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carrying from it the wealth of produce, materials and products that it yielded.
    Travel down the big river was not much of a problem. Canoes and pirogues and, later, flatboats, keel boats and barges simply went with the current, steered by sturdy river boatmen manning paddles or oars. Travel up the river was another matter entirely. The river’s many bends and twists rendered sail power impractical, so that boats going upstream had to depend on the manpower of their crews, who laboriously poled, paddled, rowed or towed their vessels against the relentless current to upriver destinations. Those arduous and limited methods of propulsion prevented the full use of the river and stood in the way of America’s realization of its tremendous potential.
    Then came a revolutionary, history-changing invention. Many men, both in the United States and in Europe, contributed to its development, but it was Robert Fulton, a poor immigrant’s son from Pennsylvania, who made it work successfully. To him went the credit and the fame for the creation of the steamboat.
    No longer then was the river master. It became servant. Perspicacious witnesses to the coming of the earliest steamboats realized what was happening. When the first steamer to ply the Mississippi, the New Orleans , pulled into Natchez on its maiden voyage in January 1812, an elderly slave who watched it in admiration immediately sensed its meaning. Throwing his hat into the air, he exultantly shouted, “Ol’ Mississip done got her master now!” Or so the story goes.
    Development of the land and resources along the Mississippi and its tributaries rapidly followed. The banks of the river, on both sides, became dotted with settlements and towns and the landings for the steamboats that were the main means of transportation. New communities sprang up, and older ones grew larger and busier. Travelers on the steamboats that served the river cities and towns got sort of a water bird’s view of the mid-continent from the decks of the boats. For many, particularly nineteenth-century immigrants, the voyage into America’s heartland began at the city that was founded to serve as the mid-continent’s gateway.
    It stood as a geographic curiosity, perilously poised on the east bank of the threatening river, the storied city of New Orleans, which by the middle of the nineteenth century had become the commercial terminus of the vast Mississippi valley. From the steamboats’ upper decks passengers could peer down on the city, over the ridge of the protective levee, viewing the city’s structures as if from an elevated railway, which was the sight that onetime river pilot Samuel Clemens remembered seeing as his vessel approached the city. “In high-river stage, in the New Orleans region,” he wrote, “the water is up to the top of the inclosing levee rim, the flat country behind it lies low — representing the bottom of a dish — and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.” 5
    As steamers bucked the muddy flow and churned northward from New Orleans they made stops where their freight or passengers required, often being hailed to shore by passengers seeking to board them from an isolated spot on the levee. But many of their landings were regular stops, one of the first of which, going upriver, was Donaldsonville, Louisiana, where Bayou Lafourche — which a couple of millennia or so ago was the main stream of the river — splits off from the Mississippi to make its own way to the gulf. The voyage to Donaldsonville, about seventy-eight river miles from New Orleans, became one of the standard speed measurements for Mississippi steamers. The record — four hours and twenty-seven minutes — was set by the steamboat Ruth , which met an unseemly end when in 1868, some twelve miles above Vicksburg, it caught fire and burned.
    The site of a