers, hardy French voyageurs, and missionaries had ventured into the environs of the Upper Mississippi River V

The Riverboat Life By the late nineteenth century steamboats had been traveling the Mississippi for more than sixty years.  They were as common to people then as jets are to us today.  Rivers like the Mississippi had long been important means of transporting goods and people, but with the establishment of st

Unlike canals and roads, steamboats were entirely a private business at the outset. British and American inventors had been laboring from the 1780s to attach steam power to boats, allowing them to move against a river current. It was obvious that in the American west, along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, such a boat

On the Water Exhibition Collection Living in the Atlantic World, 1450-1800 Maritime Nation, 1800-1850 Fishing for a Living, 1840-1920 Inland Waterways, 1820-1940 Ocean Crossings, 1870-1969 Answering the Call, 1917-1945 Modern Maritime America, 1950-Present Reading the River River pilots guided steamboats up and down t

Home Keelboats Flatboats Rafts Steamboats 1811-61 Steamboats 1861-99 Levee Scenes Artwork Civil War Steamboat Interiors Steamboat People Mark Twain Maps Resources Credit: Artist, Gary R. Lucy. Medium: Oil on canvas. Depicted: 1811. Enlargement: 600 x 367pxs. Website: www.garylucy.com Note: The

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Steamboat s played a major role in the development of the Mississippi River and its tributaries by allowing the practical large-scale transport of passengers and freight both up- and down-river. Using steam power , riverboat s were developed during that time which could navigate in shallow waters as well as upriver aga

 Steamboats of the 1800s Steamboats of the 1800s: John FitchThe idea of using steam power to propel boats occurred to inventors soon after James Watt patented an improved version of the steam engine in 1769. John Fitch (1743-1798) was granted a United States patent for a steamboat on August 26, 1791. His fir