The Great American Steamboat Race (6 page)

St. Louis riverfront around 1870. From a French trading post in 1764 St. Louis blossomed into a booming American metropolis by the 1850s, when steamboat commerce made it the largest city west of Pittsburgh and steamboats stretched for a mile along its busy wharves (Library of Congress).

When they reached St. Louis, mid–nineteenth-century travelers could see what a vibrant boom town it was, its riverfront alive with steamboats taking on and discharging passengers and freight. In the 1850s St. Louis was the largest city west of Pittsburgh, its population swelled by an immigration influx in the 1840s that brought thousands of Germans, Italians and Irish to the city. From fewer than 20,000 residents in 1840 St. Louis grew to almost 78,000 in 1850 and to more than 160,000 by 1860, despite a cholera epidemic in 1849 that took the lives of nearly 10 percent of the city’s population. In addition to its permanent residents, St. Louis in the mid–1800s had its full share of transients — steamboaters stopping over on their way to or from elsewhere.

The city had begun as a trading post in 1764, built on the site of ancient Indian mounds by Pierre Laclede and his teen-age stepson, Auguste Chouteau, who with a small group of men had managed to make their way up the Mississippi from New Orleans. There near the mouth of the Missouri River, the avenue to the wild and wide-open West, the little settlement quickly became a fur-trading center and drew scores of new residents. Like New Orleans, it passed from France to Spain and back to France, then to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By then St. Louis’s population had increased to about a thousand residents.

In May 1804 St. Louis was the jumping-off place for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their historic exploratory journey into the vastness of the West, and it was to St. Louis that the two explorers returned with a wealth of new knowledge in September 1806. St. Louis was incorporated as a town in 1809, and as a city in 1822, following Missouri’s admission to the Union as a state in 1820.

It was the coming of the steamboat, though, that turned St. Louis into a booming metropolis. The
Zebulon M. Pike
was the first steamer to ascend the Mississippi all the way to St. Louis and when it landed at the St. Louis riverfront on July 27, 1817, it became the first of many hundreds that would dock there. In the mid–1800s river travelers arriving at St. Louis could watch as their boat took a place in the mile-long row of steamboats that crowded the bustling riverfront.

Now, in the summer of 1870, two other steamers, two of the century’s swiftest and best, were rushing toward St. Louis to see which of them would be first to join the crowd of steamboats gathered at that riverfront.

The
Robert E. Lee
takes the lead. Observers watching the race from the levee at Carrollton, some eight river miles above the official starting point, reported the
Lee
’s lead to be as much as four minutes over the
Natchez
(Library of Congress).

Then, also about thirty miles out of New Orleans, an emergency struck the speeding
Robert E. Lee
. The news came to Cannon from his chief engineer, William Perkins, and he immediately left Governor Warmoth and Doctor Smyth and rushed down to the main deck and then into the hold to reach the scene of the problem. Through the hold, empty of freight, Cannon followed Perkins and Tom Berry, the first assistant engineer, to where a five-inch pipe that fed heated river water into the
Lee
’s eight boilers had come apart at a joint, shaken loose by the vibration of the boat’s huge, pounding engines. The vibration was so severe, according to the
St. Louis Republican
reporter traveling aboard the
Lee
, that he found it difficult to write with a pencil on paper as he attempted to complete a dispatch to his newspaper. “At her highest speed,” he remarked, “they [the engines] cause such a vibration that it is almost impossible to write on the tables of her saloon.”
²

Hastily the engineers, their hands protected with heavy gloves, forced the separated ends of the pipe back together, inserted packing material into the joint and tightened the sleeve over it with their wrenches, reducing the escaping flow to a seeping trickle that could be tolerated. Perkins pronounced it good enough. A perfect repair would require the
Lee
to stop and shut down its machinery while the repair was made. The race precluded that. Instead, Perkins ordered two crewmen to station themselves beside the pipe and tighten the connection whenever the engine vibration threatened to separate it again. He also ordered the bilge pumps kept running to remove the leaked water from the hold.
³

According to one account, Perkins two weeks earlier had advised Cannon to put the
Robert E. Lee
in the drydock at Mound City, Illinois, and have its machinery undergo maintenance, but Cannon had put him off and delayed taking his advice, apparently at that time not intending to agree to the race.

Now relieved that a crisis had been averted, Cannon climbed back up to the hurricane deck to rejoin Warmoth and Smyth, smiling reassuringly into their anxious faces as he strode toward them. No sooner had he resumed his conversation with the two men than the boat’s carpenter, John Buist, approached him to report another problem. The boat was too rigid, Buist announced, and the hog chains needed to be loosened to allow the boat to sag a little and lie as flat as possible in the water to offer the least possible resistance to the oncoming stream. (Hog chains were wrought-iron rods that extended from one end of the hull to the other, creating stiff braces that prevented the hull from hogging — that is, arching up like a hog’s back, thus giving the device its name — and from sagging. The effects of using hog chains were to allow hulls to be built longer, shallower and with lighter timbers, thereby increasing the boats’ payloads. They had been introduced into steamboat building sometime between 1835 and 1841 and were considered a major technological improvement.) Cannon strode off with Buist, but apparently did not agree to the adjustment of the hog chains.

Scores of spectators still stood waving and shouting from the east and west riverbanks, now a mile apart, as the steamers continued their march, the sun slipping below the trees on the west side of the river. As darkness came on, bonfires sprang up along the levees, providing a lighted path for the boats to steer upon as they sped into the evening, and spectators fired guns and cheered as the
Robert E. Lee
passed them.

