Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 - (Page 37)

rom Pittsburgh the clear and shallow waters of the Ohio River flow northwest and then southwest on their 1,100 mile journey to the Mississippi. Along the way, the Big Sandy River, the Licking, the Kentucky, the Green, the Wabash, the Cumberland and the Tennessee rivers join forces with the Ohio until their mutual junction with the Father of Waters. Following the lead of courageous voyageurs in their bateaux and pirogues, 19th-century farmers along these midAmerica tributaries built new kinds of boats — the keelboat and the flatboat — to funnel the vast production of their river valleys downriver to New Orleans, the trade gateway to Europe. Among the tens of thousands of farmers, traders, adventurers and mariners who came to New Orleans on keelboats and flatboats were Stephen F. Austin, Nicolas Roosevelt, James J. Audubon, Henry B. Shreve, Abraham Lincoln, and the future king of France, Louis Philippe. Ballads and folktales, novels and memoirs, the works of Mark Twain, the legends of Davy Crockett and Mike Fink, minstrel shows, movies, and the carefully researched compilations of trained historians have comingled over time like the waters of the rivers to tell the story of these intrepid navigators. Historians consider Louis Hunter’s 1931 Steamboats on the Western Rivers one of the greatest compilations on its subject, and equally regard Leland Baldwin’s The Keelboat Age on Western Waters, written a decade later. The excellent Western Rivermen by Michael Allen integrates earlier compilations drawn from letters and diaries, travel journals, newspaper accounts, and public records from upriver. Had Allen and the earlier writers known about them, they would also have benefited from a study of the ship captains’ protests, vessel sales, charter parties, and bottomry bonds, all housed at the Notarial Archives in New Orleans. These documents are full of first-person testimony by seamen who hazarded the perils of the oceans and rivers to reach the port of New Orleans. opposite page: The steamboat Moselle exploded on April 25, 1838 shortly after leaving the dock at Cincinnati, Ohio, killing 85 passengers. below: Flatboats and sailing ships crowd the port of New Orleans in this illustration from the early 19th century. The unpredictable obstacles of currents, weather, snags, floods and low water have long stymied riverboat crews plying the waters toward the lucrative port of New Orleans. Fall 2008/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 37 THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities New Orleans Immortelle The Historic New Orleans Collection Highland-Fairfield: The Historic Heart of Shreveport The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Perils of the Mississippi River Louisiana Foodways Harvest of Life King Oliver: The Forgotten King of Jazz Louisiana Architecture Jazz Notes Louisiana State Museum Eye of the Storm Louisiana Association of Museums Soul Resin Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008

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