The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon

Author:John James Audubon [Audubon, John James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-71270-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

“The amount for the present year will be much greater than any of the above. The number of flatboats and keels is beyond calculation. The number of steamboats above the Falls I cannot say much about except that one or two arrive at and leave Louisville every day. Their passage from Cincinnati is commonly 14 or 16 hours. The Tecumseh, a boat which runs between this place and New Orleans, and which measures 210 tons, arrived here on the 10th instant in 9 days, 7 hours from port to port; and the Philadelphia, of 300 tons, made the passage in 9 days 9½ hours, the computed distance being 1,650 miles. These are the quickest trips made. There are now in operation on the waters west of the Alleghany Mountains 140 or 145 boats. We had last spring (1826) a very high freshet, which came 4½ feet deep in the counting room. The rise [of the Ohio River] was 57 feet, 3 inches perpendicular.”

The whole of the steamboats of which you have an account did not perform voyages to New Orleans only but to all points on the Mississippi and other rivers which fall into it. I am certain that since the above date the number has increased, but to what extent I cannot at present say.

When steamboats first plied between Shippingport and New Orleans the cabin passage was a hundred dollars, and a hundred and fifty dollars on the upward voyage. In 1829 I went down to Natchez from Shippingport for twenty-five dollars and ascended from New Orleans on board the Philadelphia in the beginning of January 1830 for sixty dollars, having taken two staterooms for my wife and myself. On that voyage we met with a trifling accident which protracted it to fourteen days; the computed distance being, as mentioned above, 1,650 miles, although the real distance is probably less. I do not remember to have spent a day without meeting with a steamboat, and some days we met several. I might here be tempted to give you a description of one of these steamers of the western waters, but the picture having been often drawn by abler hands, I shall desist.

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