The Duane of Pittsburgh was said by the Liverpool "Saturday Advertiser" of July 9, 1803, to have been the "first vessel which ever came to Europe from the western waters of the United States." Probably the Louisiana of Marietta went as far afield as any of the one hundred odd ships built in these years on the Ohio.The official papers of her voyage in 1805, dated at New Orleans, Norfolk (Virginia), Liverpool, Messina, and Trieste at the head of the Adriatic, are preserved today in the Marietta College Library.
The growth of the shipbuilding industry necessitated a readjustment of the districts for the collection of customs.
Columbia (Cincinnati) at first served the region of the upper Ohio; but in 1803 the district was divided and Marietta was made the port for the Pittsburgh-Portsmouth section of the river.In 1807 all the western districts were amalgamated, and Pittsburgh, Charleston (Wellsburg), Marietta, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Fort Massac were made ports of entry.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 gave a marked impulse to inland shipbuilding; but the embargo of 1807, which prohibited foreign trade, following so soon, killed the shipyards, which, for a few years, had been so busy.The great new industry of the Ohio Valley was ruined.By this time the successful voyage of Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont, between New York and Albany, had demonstrated the possibilities of steam navigation.Not a few men saw in the novel craft the beginning of a new era in Western river traffic; but many doubted whether it was possible to construct a vessel powerful enough to make its way upstream against such sweeping currents as those of the Mississippi and the Ohio.Surely no one for a moment dreamed that in hardly more than a generation the Western rivers would carry a tonnage larger than that of the cities of the Atlantic seaboard combined and larger than that of Great Britain!
As early as 1805, two years before the trip of the Clermont, Captain Keever built a "steamboat" on the Ohio, and sent her down to New Orleans where her engine was to be installed.But it was not until 1811 that the Orleans, the first steamboat to ply the Western streams, was built at Pittsburgh, from which point she sailed for New Orleans in October of that year.The Comet and Vesuvius quickly followed, but all three entered the New Orleans-Natchez trade on the lower river and were never seen again at the headwaters.As yet the swift currents and flood tides of the great river had not been mastered.It is true that in 1815 the Enterprise had made two trips between New Orleans and Louisville, but this was in time of high water, when counter currents and backwaters had assisted her feeble engine.In 1816, however, Henry Shreve conceived the idea of raising the engine out of the hold and constructing an additional deck.The Washington, the first doubledecker, was the result.The next year this steamboat made the round trip from Louisville to New Orleans and back in forty-one days.The doubters were now convinced.
For a little while the quaint and original riverman held on in the new age, only to disappear entirely when the colored roustabout became the deckhand of post-bellum days.The riverman as a type was unknown except on the larger rivers in the earlier years of water traffic.What an experience it would be today to rouse one of those remarkable individuals from his dreaming, as Davy Crockett did, with an oar, and hear him howl "Halloe stranger, who axed you to crack my lice?"--to tell him in his own lingo to "shut his mouth or he would get his teeth sunburnt"--to see him crook his neck and neigh like a stallion--to answer his challenge in kind with a flapping of arms and a cock's crow--to go to shore and have a scrimmage such as was never known on a gridiron--and then to resolve with Crockett, during a period of recuperation, that you would never "wake up a ringtailed roarer with an oar again."The riverman, his art, his language, his traffic, seem to belong to days as distant as those of which Homer sang.
