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

saloons, gambling joints and brothels built on the mud flats beside the river, always the first and last part of Natchez that steamboat passengers saw.
    Being a major port on the river, Natchez became one of the most prominent speed-measuring destinations for steamboats operating out of New Orleans. The steamer Ruth held the record for that run, too, making the trip from New Orleans to Natchez, about 350 river miles, in fifteen hours and four minutes in 1867, a time unsurpassed until 1909, when the battleship USS Mississippi made the run in fourteen hours, after starting two miles farther up the river than had the Ruth .
    Vicksburg, seventy-five river miles above Natchez, situated where the Yazoo flows into the Mississippi from the northeast, is another city built on a hill that rises from the riverbank. Its known history began in 1715 with a French-built fort, Fort St. Pierre, which became Fort Nogales under the Spanish administration in 1719 and was renamed Fort McHenry after the Americans took it over in 1811. The town was named for the Methodist preacher, Newitt Vick, who bought 1,100 acres atop the bluff to build a community there. By 1826, when Vicksburg was incorporated, it had become a thriving town, enlivened by the steamboat traffic that came to carry the area’s cotton away. Its riverfront grew to become almost as boisterous and disreputable as Natchez-Under-the-Hill. By 1860 the town’s population had increased to 4,600. (Before the nineteenth century ended, Vicksburg gained distinction as the birthplace of Coca-Cola. Joseph Augustus Biedenharm, a candy-store and soda-fountain owner, in March 1894 put his popular soda-fountain drink in bottles that he could take out and sell in the countryside, and thus was the popular soft drink born.)
    From Vicksburg, steamers continued upriver to Lake Providence, Louisiana, on the west bank — so named, it was said, because its sheltered landing, beside the lake of the same name, provided refuge from river pirates in the 1700s and early 1800s. Clemens called Lake Providence “the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come to” on a voyage down the Mississippi. After Lake Providence, it was on to Greenville, Mississippi, on the east bank, another prominent cotton shipping point.
    For many years Napoleon, Arkansas, at the mouth of the Arkansas River, was a major port on the river, the next one above Greenville. There where Marquette and Joliet had halted their exploration of the lower Mississippi and two Indian villages had welcomed them in 1673, there eventually rose a European settlement that by 1832 was large enough to warrant a post office. In 1851 the town was visited by Peter Daniel, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, who wrote about it in a letter to his daughter, telling her, “I reached this dilapidated and most wretched of wretched places at noon today and am compelled to wait until 2 P . M . tomorrow for the mail boat to Little Rock. This miserable place consists of a few slightly built, wood houses, and the best hotel in the place is an old, dismantled steamboat.” 7
    Nevertheless, Napoleon became a thriving community, its prosperity owing to the cotton crops of plantations in the area. At its peak, Napoleon had a population estimated at 2,000, plus a large but uncounted number of transients. It was the county seat of Desha County until 1874, when the county seat was moved to Watson after the river ate away a section of the riverbank and a number of buildings were washed away in the powerful flow of the river. That event marked the beginning of the end for Napoleon. By the 1880s there was nothing left of it.
    Upriver from the Napoleon site is Helena. In the mid– and late 1800s Helena was the second largest city in Arkansas, with a population of about 5,000. More than merely a cotton center, the city prospered from its commerce in lumber and grain, and it was home to a foundry, machine shops, mills and wagon factories, all of which