BIG MUDDY - Conclusion

By Dan R. Conway

(Originally printed in the Hysham Echo March 24, 1927)

(Cont. from last week)

As one writer has put it, the first navigator on the Missouri river was the blue-winged teal; the next the Indian with his canoe and bull-boat; then came the half-civilized French-Canadian voyageur with his pirogue, paddling upstream or corbelling around the swift points. At a later day came the fur trader with his keel-boat; still later there came up from below, the little “dingey” - the single engine one-boiler steamboat. At last the evolution was complete, and there came the magnificent passenger steamer of the fifties, the floating palace of the palmy days of steam-boating.

The First Steam Craft

The first steam craft that appeared on the waters of the Missouri was the Western Engineer, built at Pittsburgh for Major Stephen H. Long for use on his expedition to the Rocky mountains in 1819 and 1820. The boat was 75 feet long, 13 feet wide and drew 19 inches of water. For the purpose of mystifying and impressing the Indians, the bow was fashioned in imitation of the neck and head of a serpent from whose open mouth issued clouds of smoke. The propelling machinery was purposely hidden from sight by a superstructure, as was the paddle wheel at the stern, which violently agitated the water like some strange aquatic monster. The speed of the boat was about three miles an hour.

The experience of the Yellowstone and the Assiniboine, the first two steamers to reach what is now Montana in 1832 and 1833, resulted in the altered construction of later Missouri river steamboats. They were afterward made with flat bottoms, so that a vessel 200 feet long and 30 feet wide could navigate in two and one-half feet of water. Later boats were also constructed with stern wheels instead of side wheels.

One very unusual feature of a flat-bottomed Missouri river steamboat was its equipment with a little railway and tram cars in its hold. These little cars ran all around the circumference of the freight quarters for the purpose of handling bulky articles with greater facility.

After the Assiniboine attained a point beyond the mouth of the Yellowstone in 1834, it was 19 years before her feat was surpassed by another steamboat. In 1853 a vessel named El Paso succeeded in passing the mouth of Milk river, and finally in 1860, the Chippewa and Key West arrived at Fort Benton, and in so doing they reached a point further from the sea by continuous watercourse than any other boat had ever been, they were 3,575 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

The Treacherous Missouri

Steamboat navigation on the Missouri was even more difficult than on the Mississippi or the Ohio, or, in fact, any other stream used by steam vessels. Besides being filled with snags and sandbars, and being extraordinarily tortuous in its windings, the big river of the west was consistently erratic in its course and the bed of the stream was constantly shifting its position throughout the entire 2,600 miles with which its navigators were required to be familiar. The stream would often find itself flowing through a tract of country that lay miles from the bed it had occupied during the preceding week. A western newspaper, The Sioux City Register, in its issue of March 28, 1868, said: “of all the variable things in creation are the actions of a jury, the state of a woman’s mind, and the condition of the Missouri river.”

Sometimes there were dangerous whirlpools, when the whirl of water was so swift that the center of the eddy was 12 feet below its edge. Many a boat was wrecked in one of these agitations.

It is now almost 68 years since Captain Charles Chouteau, of a family famous in the annals of the Missouri river fur trade, and prominent in the business world of St. Louis, brought the first steamboat up the Missouri river to Fort Benton, then once of the small outposts of the fur trade. He was the harbinger of the post’s prosperity. After him came other pioneers of the Upper Missouri navigation, bringing in supplies to the trappers and traders, and taking away cargoes of furs, then the country’s only source of wealth.

With the discovery of gold at Alder Gulch, Bannack and Last Chance Gulch, thousands of fortune hunters came to Montana, and Fort Benton became the head of navigation on the Missouri and the water port for supplies for an area greater than that now served by the wholes alers of Minneapolis. It was a robust, lusty center of considerable population, throbbing with the raw life of the frontier.

The river trade reached its peak during the summer of 1866, and during that season 40 steamers unloaded their cargoes of goods and adventurers there. From Benton bull teams trekked into the far distance of the north country, carrying supplies to the little settlements of western Canada, and to the new gold camps of western Montana. It all made for trade and important business houses, at first trading posts developed into mercantile houses of importance, such as the T. C. Power company of Montana.

Decline of Steamboating

Fort Benton flourished as the water metropolis and port of the frontier until the coming of the railroad. Thereafter steamboating on the Missouri river declined rapidly, and in the course of a few seasons, because of railroad competition, it was abandoned entirely.

With the recent announcement in the press of the proposed bill before congress to authorize the appropriation of necessary funds for the opening up of navigation on the upper Missouri river, there looms a faint hope that this greatest of American waterways shall again, in a sense, at least, come into its own as an avenue of commerce. The Missouri river, and especially the upper Missouri, now threads its way through a land vast and rich in agricultural lands that are rapidly becoming improved and which have proven most productive of food stuffs of almost every known and needed variety. This new method of transportation of products and merchandise will prove an added aid to the producer and the manufacturer and merchandiser of the Great Northwest, and could even be made instrumental in the opening up of new territory which lies outside the radius of present railroad facilities. Print this post