The Rivermen [antikvár]

1A 3,000-inile waterway west "A great spiral staircase to the Rockies" was one 19th Century traveler's memorable metaphor for the Missouri, whose tortuous bends led canoeists, keelboaters and eventually steamboat-men from the Mississippi all the way to Fort Benton, Montana —nearly half a mile above sea level and 3,000 miles from the river's mouth. For generations of explorers and exploiters, the Missouri was the key to the West. It excited the imaginations of 16th Century geographers as a possible avenue to the Orient; later, it provided access to the fur riches that drew the hrst frontiersmen into the wilderness: and after the Civil War, it conveyed thousands of prospectors to Rocky Mountain gold. The river's orneriness matched its promises. "The broad current," wrote journalist Albert Richardson in 1857, "is unpoetic and repulsive—a stream of flowing mud studded with dead tree trunks and broken by bars." Yet hundreds of steamboats ran this gauntlet to earn profits that might repay the vessel's entire cost m a smgle voyage. Eventually technology overtook the rivermen. Beginning in 1859, railroads began to intersect the Missouri, siphoning off water-borne traffic. By 1890, when the last packet boat departed from the deserted levee at Fort Benton, the only reminders of the steamboat's glory days were river bends with names like Maha, Sukan, Diana and Kate Sweeney — each honormg one of the Big Muddy's paddle-wheeled victims.