09/02/2021
This wonderful 14 review just arrived:
Men of the Inland Rivers: Interviews from the Age of Steamboats, Packets and Towboats, by John Knoepfle
Published by Burning Daylight, 2020, 579 pages,
(ISBN, paperback, 978-0-9897242-9-6)
But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a deck hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat….
Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
Men of the Inland Rivers provides an oral history of the practice and culture of river boating on the Ohio River and related rivers, spanning about a hundred years, roughly from 1850 to 1950. Often these rivers are smaller, lesser known rivers, such as the Big Sandy (approximately 30 miles) or the Monongahela (approximately 130 miles). Some of those who are interviewed have spent time on the Mississippi, mentioning, for example, that in the early days, it was common to buy a boat, load it with goods, float down to New Orleans, sell the goods, sell the boat, and walk a thousand miles home. The recordings have been transcribed and archived at the University of Illinois, Springfield. Making occasional corrections, Burning Daylight has collected and published these transcriptions in one volume.
Knoepfle conducted the majority of the interviews in 1957, usually near or on a river. Working as “producer director for WCET, Cincinnati’s educational TV station” he often saw the “the last of the steam-driven packets and tows” operating on the Ohio, and eventually he took it upon himself to record the memories of those who were associated with this era of transportation, resulting in taped interviews that included “captains, pilots, boat owners, show boaters, night watchmen, mates, roustabouts, lock masters, packet cooks, among others” (iv).
The time span covered by the interviews themselves ranges from the early 1800s to the day of the interview. Many of those interviewed were born toward the end of the 19th century, so most references to earlier years are second-hand, often a recitation of things their grandfathers, fathers or uncles had said or experienced. Historic events referred to in the interviews include the floods of 1884 and 1913, the 1917 ice gorge and flood, and World Wars I and II—as well as the gradual introduction and final dominance of the diesel engine during the first half of the 20th century.
Such memories and experiences that would never recur. Just as Twain remarks that the European boats with keels failed in the shallow rivers of America, so the American flat-bottomed, steam-driven boats finally succumbed, first to diesel power, and with a few exceptions, later to cars, trucks, and railways.
Throughout the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century, transportation on the waterways was the primary and sometimes the only way of moving people and freight. There were places without railroads that only boats could reach, ensuring the demand for their services. Even today, inland waterways provide the least expensive transportation—cheaper than both trucks and railroads—and they are still used for particularly heavy or bulky loads, such as oil and coal. But the waterways are slow, and, as one captain said, he carried passengers and freight on his boat from 1914-1947, but that “the trade run out, and trucks and automobiles took the passenger trade away, and the freight trade away.” Bluntly put, the trade was no longer financially viable. This particular Captain Smith said he “Couldn’t even pay the men.” As a last resort, he arranged to evenly divide any profits: “We finally got down to pay them what the boat would make and the crew all agreed to run it, you know, just to divide it up, but at that we was only paying ten dollars a week.” Even then ten dollars wouldn’t suffice—that was less than Black roustabouts in previous years could make—“So we had to quit” (440). Captain Smith was the last survivor among those who carried passengers and freight on packet boats.
As a reference book, Men of the Inland Rivers is of course valuable to historians, scholars, and libraries. In addition to The Waterways Journal Weekly (published continuously from 1887 to the present), Men of the Inland Rivers fills an important role in recording the memories, impressions, and activities of those who worked on or near the inland rivers of the eastern United States. Few of those interviewed were writers (only one newspaperman comes to mind), and so, without these interviews, their first-hand perceptions of what was once the primary mode of transportation would have died for the most part.
As a book for the general public goes, Men of the Inland Rivers has several entire interviews and many isolated passages that stand on their own merits. Those interested in humanity, particularly early 20th century Americans working on or near rivers, will find the book of course sheds light on the boats and their navigation, but also on the values that governed many of the rivermen. Among these values are matters of race, along with labor relations, death, and a persistent sense of honor. It is to these matters that this review turns, showcasing a sample of the salient themes and characters along the way.
God’s Plenty
Once one navigates the nearly 600 page volume, one finds—as Dryden did in Chaucer—”God’s plenty.” The temperaments of the speakers vary, as is illustrated by Captain Bernard Savage and Captain Jesse Hughes. We hear from Captain Hughes that he began work in the 1890s and soon went to work for the well-known Captain Gordon Greene for 55 years. Throughout that time, Captain Hughes “didn’t have any thrilling experiences.” He states, “I wasn’t in any accidents or disasters of any kind. I never had any accidents on the boat.” This piloting career “was fairly successful” because he “got along all right and never had any mishaps. Everything was very commonplace” (249-250). Kudos, Captain Hughes.
