The arrival of the first steamboat in Arkansas in 1820 ushered in an era of commerce and travel for the newly created territory. Within a few years, it was possible to make a trip from Little Rock or Camden to New Orleans, conduct business, and return home in less than a week.
Cotton, deer hides, bear oil and countless other products of Arkansas forests and farms could be shipped to markets in a planned and timely manner. The steamboat soon became an integral part of the economy and brought romance and drama to towns across the state.
Early settlers in Arkansas used flatboats and keelboats to traverse the rivers. As the name implies, flatboats had flat bottoms, which allowed more room for large cargoes but made the craft less manageable.
The first recorded steamboat in Arkansas was probably the Comet, which docked at Arkansas Post about 10 p.m. March 31, 1820, having departed New Orleans eight days earlier. Despite the late hour, a crowd came out to see this revolutionary new contraption. This was 13 years after Robert Fulton's Clermont launched the commercial steamboat era in 1807. Suddenly, Arkansas was not so remote any more.
Little Rock received its first steamboat, the Eagle, in March 1822. The following month a steamboat reached Fort Smith with supplies for the military post that gave the fledgling town its name. Steamboats were threading their way up the Ouachita by 1830, while the Waverly reached Batesville on the upper White River in 1831. Just when the Black River received steamboat service is debated, but one reached Davidsonville in Randolph County at least by 1831.
Archaeologist and historian Leslie Stewart-Abernathy summed up the rapid growth and penetration of steamboats in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas: "By about 1875, steamboats had reached everywhere in the state, up the Little Red River, into the Fourche La Fave, up the St. Francis River and Bayou Bartholomew, and eventually up the Buffalo River as far as Rush."
Several steamboats were built in Arkansas prior to the Civil War. The first steamboat was constructed of bois d'arc wood on the Little River in Hempstead County about 1824. The bois d'arc tree, popularly known as the bodark or Osage orange, is intimately tied to many aspects of Arkansas natural and cultural history.
In late 1841, two partners at Lewisburg in Conway County built a steamboat and floated it down the Arkansas River to modern North Little Rock, where it was fitted with boilers and engines. At the suggestion of the Arkansas Gazette, the new boat was named after recently inaugurated and wildly popular Gov. Archibald Yell. Wasting no time, Gov. Yell immediately set off for Cincinnati, a center of steamboat commerce.
Several of the steamboats built in Arkansas were small and lightweight, with the goal of being able to travel during periods of low water. One was the Dime, built in Arkadelphia about 1830. Another was the Arkansas No. 6, which a female Protestant missionary on her way to Fayetteville to teach at a school for Indian girls described as "a perfect toy boat."
The Arkansas No. 6 had been called out of Van Buren to pick up the missionary and other travelers when their steamboat became stuck on a sandbar. The rescue boat had a "tiny stove with a thin tin stovepipe [and] scarcely gave out any heat, and as it was very, very cold, we suffered. There were no state-rooms, only thin, dark curtains to hide one bed from another."
Steamboat travel could be dangerous as well as uncomfortable. The rivers were home to hundreds of snags and sunken logs, which ripped the bottoms of steamboats with distressing regularity. Boilers exploded frequently due to neglect, clogging and poor design.
On Sunday, March 5, 1854, the steamer Caroline caught fire as she traveled up the White River, with extensive loss of life. A boiler explosion on the lower Arkansas shortly after the Civil War took the lives of several members of the Ashley Band, a musical group made up of former slaves of Sen. Chester Ashley of Little Rock.
By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, steamboats had been plying the state's waters for over 40 years. Towns like Little Rock, Clarendon, Jacksonport and Camden had long prospered from the steamboat trade, but during the two decades following the end of the war, steamboat owners sought out markets up every navigable stream in the state, and some that stretched the definition of navigable.
Steamboats built after the Civil War were often more elaborately decorated and lighted as the austere simplicity of the antebellum era gave way to the generous ornamentation of the Victorian age. The larger boats could be four stories high with a main deck, a boiler deck, a Texas or hurricane deck, and atop that a pilot house.
The steamboat made it possible for goods from around the world to be shipped to interior Arkansas. A Camden merchant in 1851 advertised the arrival of three shipments containing 2,000 pounds of bacon, 1,000 pounds of cheese, 30 sacks of coffee, 15 kegs of lard, 50 barrels of molasses and 60 barrels of flour. Salt was also a staple of the steamboat trade.
The same steamboats loaded up with local produce before leaving the landing. Practically every riverboat captain hauled large consignments of Arkansas cotton to markets downriver. Lumber and other wood products were commonly exported. In 1881 more than 101,000 bales of barrel staves were shipped out of the Camden port.
Black Arkansans worked on steamboats long before the Civil War, often as slaves who were hired out to the boat captains. Some blacks were cooks and general helpers, but most worked as roustabouts, doing the heavy lifting when the boats were manually loaded or unloaded. Even after the Civil War, blacks continued the tradition of working as roustabouts.
John Quincy Wolf, who worked as a clerk aboard a steamer on the upper White River in the 1880s, remembered that about 15 blacks worked on a typical steamboat, including "deck-hands, firemen, cooks and cabin boys." He recalled the deckhands having spare time between ports, which they filled with playing Seven Up, a popular card game, or shooting craps after dark in the engine room.
In his memoirs, Wolf recalled the aromas of a steamboat -- especially in the bars where "the preparation of egg-nog, mint juleps, rock and rye, cocktails, sour toddies, and other mixed and fancy drinks calling for the use of sugar, rock candy, lemons, whiskey, water (not very much), nutmegs and other spices produced a sweet, pungent odor ... I like the smell of a steamboat."
The Upper White, which winds its way from Newport in Jackson County through the Ozarks to the mouth of the James River in Stone County, Mo., was the last part of Arkansas to be served by railroads, so the steamboat trade persevered. Over this distance of 367 miles were nearly 100 steamboat landings.
The most famed riverboat captain of the Upper White trade was Thomas Benton Stallings. Known as the Commodore of the White, he built the first and only steamboat in Boone County, launched in January 1881 at Dubuque north of Lead Hill. The Lady Boone was a light steamer with a length of 110 feet, capable of carrying only 400 bales of cotton, but that same lightness allowed it to travel over the threatening and unreliable Upper White.
The same technology that made possible the steamboat also brought railroads, and before the century ended, the sounds of the train whistles almost completely replaced the familiar three-key whistles of the steamboats. By 1910 railroads had snaked their way into every area of the state, and the steamboats became floating relics.
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com. An earlier version of this column was published Sept. 7, 2008.
NAN Profiles on 04/12/2020