Orleans) in the hustling forties
exceeded that of the Atlantic ports (exclusive of New York City) by
15,000 tons. The steamboat tonnage of New Orleans alone in 1843 was more
than double that of New York City.

Those who, if the old story is true, ran in fear to the hills when the
little New Orleans went puffing down the Ohio, in 1811, would have been
doubly amazed at the splendid development in the art of boat building,
could they have seen the stately Sultana or Southern Belle of the
fifties sweep swiftly by. After a period of gaudy ornamentation
(1830-40) steamboat architecture settled down, as has that of Pullman
cars today, to sane and practical lines, and the boats gained in length
and strength, though they contained less weight of timber. The value
of one of the greater boats of this era would be about fifty thousand
dollars. When Captain Bixby made his celebrated night crossing at Hat
Island a quarter of a million dollars in ship and cargo would have been
the price of an error in judgment, according to Mark Twain, * a good
authority.

*Op. cit., p. 101

The Yorktown, built in 1844 for the Ohio-Mississippi trade, was typical
of that epoch of inland commerce. Her length was 182 feet, breadth of
beam 31 feet, and the diameter of wheels 28 feet. Though her hold was 8
feet in depth, yet she drew but 4 feet of water light and barely over
8 feet when loaded with 500 tons of freight. She had 4 boilers, 30
feet long and 42 inches in diameter, double engines, and two 24-inch
cylinders. The stateroom cabin had come in with Captain Isaiah Sellers's
Prairie in 1836, the first boat with such luxuries ever seen in St.
Louis, according to Sellers. The Yorktown had 40 private cabins. It
is interesting to compare the Yorktown with The Queen of the West, the
giant British steamer built for the Falmouth-Calcutta trade in 1839. The
Queen of the West had a length of 310 feet, a beam of 31 feet, a draft
of 15 feet, and 16 private cabins. The building of this great vessel led
a writer in the New York American to say: "It would really seem that we
as a nation had no interest in this new application of steam power, or
no energy to appropriate it to our own use." The statement--written in
a day when the Mississippi steamboat tonnage exceeded that of the entire
British Empire--is one of the best examples of provincial ignorance
concerning the West.

On these steamboats there was a multiplicity of arrangements and
equipments f