Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 - (Page 43)

cutter Louisiana was lying careened on her side on the shore across from New Orleans in the summer of 1805 when the ground under it caved in. A few minutes later there were eight fathoms of water where the vessel had lain. And the boat Thomas Jefferson sank three miles above Fort Massack on the Ohio in 1805 with 40 hogsheads of tobacco weighing over 49,000 pounds when a tree fell over on it and crushed it while it was tied up to the shore. By the way, this was not a freak accident. In fact, flatboatmen were taught to watch out for falling trees. Compared to the blunt-ended, keel-less flatboat, we are told, the better-built keelboat was rare; some three to four hundred in all against thousands of the former. Notarial protest records bear this out, as a keelboat appearance is exceptional in the records. In one case, the master of the keelboat Independence appeared with his assistant boatman to state that having left Shipping Port on August 26, 1815 with a cargo of cotton, flour, and soap, they ran over a sawyer off Plum Point in the Mississippi, and “hung by the The Wood-Boat (1850) by George Caleb Bingham, from the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum. ADVENT OF THE KEELBOAT stern.” Both the crew and six passengers tried to get the Independence off the sawyer with spars, and by swinging her backward and forward, but she would not dislodge until they had unloaded about half of the cargo onto a pair of skiffs, and then “by a purchase fastened to a sawyer, they succeeded in getting her off.” In the end the keelboat made it to New Orleans in better shape than a flatboat traveling with it, which also struck a sawyer and had to be pumped and bailed the whole way down. If flatboats and keelboats had their troubles, so did steamboats. Hunter reported several classes of steamboat accidents including explosions, collisions, fire, and the pernicious snag and sawyer. The Aetna, one of the first four steamboats to navigate the Mississippi, had been in operation only a few weeks when she filed her first protest in New Orleans before notary John Lynd. She had departed Pittsburgh brand new on March 15, 1815, with Anthony R. Gale in charge. She took in some cargo at Fall 2008/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 43

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

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.