The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast · Dean Klinkenberg

The Dark Side of Steamboat Travel: The Disasters that Claimed Thousands of Lives on the Mississippi River

·43 min·2 clips

Mrs. Seymour watched people sink and rise in the river after the John L. Avery struck a tree.

1. The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast episode 50 examines steamboat travel on the Mississippi River and the disasters that killed thousands of people. 2. Dean Klinkenberg narrates the episode as host and writer, drawing on his book Mississippi River Mayhem and his MississippiValleyTraveler.com site for related material. 3. The episode asks why a technology that revolutionized American travel also produced so many deaths on the river. 4. Dean starts with the New Orleans, the first steamboat to ply the Mississippi, which lasted from 1812 until July 14, 1814 before a drop in river level impaled it on a tree stump. 5. He explains that John Fitch and James Rumsey both tried to build steam-powered boats, but Robert Fulton made the technology commercially reliable with Robert Livingston. 6. Dean notes that Frenchman Jufflo de Bas powered a boat on the Seine at Lyon on July 15, 1783, and that the boat shook to pieces after 15 minutes. 7. He says Fitch ran a steam boat on the Delaware River on August 22, 1787 and later operated a ferry between Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey. 8. The episode points out that Rumsey died broke in 1792 and Fitch died in 1797 after moving to Kentucky. 9. Dean describes the North River Steamboat's maiden voyage on August 17, 1807 and Nicholas Roosevelt's 1811 trip on the New Orleans from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. 10. He argues that the Mississippi suited steamboats because their shallow hulls and paddle wheels handled shifting currents, and because wood for construction and fuel was abundant along the river. 11. Dean says nearly a third of steamboats reached their end in accidents before the Civil War, and about half of those accidents came from snag strikes. 12. He names the snag types sawyers, movers, preachers, planters, and sleepers, and explains that even careful pilots could not avoid them all the time. 13. The Glendy Burke hit driftwood near Cairo, Illinois, in 1855 and sank in about two minutes, but everyone on board survived. 14. The Tennessee hit a snag near Natchez, Mississippi, in February 1823 and killed about 60 people in cold water and heavy storm conditions. 15. Dean recounts the John L. Avery disaster of March 9, 1854, when Mrs. Seymour lost $900 in cash and a completed manuscript after the boat struck a tree near Louisville. 16. He also describes the Shepherdess near St. Louis, where a nighttime snag strike flooded the lower deck and left the captain missing after he walked back to his post. 17. The episode shifts to fire, with Dean quoting Michael Chevalier on Americans smoking near cotton bales and carrying gunpowder with little care. 18. Dean recounts the Ben Sherrod fire of May 8, 1837, the loss of its logs, and the estimate that about 120 people died, including many enslaved people and deck passengers. 19. The pacing is conversational and information-heavy, with Dean moving between historical explanation, eyewitness quotations, and casualty totals. 20. Listeners interested in Mississippi River history, steamboats, and nineteenth-century disasters will get the most from this episode.

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