Lloyd's Steamboat Directory


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Mississippi River Mayhem


Book Description

In his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain personified the river as “Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing!” Twain’s time as a steamboat pilot showed him the true character of The Great River, with its unpredictable moods and hidden secrets. Still a vital route for U.S. shipping, the Mississippi River has given life to riverside communities, manufacturing industries, fishing, tourism, and other livelihoods. But the Mighty Mississippi has also claimed countless lives as tribute to its muddy waters. Climate and environmental conditions made the Mississippi the perfect incubator for diseases like malaria. Natural disasters, like tornadoes, floods, and even an earthquake, have changed and reshaped the river’s banks over thousands of years. Shipwrecks and steamboat explosions were once common in the difficult-to-navigate waters. But when there was money to be made, there were some willing to risk it all—from the brave steamboat captains who went down with their ships, to the illegal moonshiners and pirates who pillaged the river’s bounty. In this book, author and Mississippi River historian Dean Klinkenberg explores the many disastrous events to have occurred on and along the river in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—from steamboat explosions, to Yellow Fever epidemics, floods, and Prohibition piracy. Enjoy this journey into the darkest deeds of the Mississippi River.




Troubled Waters


Book Description

In Troubled Waters, Paul F. Paskoff offers a comprehensive examination of the federal government's river improvements program, which aimed to reduce hazards to navigation on the great rivers of America's interior during the early and mid-nineteenth century. Danger on the rivers came in a variety of forms. Shoals, rapids, ice, rocks, sandbars, and uprooted trees and submerged steamboat wrecks lodged in river beds were the most common perils and accounted for the largest number of steamboat disasters. This daunting array of river hazards required a similarly broad range of efforts to remove or at least ameliorate them. Against a variety of obstacles -- natural, political, and technological -- the river improvements program succeeded in reducing the rate of steamboat loss, even as steamboat traffic dramatically increased. Its success, Paskoff argues, demonstrates that the federal government was far more active than generally thought in promoting economic growth and development in the years leading up to the Civil War.The river improvements program was one of the most volatile issues in national, sectional, and state politics, touching on questions of economic development, constitutional law, partisan politics, and sectional rivalry. Paskoff examines the controversial program from its beginnings during the early republic to 1844, giving careful attention to the policies of Andrew Jackson's administration. He explores the array of objections to the program -- some grounded in a strict interpretation of the Constitution and others in a concern over alleged federal wantonness, corruption, and waste -- and follows the political story through the administration of James K. Polk forward to secession. Paskoff also explains the fiscal, economic, and technological aspects of the hazard problem and its solution, analyzing the federal government's fiscal condition, its capacity to undertake such an ambitious program, and the influence of conditions in the larger economy, including effects of the Mexican War, upon the federal government's finances.Paskoff's lively analysis rests on a bedrock of impressive quantitative evidence, including databases containing every documented steamboat wreck -- more than 1,200 -- on American rivers, lakes, and coastal waters; construction and engine data for more than 600 steamboat packets; and all relevant federal appropriations and expenditures measures, more than 2,300 spending projects in all. Vigorously researched and vividly told, Troubled Waters is an essential contribution to the history of internal improvements in the antebellum United States.







The Historian's Huck Finn


Book Description

Putting Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in historical context, connecting it to pivotal issues like slavery, class, money, and American economic expansion, this book engages readers by presenting American history through the lens of a great novel. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is widely regarded as a classic American novel—a groundbreaking one in which the author attempts to accurately portray society through the use of at-times coarse vernacular English. In this book, readers can experience the full text of Twain's Huckleberry Finn accompanied by annotations in footnote form throughout. As a result, this classic is transformed into a fascinating historical documentation of 19th-century American life and society that touches on topics like slavery, the transportation revolution, race, class, and confidence men. Bringing the perspective of a social and economic historian, Ranjit S. Dighe offers more than 150 annotations as well as supporting essays that put the characters, incidents, and settings of the book into their historical context. First-time readers get to experience a great American novel with memorable characters, vivid imagery, and a great narrative voice while simultaneously learning about American history; teachers and students who have read Huckleberry Finn before will enjoy re-reading it, especially with insightful annotations that connect the story to the historical timeline. This book exposes the subtle lessons Twain's tale has to teach us about America's growth, development, conflicts, and mass movements in the nation's first century.










Touring the Antebellum South with an English Opera Company


Book Description

The diary of Anton Reiff Jr. (c. 1830–1916) is one of only a handful of primary sources to offer a firsthand account of antebellum riverboat travel in the American South. The Pyne and Harrison Opera Troupe, a company run by English sisters Susan and Louisa Pyne and their business partner, tenor William Harrison, hired Reiff, then freelancing in New York, to serve as musical director and conductor for the company’s American itinerary. The grueling tour began in November 1855 in Boston and then proceeded to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati, where, after a three-week engagement, the company boarded a paddle steamer bound for New Orleans. It was at that point that Reiff started to keep his diary. Diligently transcribed and annotated by Michael Burden, Reiff’s diary presents an extraordinarily rare view of life with a foreign opera company as it traveled the country by river and rail. Surprisingly, Reiff comments little on the Pyne-Harrison performances themselves, although he does visit the theaters in the river towns, including New Orleans, where he spends evenings both at the French Opera and at the Gaiety. Instead, Reiff focuses his attention on other passengers, on the mechanics of the journey, on the landscape, and on events he encounters, including the 1856 Mardi Gras and the unveiling of the statue of Andrew Jackson in New Orleans's Jackson Square. Reiff is clearly captivated by the river towns and their residents, including the enslaved, whom he encountered whenever the boat tied up. Running throughout the journal is a thread of anxiety, for, apart from the typical dangers of a river trip, the winter of 1855–1856 was one of the coldest of the century, and the steamer had difficulties with river ice. Historians have used Reiff’s journal as source material, but until now the entire text, which is archived in Louisiana State University’s Special Collections in Hill Memorial Library, has only been available in its original state. As a primary source, the published journal will have broad appeal to historians and other readers interested in antebellum riverboat travel, highbrow entertainment, and the people and places of the South.