PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE
accident and disease, and many Irishmen also died in BNA from malaria, when digging the Rideau Canal between Bytown (future Ottawa) and Kingston between 1826 and 1832. 1840s. The Mississippi River (US). The great US waterway, key to the development of the US economy and intracontinental passenger travel. The first steamboat, New Orleans, voyaged from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as early as 20 October 1811 and, after passing Cincinnati, Ohio, didn’t arrive at New Orleans until 10 January 1812, due to delays from seasonally shallow water levels at the “Falls of the Ohio” below Louisville, Kentucky. It was not until Henry Shreve developed the classical flatbottomed Mississippi River-style Steamboat a few years later that extensive travel on the internal American river-canal system became less seasonal and thrived, after extensive removal of snags (submerged logs), the blasting of rocks and boulders to deepen channels, and the building of wing dams to control sand bars (Robinson, 1983). The economic impact of the internal river trade proved staggering. “Economic historian Isaac Lippincott compiled statistics that showed that the commercial receipt for river cargo in New Orleans totaled $22 million in 1830 ($660 million in today’s dollars). By 1840, the New Orleans River trade - swelled by the enormous growth in cotton exports – had doubled to almost $50 million” (Buck, 2022).
Fig. 24. The Mississippi and St Louis, Missouri The 2,300-mile Missouri River (“Big Muddy”) meets the 2340-mile Mississippi at St Charles, just north of St Louis. Since railroads were poorly developed in the 1840s, providing only short commercial links from remote areas to hubs, steamboats were the fastest means of transportation providing access to the Missouri Valley and important jumping-off supply points for the Oregon Trail, such as Independence and St Joseph’s, Missouri. Further up the rugged Missouri River adventurist steam boaters would eventually reach as far as Fort Benton, Montana in 1860.
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