The Great American Steamboat Race by Benton Rain Patterson Read Free Book Online

trading post as early as 1750 and of a Catholic church by 1772, the town was laid out by William Donaldson, who had acquired a large tract of land there in 1806. The new town soon became known to the area’s French population as La Ville de Donaldson . Situated as it was in the heart of sugar-cane country, it became an important shipping point for cane growers, who made of it a prosperous community of elegant homes and other attractive buildings. For three months in 1830 Donaldsonville served as the capital of Louisiana.
    The next big steamer stop above Donaldsonville was Baton Rouge, the Louisiana capital city, which Samuel Clemens saw as a veritable garden in the nineteenth century, “clothed in flowers ... like a greenhouse. The magnolia trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge snowball blossoms.” 6 The nineteenth-century capitol, built to resemble a European castle, was one of the city’s chief tourist attractions. The environs of Baton Rouge presented to steamboat travelers scenes of sugar cane plantations, with elegant plantation houses, sprawling fields of cane and clusters of slave houses.
    After Baton Rouge the next significant stop was Bayou Sara, Louisiana, at the mouth of the stream named Bayou Sara, just below St. Francisville, on the east side of the Mississippi. Bayou Sara, the town, had been a popular port and safe haven for flatboats since the late 1700s, and by the 1860s, with the coming of steamboats, it had grown into one of the major shipping points between New Orleans and Natchez, made so by the nearby cotton plantations that it served. Repeated flooding, however, eventually forced the town’s residents and businessmen to move their homes and buildings to the higher ground of St. Francisville, situated on a bluff. During the years of the area’s booming cotton economy in the mid–nineteenth century, St. Francisville became an affluent community, known for its handsome plantation homes and town houses. The town of Bayou Sara, meanwhile, declined and by the end of the century had disappeared, all but one of its buildings having been dismantled, demolished or carried away by the Mississippi’s raging floodwaters. The bluff overlooking the Mississippi at Natchez. The British novelist Frances Trollope traveled down the Mississippi in 1827 and in her travelogue wrote that Natchez appeared “like an oasis in the desert.” By the mid–nineteenth century its natural beauty had become enhanced by the dozens of elegant mansions built by multi-millionaire cotton planters (Library of Congress).
    Natchez, a hundred river miles above St. Francisville, was one of the few places that Frances Trollope, the early-nineteenth-century British novelist, found to her liking as she traveled down the Mississippi in 1827. “At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved by bluffs, as they call the short intervals of high ground,” she wrote in her travelogue and commentary, Domestic Manners of the Americans . “The town of Natchez is beautifully situated on one of those high spots. The contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw, palmetto, and orange, the copious variety of sweetscented flowers that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert. Natchez is the furthest point to the north at which oranges ripen in the open air, or endure the winter without shelter. With the exception of this sweet spot, I thought all the little towns and villages we passed wretchedlooking in the extreme.” By the mid–nineteenth century it was not only Natchez’s natural beauty that made it attractive but the hundreds of mansions built by wealthy cotton planters who made Natchez a city of millionaires.
    Unavoidable for steamboat travelers was the most notorious part of the city — the dockside section known as Natchez-Under-the-Hill, a rude cluster of