Nothing Ventured

Risky business, riverboats. Your average packet burned 40 cords a day, which is a lot of wood, and any given day, there would be a few hundred, plying their trade, between Portsmouth and Cincy. A hundred river miles, more than a boat per mile, crowded (really) and in 1922 there was a fire that jumped from one boat to another, at the landing in Cincy, that lit up the sky. Five or six fortunes were lost. All day today with "Way's Packet Directory" and got about half-way through. So far 12 packets built in Portsmouth, and two ferries. Several of the packets were fairly large, the Fannie Dugan was 165 feet. The river was the highway, because a highway was a daunting task, on either shore of the river: every tributary would have to bridged, so the river towns were isolated from each other, and from the interior by the ridge-lines. Everything arrived by boat. You flagged down a packet by standing at the simple, crude, landing, and waving a hanky. Boats were built for very specific purposes, for use on very specific rivers. Showboats, which were simply barges with seating and a stage, weren't even self-powered, but required a full time tug to shove them around. There are still a few around, permanently moored. You can't sell over-night berths in a boat with a wooden super-structure anymore, but a few still offer excursions and dinner cruises. The Army Corp of Engineers has a great many 'snag boats' 'snaggers' that cruise the Mississippi and Ohio, doing nothing but pulling trees out of the river. An appalling number of boats were sunk when their hulls were pierced by entire trees floating just below the surface. Early on, boilers blew up fairly often. State rooms were state rooms because they were named for states, not numbered, and "the Texas" was the top deck, usually given over to officer cabins, the pilot house was on top of that. The pilot house, in a great many boat sinkings, drifted away, ended up as a playhouse or gazebo downstream. Hulls were salvaged, new superstructures built on top of them, renamed, and sent back into the fray. A modest packet, 150 feet long, 40 feet wide, drafting three-and-a-half feet, could pay for itself (1860, maybe $40,000) in just a couple of round-trips. From Memphis, hauling cotton down to New Orleans and sugar back up, was a lucrative trade; and on the Ohio, the run from Pittsburgh to Cincy was all about iron, steel, and coal. The infrastructure, for this whole commerce, was entrusted to the Army Corp; the Army Corp was invented to maintain the infrastructure for trade and commerce on the river systems. I once had to get a permit from the Army Corp, to build an eight foot bridge, across a creek, high in the Rockies. It was weird. The creek I was bridging was seldom deeper than six inches, and they acted like they might need to get an air-craft carrier up there, at some future date. Up the Scioto, which was part of the canal system, at Chillicothe, they built canal boats; boats to fit specific places, Lock 42, or whatever was the smallest one. I refuse to read about the canal system. I'm already overloaded. But I am interested. Maybe I'll catch a late night show on the History Channel, some night I'm stranded at the museum, and everything will be brought into perspective. I really don't think so. What happens, the gritty, is always off-camera. What you don't want to see about who you are. Hits me like a ton of bricks that I only want the nice things, the things that make me look nice. But, of course, that's not who I am, I'm the dude that actually read every one of those descriptions, of every one of those boats, over 3,000, I think there are just over 6,000 in all, I may be the expert here. On who was where when. I have the advantage of more time at the helm. But it could be just arrogance; some hours spent reading.