nto their fitness before receiving a
license, has done much to guard against them. Yet to-day, we hear all too
frequently of river steamers blown to bits, and all on board lost, though
it is a form of disaster almost unknown on Eastern waters where crowded
steamboats ply the Sound, the Hudson, the Connecticut, and the Potomac,
year after year, with never a disaster. The cheaper material of Western
boats has something to do with this difference, but a certain
happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care spirit, which has characterized the Western
riverman since the days of the broadhorns, is chiefly responsible. Most
often an explosion is the result of gross carelessness--a sleepy engineer,
and a safety-valve "out of kilter," as too many of them often are, have
killed their hundreds on the Western rivers. Sometimes, however, the
almost criminal rashness, of which captains were guilty, in a mad rush for
a little cheap glory, ended in a deafening crash, the annihilation of a
good boat, and the death of scores of her people by drowning, or the awful
torture of inhaling scalding steam. Rivalry between the different boats
was fierce, and now and then at the sight of a competitor making for a
landing where freight and passengers awaited the first boat to land her
gangplank, the alert captain would not unnaturally take some risks to get
there first. Those were the moments that resulted in methods in the engine
room picturesquely described as "feeding the fires with fat bacon and
resin, and having a nigger sit on the safety valve." To such impromptu
races might be charged the most terrifying accidents in the history of the
river.

But the great races, extending sometimes for more than a thousand miles up
the river, and carefully planned for months in advance, were seldom, if
ever, marred by an accident. For then every man on both boats was on the
alert, from pilot down to fuel passer. The boat was trimmed by guidance of
a spirit level until she rode the water at precisely the draft that
assured the best speed. Her hull was scraped and oiled, her machinery
overhauled, and her fuel carefully selected. Picked men made up her crew,
and all the upper works that could be disposed of were landed before the
race, in order to decrease air resistance. It was the current pleasantry
to describe the captain as shaving off his whiskers lest they catch the
breeze, and parting his hair in the middle, that the boat might be the
better trimmed. Few passengers w