When we turn to Captain Bernard Savage, we are met by a stream of mishaps. At the age of eight he comes on a boat headed to New Orleans as a cabin boy. Low water—the plight of the rivermen—keeps them anchored in New Orleans for a few weeks. Soon the boy gets to know some sailors in a nearby schooner. While his uncle was in the hospital “for something,” the boy spent time helping the sailors who played a series of practical jokes on him, albeit jokes that made him feel important (such as being told he’d have to walk the plank). Finally when his uncle returned from the hospital he was reprimanded harshly for associating with pirates—to his surprise (383-384).
While he was a cub pilot working on his license he “was blowed up on one of them big towboats, on the Hoxie. Blowed up in Ravenswood…” He claims, “we was coming up with empties [empty barges] and she blew up there and we was coming close to shore and blew the whole cabin off of her, right over the boiler, landed out on the river bank . . . .” The claim, he says, is that they had too much steam pressure (the better for going upstream, especially in uneven, shallow water), but claims they would rarely go over the allowed pressure. Next he claims, “I was on the Hawk when she blew up.” From there he got fired. Immediately he offers a description of how Daddy Price, a boat owner, was once forcing him to play the bass drum on shore to attract attention (music was used that way). He, however, would have none of it. Instead he broke both drum heads, threw the drum into the river, and, again, was fired. (384-285)
His career piloting ended when they were making a difficult landing and, as was typical, the mate had to jump ashore and put a rope around a tree to help guide the boat in. However, “the mate wound up tight on the bits [mounted on the boat] and didn’t slack it enough and broke it.” Sadly, not only the rope snapped but it cut the mate in half, “just like you’d cut him in two with a knife.” He concludes, “And I never went on one afterwards” (389-390). No longer piloting, he still encountered tragedies, including finding a man who had “jumped off the Broad Street Bridge” on “the day George Hart was nominated, inaugurated Governor” (390, and it’s unclear if the inauguration was a cause of su***de or a mnemonic for the date). Nothing, for Savage, was commonplace.
Race
If one notes that the interviews occurred before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that some of the events that were recalled occurred before the Civil War, one cannot be surprised at alternations between latent and overt racism, mostly in reference to Blacks, although Italians and Muslims are mentioned.
Often the slurs are embedded in what the speaker intends to be purely humorous. For example Captain Roehrig tells a story about how a Captain Bryan tricked a roustabout who was Black (and nearly all of them were Black). Captain Bryan bets the roustabout a quarter that he cannot lie on his stomach and let mosquitoes attack him for 15 minutes. As the roustabout lay there, the captain realized he was about to lose his quarter so he dropped a hot coal on the man’s back in order to get him to jump up, which he did, exclaiming that it “was a gallinipper,” a particularly aggressive mosquito. Upon hearing “gallinipper,” the captain paid the quarter anyway—making a funny story outside of the obvious low wages offered to roustabouts, not to mention the sa**sm (373-374).
In one instance, it sounds as though a Captain Coomer is genuinely distressed over how he treated his Black roustabouts: “And today I am actually ashamed of some of the things that I have actually done in the way of working people beyond humanity, that is the only way you could put it.” However, on closer inspection it appears he is referring to “only two or three men” who were “white roustabouts up on the Cumberland” that “we classed … and treated … as regular river roustabouts.” In spite of admitting the life of a roustabout “was pretty rough,” the captain maintains, “roustabouts just followed the river as a regular life, they enjoyed it” (138-139).
Undoubtedly, music was where the Blacks excelled. Frequently, mention is made of the songs they would sing as they carried heavy loads on their shoulders as they walked up and down the stage plank to load or unload the boat. According to the engineer Norval Horten, “we would stop there, and pick up hay; and they would have as high as 1,500 to 2,000 bales of hay to come on. I remember them roustabouts, them colored roustabouts, they had a song they would sing. ‘Oh, if I knowed this old boat, I’d sho stayed in port. Oh, oh my.'” He continues, “When they would see a big pile of hay, then they would start singing. A roustabout on those packet boats had an awful life, too when you think about it. They never had no regular hours. When you make a landing, they would wake them up, and they had to carry freight. After that they would get to sleep on the freight, didn’t have any beds or anything, they just had to sleep around on the freight. And when they fed them, they fed them just like you feed dogs” (247).
