The riverboat captain is a storyteller. Captain Don Sanders shares the stories of his long association with the river — from discovery to a way of love and life. This a part of a long and continuing story.
By Capt. Don SandersSpecial to NKyTribune
Of the many years of steamboat history on the Western Rivers, I’m most fascinated with the decade of the 1840s. My fascination may stem from the fact that I am a child of the 1940s, enamored with any numbers belonging to the 40 series. Aside from my enchantment with the 40s sequence of enumeration, transportation during that mid-19th-Century decade West of the Appalachians primarily depended on steamboats until a great war, still a couple of decades away, changed all that.
By 1840, steamboat transportation on the Mississippi River and numerous tributary streams had entered its third decade. In 1811, Nicholas Roosevelt, in command of Fulton and Livingston’s NEW ORLEANS, became the skipper of the first steam-powered vessel to ply the great waters of the West, as Americans called the area from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. Still, by the 1840s, the rivers remained a hazardous course to travel. Snags, sawyers, shallow water, and sandbars still posed challenges to the best pilots, especially on the Lower Mississippi. Exploding boilers, fires, and the frailties of wooden hulls were among other worries that plagued early riverboat transportation.
Early Mississippi River steamboats resembled deep-sea ships. What else did the early boatbuilders have to go on? The newly designed riverboats had deep-draughting hulls, high model bows, and some still sported bowspirits forward of the hulls — all imitations of ocean-going vessels. Practicality, however, soon overcame tradition. Deep-drafting hulls became shallow-drafters, and the bowspirits stood vertical and became a foremast, enabling river pilots a forward reference for navigating…