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

made it a major stop for steamers.
    Memphis was next. The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto is believed to have been the first European on the site of Memphis, having arrived there in the 1540s. By the 1680s French explorers had erected Fort Prudhomme there, and by 1796, when Tennessee was admitted to the Union, the site was occupied by the new state’s westernmost settlement. The community was established as a town in 1819 by General Andrew Jackson, Judge John Overton and General James Winchester on a 5,000-acre land grant. In 1826 it was incorporated as a city, named for the ancient Egyptian metropolis on the Nile. It became a hugely prosperous cotton trading center, where more than 40 percent of the nation’s cotton crop was traded, making of its waterfront a bustling shipping point thronged by steamboats. Prosperity swelled the city’s population from 1,800 in 1840 to more than 18,000 in 1860.
    After Memphis came New Madrid, Missouri, on the west bank. First established in 1789 and nearly destroyed in the 1811 earthquake that made it famous, the town, situated between the river and the forest, had been rebuilt and repopulated and had resumed its position as a regular stop for riverboats throughout the nineteenth century.
    Hickman, Kentucky, one of the next small stops, was noticeable for its warehouses that held the region’s tobacco crop till it could be shipped out aboard steamers.
    Then came Cairo, at the extreme southwest tip of Illinois, where the Ohio River delivers itself into the waters of the Mississippi, demarcating the lower Mississippi from the upper Mississippi, some one thousand miles above New Orleans. Protected by levees, the town stands on a narrow peninsula created by the two rivers as they rush toward their confluence. Because of its strategic position at the mouth of the Ohio, the site was a natural for some sort of settlement and fortification, as the Jesuit priest and explorer Pierre Francois Xavier observed in 1721. The settlement that resulted was first incorporated as a city in 1818, and after faltering in its development — for the first few decades of the nineteenth century it had only two buildings, one a log cabin and the other a warehouse — the community made a new start in 1837 and in 1858 was re-incorporated. By 1860 it had become an important steamboat port, and its population had risen to more than 2,000.
    At Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the next stop, a hill rises quickly from the riverbank, and the city is built on that hill, as if holding its feet out of the water. In the early 1800s about a dozen families comprised the community, but in the mid– and late 1800s visitors arriving by steamboat could see the Jesuit school for boys that had been built not far up the hill and, above a sloping lawn, the public college that stood farther uphill, two institutions that helped account for Cape Girardeau’s reputation as the Athens of Missouri. The town had begun about 1793 and by the end of the nineteenth century it had become the busiest port on the river between St. Louis and Memphis.
    Above Cape Girardeau, conspicuously standing out from the wooded hills, is a natural feature that helps vary the scenery, a sixty-foot-high rock called Grand Tower. It’s about an acre in area and rises from the river near the Missouri side. The town of Grand Tower, on the Illinois shore, opposite the rock, was another steamboat stop, once known as Jenkin’s Landing.
    Ste. Genevieve, the next stop, believed to be the oldest European settlement in Missouri, was another town populated by no more than a dozen or so families in the early 1800s. Steamboat passengers arriving from the lower Mississippi and disembarking at Ste. Genevieve may have been surprised to discover that many of the town’s structures were built of logs standing vertically on the ground, French style, with no foundation, or on a sill, rather than logs laid horizontally, one on top of the other, the usual American way of erecting log