Better, in terms of working conditions, were the jazz musicians who thrived on the showboats. According to one account, “They had a negro band supplying music and that was the first occasion that I had ever heard what we now call jazz. Typical jazz rhythm or at least … the clarinet player particularly did things with a clarinet that I had never seen done before. He could almost make it sound like a slide trombone by eliding the sounds….” Instead of being the butt of the joke, as was often the case, they are now the source of humor, as in the sense of good spirits: “It certainly was rousing music and it had that whole in good humor almost as soon as they played their first tune.” Still, the account admits the life wasn’t overly easy, in that “They played all day long, and late that evening…” (10).
On several occasions, crew members (who were almost always white outside of the roustabouts) went out of their way to help Blacks. Norval Horten, again, recalls an incident when “One night we were backing down through the pass, and felt like a big log rolled under, and knocked a big hole in her 20 feet long and about four feet wide and didn’t have much time to do anything but just run to the high side of her and jump overboard. They had a Black cook on there and he could not swim a lick; he begged me to save him. So I told him, ‘Don’t grab me and I will hold you up.’ He used sense and I held him up until they came to us with a yawl…” (233-234).
Once again, we hear from Captain Savage, this time on race. If one wanted to hire an Italian, one had to “hire a whole gang. Hired the boss and he had the gang. Had to build a camp for them and everything.” In one incident, “was four of them wops setting on the head” of a barge that ran aground, so that one end was up on the bank and the end where the Italians sat was sinking. “All they had to do in the world was get up and run the length of that boat and jump out on the bank. They set there”—and drowned. With a mixture of folklore and racism, Savage adds, “A white man will come up three times. Most of the time, twice anyhow. They never even come up” (391)—suggesting the Italians were not authentic white men, if I read this correctly.
In the same breath, he adds that “nine Mohammedans” (Muslims) also drowned. This reference surprised Knoepfle, the interviewer, who asked “What were Mohammedans doing on the Muskingum?” To which Savage replied in economic terms that “Oh they was laborers…. Oh, they got them from every place in them days. They paid them twelve and a half cents an hour, 15 was the best they got” (392). Race and labor with its harsh conditions and low wages rarely remain separate in these interviews.
Labor
Among the hardest working and the lowest paid, were the roustabouts, who were almost always Blacks. Their job was to carry freight on and off the boats and barges, usually at a penny per bag, which added up to more than they would get paid an hour. On occasion they would strike, informally. Once, the captain paid them two cents a bag at their demand, but he and the crew unloaded the boat’s next stop themselves, breaking the strike.
Skilled workers, such as mates, engineers, and pilots earned much more, of course. Says Horace Lyle, a pilot on the Delta Queen, “I remember during World War I it got to be 60 cents an hour and they thought that was terrific. Going to break everybody up, but whatever the amount was, there was a man say he had six men, they would just give him in the smallest amount of currency possible, the full amount for all of them. Then he would go with his six up to the saloon right here at the corner of Front and Sycamore, and go in the saloon and get the change. Of course, probably leave a good bit of it there, or all of it” (299).
The logging industry provided well-paying work for those who owned a boat, owners being almost exclusively white. Thousands of logs would be floated as a kind of raft down a river, often the Big Sandy. Sometimes they come loose when they met the Ohio River. Companies would pay twenty-five cents for each of their logs that was returned and fifty cents if a log bore a competitor’s factory name. Thomas Wagner explains that, “Wilber Pyle and I, at one time we caught 72 logs one day.” However, they were so young that “They wouldn’t give us the money. We had to get Dr. Ellison, he was the coroner, he run the drugstore, he come over and appointed himself our guardian and he collected the money. We were only 15 years old, they weren’t going to give us no $36. (chuckles)” (553).
Whether on a packet boat that moved freight and people, a towboat that moved barges, or a showboat that seldom moved but entertained, everyone—mates, firemen, musicians, cooks, coalers, deckhands, engineers, and pilots—worked hard and long hours. Pay scales then, as now, generally reflected the years of training required to fulfill the tasks. Finally, the captains who often were boat owners, made good livings.
Dick and Marie Twedell, who grew up on the Monongahela, explain the unique status of captains in this (slightly self-contradictory) way:
D: … They seemed to have the same status as a general foreman or superintendent of a steel mill. They were really separate men. The only difference was you very seldom saw the river captain because he was on the river.
M: A very prosperous . . .
D: That was considered to be a fine way to make a living because he was always taken care of and his salary and was always with his family. He had his home, he had his meals provided by whatever coal or steel company he was navigating for…. Well you never saw the captain, but you always knew he existed. This was the thing about it, you always knew this man existed, and you knew he was somewhere in the river, but you never saw him…. Captains had families. Your typical rivermen, I guess, was not supposed to have families. Of course I imagine, a pilot or a chief engineer was still respectable. People never bothered to break it down below captain and crew. That was just the way it was. I never knew of a man who would admit he was an engineer or a pilot or anything. He was a captain or a crewman. (549-550)
It makes one wonder whether the additional responsibilities of being a captain self-selected those who had the appropriate character or whether the status society conferred upon captains brought out the best in those who held the office.