When Warmoth and Smyth decided it was bedtime, they made their way down from the darkened hurricane deck to the cabin and found the stateroom they would share. And there was more than the stateroom to share. All furniture except one double bed had been removed from the room when Cannon ordered the
Lee
stripped, and the two men would have to sleep together in that one bed. They were political allies and close friends, though, and apparently didn’t mind. Warmoth took the occasion to point out to Smyth, an Irish immigrant, the wondrous opportunities of America. “If you had not come to this country,” he told him, “but had remained in Ireland, it would have been a long time before you could have slept with a governor.”

Quick to reply, Smyth in his brogue gave Warmoth a not-too-subtle gibe for his carpetbagger’s advantage. “If we both had lived in Ireland,” Smyth said, “it would have been a damned sight longer time before you would have been a governor!”
⁴
It was all in fun, though.

Other passengers lingered for a while on the promenade of the deck and in the grand saloon, then they, too, ambled off to their staterooms for the night. Cannon, though, kept his post on the hurricane deck, his eyes often turning aft, where in the distance on straight stretches of the river he could occasionally see the glow of the
Natchez
’s fires when the furnace doors were opened.

The
Lee
reached Donaldsonville, about two-thirds the distance from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, after four hours and fifty minutes. The
Natchez
reached Donaldsonville after five hours and five minutes. The
Lee
’s lead had increased to fifteen minutes. Around midnight the
Lee
passed Conrad’s Point, at the beginning of a long, straight stretch below Baton Rouge, and was nine miles ahead of the
Natchez
, still lengthening its lead.

Shortly before midnight more bad news came to Cannon, and he hurried down from the hurricane deck to see for himself the latest thing to go wrong. One of the boat’s eight boilers had sprung a leak, and water was escaping from it faster than the boat’s intake pump could replenish it. The gauges showed the steam pressure dropping, and as the water level in the leaking boiler fell, the danger of an explosion fearfully rose.

Doubtless remembering the disastrous explosion of the
Louisiana
’s boilers, Cannon ordered the furnace doors opened and he stared into fiery chambers to see if he could spot where the leaking water was entering the furnace from the boiler above it. The site of the leak would have to be found quickly and once it was discovered, repairs would have to be made immediately. If the leak were not stopped, water would drain away from the leaking boiler and the boiler’s quarter-inch-thick iron plates would become overheated and burst apart, their fragments smashing into and bursting the other boilers, which would erupt in a devastating explosion and spread the furnace fires to the entire vessel.

Ordinarily in such an emergency, the vessel would immediately put into shore and tie up to a tree while the furnace fires were doused with water and the boilers allowed to cool before a crewman would crawl into the boiler to find the leak and patch it. That procedure would take hours, perhaps days. The
Robert E. Lee
would be sitting idle while the
Natchez
steamed triumphantly past it and on to victory at St. Louis. Captain Cannon hated that thought. From the open furnace door, he and his engineers could see a spot where the furnace fire had been extinguished and where steam rose from the bed of the furnace and they guessed that the leak was from a connection just above that point. The connection was from the No. 4 boiler, which must be where the leak was, they reasoned. Somebody would have to crawl under the No. 4 boiler to find the exact spot and devise a way to patch it. In the meantime, the slowed
Robert E. Lee
would continue its course toward St. Louis. And all concerned would hope for the best.

Chief engineer Perkins, though willing, was too old and not nearly limber or dexterous enough to squeeze himself into the hot, cramped, two-foothigh crawl space beneath the furnace and boilers to find the leak and make the repair. Tom Berry, the first assistant engineer, was too large a man to fit into the space, and while four other assistants stood deciding whether to volunteer, assistant engineer John Wiest stepped up and said he would try it.

The leak was found to be actually in the mud drum, the long, cylindrical, troughlike device below the boiler and connected to it. Its function was to collect the sediment that was suspended in the water that was pumped from the river into boilers. The No. 4 boiler was the fourth boiler from the right side of the row of eight boilers. Its position between the other boilers made the underside of it probably the hottest spot beneath the boilers. In an attempt to cool off the bottoms of the boilers as best they could, crewmen brought out one of the boat’s hoses and sent a stream of water onto the bellies of the boilers.

Wiest stripped off his clothes and put on a set of heavy, protective overalls. He tied a handkerchief around his head to protect it from the heat and pulled on a pair of thick gloves to protect his hands. Equipping himself with a hammer, a cold chisel and a poker borrowed from the firemen who manned the furnaces, he lowered himself to the deck and on his stomach wriggled his way into the space beneath the No. 4 boiler’s mud drum, then twisted his body to lie on his back. Not knowing whether he would be scalded or suffocated, he braved the searing heat and with the cold chisel in one hand and the heavy hammer in the other, he pounded away at the rivets until he had forced out enough of them to pry back a section of the iron plating. Through the opening he had created he was able to stab with the poker and widen a hole in the tile bed of the glowing furnace, close to the mud drum. Peering through it, he could see that it was not one leak but many and they were in the top flange of the mud drum, where the No. 4 boiler connected to it. Water was spraying from a number of small, rusty perforations.

Then suddenly he blacked out, overcome by the stifling heat. Cannon and two other steamboat captains, anxiously watching him, saw his body go limp, and immediately crawled into the space, grabbed Wiest by the legs and hauled him out, then placed him on the starboard guard, the extension of the