The Riverboat Grand

Ever since I was a kid and read Mark Twain's adventure stories, I've had a fascination with paddle-wheel riverboats. In an era when the nation was relatively young and the mighty rivers were the main arteries of commerce, the steam riverboats proliferated and were instrumental in the economic development of America. Their age, fortunately, overlapped the age of photography just enough to leave us some record of what life with riverboats was like.

There were thousands upon thousands of riverboats built, and theirs was a hard life, with the typical boat lasting maybe ten years or so. Disciplined industrial safety hadn't been developed yet, and everything was about making money, so boilers weren't always built or operated with the idea of "safety first", so fires and boiler explosions were commonplace, and took a huge toll on boats and passengers. When one ponders what the worst maritime disaster was, the sinking of the Titanic instantly comes to the minds of many, but that tragedy wasn't the worst by far: the record is held by a steam-powered side-wheel riverboat named the Sultana, which was grossly overloaded Union soldiers paroled from Confederate prison camps. Normally the boat could carry 376 passengers, but on the night of April 27, 1865, the two-year-old riverboat was carrying 2,427 people when three of her four boilers exploded, and around 1,800 people died. The scope of disaster ensured that the Sultana's name would be remembered, but so many others sucumbed in less dramatic fashion, and so weren't remembered at all. 

Records of the less famous riverboats are spotty. Starting in 1856, the insurer Lloyd's produced a Steamboat Directory, and more recently, the reference book Way's Packet Directory lists over 5,900 boats that worked on the Mississippi River system, and that list is now searchable at Riverboats.org; a Grand does appear in the database as Way's number 2417, but as I don't have access to the book, I can't relay if there's any additional information that would confirm that this is the same boat, or suggest when or where this photo was taken (if anyone has this info, I'd love to hear from you!). The photo itself has no accompanying info about this family who seem to be about to board for a river journey. From the clothes, we can guess that the date was in the late 1800s or the first few years of the 20th century, but even the river that this scene took place on is unknown.

Typical of photographs from this era, the exposure was a long one, and unfortunately the camera appears to have been bumped,
resulting in the details being obscured by motion blur.