Death
Depending on who is being interviewed, the river can be a very dangerous place. Death and injury were at times perhaps exaggerated. At one extreme, we recall Captain Hughes, who never had any mishaps and for whom “Everything was very commonplace.” Somewhere in between stands Captain White: “I wasn’t around in the brutality days, that day is past. I’ve heard a lot of stuff, but I think a lot of it is rumor, more so. Grossly exaggerated, a lot [of] that stuff, they tell about putting all the roustabouts in sidewheel boats, and tell them to roll the wheel over drown them all. I don’t think that ever happened. I’ve heard it’s the truth, but I doubt it” (567). Better acquainted with (near) death was Captain Savage, who not only got “blowed up” several times, but claims he “was drowned three times” (392). He obviously survived, much better than several drowned men he found on various occasions. Racist, yes, but he wasn’t afraid to attempt to rescue a drowning man of any race. On one occasion, several Italians were looking overboard where one of their gang had fallen. Savage states: “Got that pike hook in his shirt and pulled him up and none of them wops would help me get him in the skiff. Superintendent and I finally got him in the skiff and got him up on. He had a cheap watch. He’d only been in 15 minutes. They should have brought him to if they had of done it” (392).
During the interview with Dick and Marie Twedell, Dick is reveling in his memories of skinny dipping with the guys in his childhood on BAB (their code for Bar Ass Beach). Marie chides him, saying, “You always remember such happy things about the river. I always remember the children who were drowned.” Being a man who apparently has a rapid response for everything, Dick replied, “There were a lot of kids drowned”—and proceeds to narrate in vivid detail a series of drownings. Echoing Huckleberry Finn, he notes that “They used to shoot guns over the water because they thought the gun would bring up the body. It was typical.” First was “a family named Kareta, who had their only son we knew, who was Benny and he played the violin,” which didn’t come easily since it “was kind of a sacrifice for a family in those days to put out money for a lesson.” One day, Benny went out in a canoe, “and the canoe overturned and Benny couldn’t swim a stroke. All the time he had been practicing the violin instead of learning how to swim and he drowned” (546).
For children, the river—and the incalculable risks it brought with it—was surely a strange and wondrous thing. On one occasion an athletic “very young kid” built a raft and took out “a little boy on the corner named Ramus” who “couldn’t swim, he couldn’t swim too well.” The raft tipped over and the child drowned, while Danny managed to get safely to shore. The horror of the story extends to the fact that Danny went home and told no one about the incident. Finally, Mrs. Ramus came looking for her son. “Danny burst out, told them the last time he had seen the Ramus boy he fell in the water. So, they went down and got the body out. The area was pretty close to shore, so it wasn’t too far downstream. It was a pretty typical of accidents you get. I guess the river claimed about an average of two a year” (547).
Honor
A cursory review, such as this, is bound to leave out more themes than it includes. For example, one couple, Ellen & Romain Proctor, have for years been performing a marionette performance on showboats, and if one were interested in learning the trade, they offer many tips about the design and creation of the dolls, after which they read aloud a script as part of the interview. A final pervasive theme worth turning to, however, has to do with honor or integrity, which touches on bravery and intelligence at times. As John Knoepfle points out in an essay that is placed as a kind of introduction to the interviews, there was such a thing as one’s word of honor. Many boats were bought and sold without paperwork, but simply with a handshake.
Men who were racists would risk their lives to save those against whom they held some degree of prejudice. While competitive on one level, riverboat captains and pilots would risk their boats and lives to help another boat in distress. One man is given a free tour of the Sprague after it was turned into a museum; he accepted the gift so as not to offend the captain who used to pilot the Sprague and now had the right to let his friends in without a fee. Nevertheless, afterward he “did sneak away … and paid the man our admission” (355).
A pilot named Johnny Dobbs overhead another captain, who was prone to cussing, yelling at his boat. However, the general manager of the boating company was standing on the bank and thought he was being yelled at. So he fired Captain Thompson. Later, Johnny Dobbs saw an advertisement for Captain Thompson’s job, so Dobbs took a train to talk to the general manager about the misunderstanding. According to Dobbs, “I told him, ‘I wouldn’t have the job as long as Cap Thompson was living. You’ve got the best man I know of worked under him two years. I know what he can do and that’s the reason I’m telling you. If you take my advice you’ll get down there as quick as you can, don’t let him catch that train, and send him back to that boat'” (504). Not only was Captain Thompson reinstated, but with Dobbs at his back, he managed a $10 raise.
