The Great American Steamboat Race Read Online Free PDF Page A

want everybody aboard at five o’clock. The pilot in his house, but not in sight, the engineers at the throttle valves, the mate to have only one stage out and that at a balance so that the weight of one man on the boat end will lift it clear of the wharf. There will be a single line out, fast to a ring bolt, with a man stationed there, axe in hand, to cut and run for the end of the stage the moment he hears a single tap of the bell, and come aboard on the run or get left.” 10
    Knowing Leathers’s reputation for making sudden fast starts against competitors, Cannon had now out-fast-started him. The Lee had been docked just below the Natchez , and as it backed out from the wharf and made a crescent-shaped turn to head its bow upriver, the Natchez was forced to wait for Cannon to straighten out the Lee , lest the Natchez back across the Lee ’s bow, or possibly into it. Once headed upstream, the Robert E. Lee fired its signal cannon as it passed St. Mary’s Market, just above Canal Street, the official starting point for timing all steamboat voyages from New Orleans. The time was a minute and forty-five seconds before five o’clock. 11
    As soon as the Lee had moved out of its way, the Natchez , distinguishable from a distance by its bright-red chimneys, backed away from the wharf, straightened out and with a surge of power steamed up to St. Mary’s Market, firing its signal cannon as it passed, the gun’s deep boom resounding over the noise of the yelling crowds on both sides of the river. The time then was two minutes after five o’clock. 12
The race was on. Twelve hundred miles of river lay ahead.
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The Course
    Alonso Álvarez de Piñeda was the first known European to see the big river. His view of it came from across the rail of a sailing ship as he and his Spanish exploration fleet followed the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 1519, sailing from Florida, bound for Mexico. Around June 2 he passed the outflow of a mighty stream and he made a note of it in his log and gave it a name — Rio del Espiritu Santo, or Holy Spirit River, because he had sighted it on (or around) the Catholic feast day of Espirito Santo, or Pentecost. But noting and naming it constituted the extent of Álvarez’s interest in the river, and he sailed on to Cabo Rojo, Mexico.
    Another Spaniard, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was the next European to see it. His view was a lot closer up than Álvarez’s. He and his contingent of explorers were traveling cross-country, slogging and plodding their way from Florida toward Mexico, exhausting themselves in the wilds and marshes, amid harassing Indians in Louisiana and Texas. Sometime in 1528 Cabeza de Vaca and his party managed to cross the Mississippi near its mouth and kept going on what was to become an eight-year trek, which only Cabeza de Vaca and three others of his party survived.
    Hernando de Soto, another Spanish explorer, made deadly enemies of the Indians in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi and was forced to fight them repeatedly as he and his steadily diminishing army, starting at Tampa Bay, moved up the Florida peninsula into Georgia and South Carolina, then turned west and traversed Alabama and Mississippi, coming at last, perhaps near present-day Greenville, Mississippi, to the banks of the wide and muddy river, which he saw merely as an obstacle on his way to the imagined gold that awaited his looting. He crossed the river and traveled as far as the northwest part of Arkansas before turning around and heading back to the big river. After three years of fruitless searching for treasure, he contracted a disease and died near the banks of the river in June 1542. The few survivors of
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Père Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet descend the Mississippi River by canoe in 1673. They were the first Europeans to explore the river, seeking to discover where it would take them. Marquette recorded in his journal the name the natives gave the river — Missisipi, as Marquette spelled