Taming the Wilderness
Rivers
(This is an online version of a 1996 exhibit that was held in the Weaver Gallery at Conner Prairie.)
Rivers
America's rivers were its first principal highways. They needed no building, grading, or paving to make them useful carriers of people and goods. Though they could occasionally turn wild and dangerous or water levels could fall during dry periods, they did not require constant repair and were always there. Rivers provided an inexpensive, efficient means of transportation.
These water paths were dotted with boats of all descriptions. First came the canoes of Native Americans, by necessity a migratory people in tune with the wilderness and the most efficient ways to exploit it. Canoes were adapted by the European immigrants for exploration and trade. Soon, larger craft were plying the waters as keelboats, flatboats, barges, and the kings of the rivers, steamboats, became part of the American scene.
The waterways and the rivermen who used them, like Mike Fink and Abraham Lincoln, wove themselves into the fabric of American myth and legend.
FLATBOATS
Flat boats were straight-prowed, flat-bottomed boats designed to travel downriver. Some crude flatboats had no enclosure, while more refined ones came complete with neat bedchambers and fireplaces. They ranged from 8 to 20 feet wide and could be 20 to 100 feet long.
Flatboats probably first appeared on western waters in the late 18th century as freight carriers. They quickly became the dominant shipping on interior waterways. Many settlers used them to transport their families and worldly goods to their new homes. Methodist Circuit Rider Timothy Flint recalled that it was "no uncommon spectacle to see a large family, old and young, servants, cattle, hogs [on flatboats] ... bringing to recollection the cargo of the ancient ark."
Flatboats carried much of the Midwest's agricultural produce to market in the early decades of the 19th century. Farmers and merchants (like the young Abraham Lincoln) would load them up and travel as far as New Orleans. At journey's end, the boat would be sold for re-use or timber. Many houses in New Orleans and other southern cities were partially built with the remnants of flatboats.
For a while flatboats and steamboats shared the same waters, but the heyday of the flatboat ended in the 1840s when the speed, economy, and size of steamboats wrested control of the waterways.
KEELBOATS
Keelboats were pointed-prowed vessels with a keel, mast, and sails. They measured 10-15 feet wide and upwards of 50 feet long. They often featured a low cabin-like structure divided into as many as four parts. Unlike flatboats, they travelled both upriver and down. Their light draft made them very useful in waters too shallow for steamboats. They carried both freight and passengers.
The boats moved upstream by a combination of sailing, poling, and rowing. When all else failed, the boats were towed from shore or warped, propelling the boat by tieing a tow rope to a tree and pulling the boat toward it. Owing to the extreme physical nature of their work, keelboatmen were viewed as a rough, rowdy group, giving rise to legendary figures like the "half-man/half-alligator," Mike Fink
Keelboats, too, fell victim to the advance of the steamboat.
STEAMBOATS
Steamboats, along with railroads, were among the major defining elements of the 19th-century transportation revolution. No longer was waterborne transportation constrained by the limits of human, animal, or natural power. Steamboats allowed more goods and people to be moved faster and more efficiently. They were yet another cog in the man-made infrastructure which tamed, exploited, and reshaped the wilderness.
The first demonstration of how steam might be used to power boats may have come as early as 1707 in Germany by a Frenchman, whose prototype was destroyed by local boatbuilders fearing competition. The first American steam-powered craft was developed on the Delaware River in 1786 by John Fitch. The more-renowned Robert Fulton launched his paddlewheeler in 1807 and within a few years steamboats were seen throughout the United States on inland and coastal waters. In 1811 the first steamboat to appear on the Ohio River was the aptly-named New Orleans, owned by Nicholas Roosevelt, ancestor of Teddy Roosevelt.
The multi-decked steamboat, usually 75 to 150 feet long, became an awe-inspiring site as it shuttled goods and people across America.
STEAMBOATS IN INDIANA
While the steamboats that plied the Ohio River are well-documented, those that traveled Indiana's other rivers are not. Though some steamboats churned the waters of the St. Joseph between South Bend and Michigan City, and on the southwestern stretch of the White River, the traffic was never extensive.
In 1831, the only steamboat to reach Indianapolis snagged on a sandbar on its return downriver. This failed venture crushed the high hopes of those in the city who knew the value of such transportation, making it the only state capital east of the Mississippi not located on a navigable waterway. Indianapolis did not experience great growth until it became a rail center.
The Wabash River provided the state's most reliable steamboat route. Steamboats may have appeared on the Wabash as early as 1818 and reached Terre Haute in 1823 and Lafayette in 1826. Though one boat puffed and struggled as far up the Wabash as Peru, by the 1830s Lafayette was generally regarded as the river's northernmost navigable point. The Wabash trade continued during high water season each year until about 1860, when the coming of railroads rendered it unprofitable.
Images from Ambler, A History of Transportation in the Ohio Valley