Captain Smith recalled the time the engineer was filling a container with gasoline and inadvertently spilled some, catching the boat on fire. Two men on the boat ran to the barge, untied it, and floated away to safety, leaving Smith, the pilot and the engineer on the burning boat. Eventually Smith put a skiff overboard, jumped in, and began paddling around the burning boat to look for the others. The engineer was “standing on the back guard” with a “row of life preservers right over his head, he never had a life preserver on, and he couldn’t swim.” So Smith rescued him. Then Smith saw that the pilot was in the river holding the [paddle] wheel without a life preserver on. The pilot had two life preservers right over his head in the cabin or in his pilot house.” Smith, who did act honorably and smartly, concludes, “That just gives you a little example of how people acted” (449-450).
During the terrible Mississippi River flood of 1927, James P. Stutzman worked for the the Corps of Engineers. He and others scoured the tributaries of the Mississippi, picking up and aiding stranded people: “We went up every side river between here and Baton Rouge, we thought we would never forget all those people and that tremendous amount of water.” After they brought out the people, they went back and brought out the cattle. But his respect went to another organization, the Red Cross: “the Red Cross did a wonderful piece of work down in there. Nobody knows just what hardships those poor people did go through” (517).
Along the lines of respect, the boats themselves earned a kind of reverence from the captains, pilots, and engineers. One frequently encounters the name of Greene. It was Gordon Greene who started the Greene Line, consisting of 26 steamboats altogether. Two of the boats were named after his sons, the Chris Greene and the Tom Greene. The family of course provided security and employment for many people, and throughout the interviews one hears good things about the Line which had become an institution for the rivermen. As members of the family began to die, some unexpectedly, one senses that a bit of many people also died. As Captain White reminisced, “Yes, I was pallbearer and at the funerals of the whole Greene family, mother, father and both sons. Pallbearer for all of them” (560).
In a similar vein, when the Snyder was being retired, the entire river gave its respects as it made its way to Marietta. “It was one of the last of the old paddlewheel steamboats, and the gala celebration we had two years ago. Of course, the highlight of the trip were the farewell greetings from all the river craft during that. They all knew the Snyder was going to the graveyard and they said good-bye to her and would honk back and everybody would stand up and wave in that traditional river salute. We would cry and have a grand time.” They passed a plant that had obtained an old steamboat whistle and it, too, blew that whistle as the Snyder was passing by. “The old pilot of a boat, from which that whistle was taken, was with us. He sat out there with some tears, and heard his old whistle for the last time” (128-129).
And it is on such a sombre note that this review ends. Men of the Inland Rivers is a long book, and by nature is quite varied in the quality of its prose. Some speakers, such as John “Dud” Chamberlain, the newspaperman, provide narrations that could stand alone and be enjoyed by nearly anybody. So, too, are the stories told by Dick Twedell, whose memory remained vivid and varied, never dull. At times, like a long riverboat trip, the reading is tedious, but as I reviewed my notes, I felt a sudden sadness that this world my mind had occupied would begin to fade into the broader background of life.
A Note on the Book’s Design
Men of the Inland Rivers is organized alphabetically, by the last name of the person primarily being interviewed (hence, Anderson, Ault, and Beatty begin the interviews). The downside of this is that last names have no chronological nor thematic relations. At times during an interview, Knoepfle will say so-and-so mentioned… only to leave the reader a bit puzzled, since so-and-so’s interview comes a hundred pages later. More importantly, if someone were to read the book from beginning to end (as I did), he or she would wonder if the project were worth it, not having any real guide to the kind of information to be discovered. Minimally, it would be nice if the chapters were arranged in the order the interviews were recorded. As a second sort-order, though, it would be better to organize the book according to the historical developments on the river. This, too, would be difficult, because some interviews include early packet boats and modern diesel tows. Time consuming as it might prove, a thematic organization would be best, with the admission that nothing like watertight categorization is possible with God’s plenty.
As a final suggestion, the addition of a running footer with the name of the person being interviewed would help the reader differentiate the many voices the he or she encounters along the journey.
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Review by Louis Burkhardt, Ph.D., who worked briefly as a deckhand on the Mississippi, Ohio, and Cumberland rivers in the 1970s, when diesel engines had for the most part replaced steam engines, although the Delta Queen, one of the remaining steamboats, was still in operation. An electronic version of this review resides at https://myplaza.xyz/white/Reviews_Books.html
