23
The Wonder of the Steamboat

Stephen Long dreamed of exploring the western rivers in a steamboat. Not a big, wide “river queen” of the sort that would later be associated with Mark Twain, but a much smaller craft. Yet, a vessel eminently more capacious and powerful than the keelboats used by Lewis and Clark. What a triumph it would be to take a steamboat on unchartered waters through the western prairies.

A sometime inventor, Long admired the steamboat as one of the great, influential inventions of his day. It was an engineering marvel. How clever to harness the steam engine to the waterwheel! With the new power of steam, the familiar action of the waterwheel was thrown into reverse, buckets were turned inside out and made into paddles, and the paddlewheel, churning against the current, drove the boat upstream. Clearly, the newly invented vessel would soon play a big role in inland navigation. There was no better way for the army to open the West, in Long’s view, than to send an exploring expedition on a steamboat to demonstrate how the new boats could ply the western rivers.

The steamboat posed certain possibilities for exploring the West in a big new way. Foremost was its power to ascend rivers. It was well known what a tedious, hazardous, and costly undertaking it was to ascend the Missouri River in keelboats propelled only by oar and sail. To harness the power of steam on that mighty river would be a great stroke. It would collapse distance—put the city of St. Louis nearly at the threshold of the Rocky Mountains. Traveling by steamboat, an exploring expedition would travel faster, cover more miles, make more discoveries, and reduce costs for the government.

Exploration by steamboat suggested exciting new prospects for scientific investigation, too, Long thought. A riverborne steamboat expedition would be able to carry more scientific instruments and collect a far greater quantity of specimens than one that traveled by keelboat or horse. More important, he would take on board a few gentlemen of science. Lewis and Clark, his illustrious predecessors in western exploration, had had to perform their scientific inquiries by themselves. They had had to collect specimens and take field notes alongside their other responsibilities, and with scant training as naturalists at that. Long conceived of scientific exploration more grandly. He wanted to take bona fide men of science with him and have them do the collecting. He would be their guide, introducing them to the West like a teacher introducing inquisitive young minds to new fields of knowledge. He was still a New England schoolmaster at heart. His six years of teaching at the West Point, Germantown, and Salisbury academies did not lie too far behind him.

He found the idea of a steamboat expedition on the western rivers compelling for yet another reason: it would be a glorious endeavor. The steamboat had already begun to catch the nation’s imagination as a potent symbol of economic progress. Belching smoke and hammering its way forward against the current, it exuded strength and power. If Long could get command of a steamboat expedition to explore the Missouri and its major tributaries, it would bring prestige to the army and glory to the nation.

Long first proposed his idea in a letter to James Monroe soon after Monroe became president in the spring of 1817. “I would build a small steamboat about 40 feet in length and 7 feet beam, drawing no more than 14 inches of water,” he wrote to the president. “With this I would navigate all the rivers of consequence . . . meander their courses, and take the latitude and longitude of their mouths and heads of navigation.”¹ Long did not receive a reply. He then put forward his plan to his commanding officer, General Smith, and to his mentor, the chief of engineers, General Swift. The problem, Long realized, was that neither of those officers would be able to advance his proposal past their superior, Major General Andrew Jackson, commander of the army’s southern division.

Around the time that Long wrote to President Monroe, he found himself in the middle of a controversy between General Jackson and Acting Secretary of War George Graham. Jackson protested the order that Secretary of War Crawford had given to Long to explore the Illinois country. Jackson argued that the purpose of the Topographical Engineers was merely to produce maps for the army, not to explore the West. More importantly, Jackson objected to Crawford’s having given Long an order without informing him of it, that is, without running it through the military chain of command. Graham retorted that the secretary of war had that prerogative; to suggest otherwise was to question the constitutional principal of civilian control over the military. The argument continued for months until Monroe finally weighed in on the side of the secretary of war and requested Jackson to cease and desist. On his next trip to St. Louis, Long was ordered to detour through Tennessee and visit General Jackson at his headquarters so they could patch things up between them. Jackson received Long graciously, for the general’s quarrel had been with the secretary, not the major. Still, the controversy had given Jackson an axe to grind that made it harder for Long to realize his vision of army exploration of the West.²

In January 1818, while Long was stationed at Fort Belle Fontaine in Missouri, he learned that Congressman John C. Calhoun of South Carolina had become secretary of war. A former War Hawk (he had advocated going to war with Britain in 1812), he was strongly identified at that time with the nationalist program of westward expansion, internal improvements, and protective tariffs. To Long, Calhoun’s move from representative in the US House to secretary of war in Monroe’s cabinet was excellent news. The prospects brightened for getting his plan of exploration past General Jackson. For the second time, Long outlined his plan to General Smith, who forwarded the communication to Calhoun with an endorsement. General Smith told Calhoun that Long was “the most skillful, industrious and enterprising officer” in the Corps of Engineers whom he knew.³

Calhoun not only liked the idea of a scientific expedition, he expanded on it. The army would also send a military expedition far up the Missouri River to establish a fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone. Its purpose would be to awe the Indians, wrest control of the upper Missouri fur trade from the British, and secure the nation’s hold on that territory. The military force would include 200 new recruits from Pennsylvania and Ohio plus whatever contingent of riflemen General Smith wanted to assign from his own command at Fort Belle Fontaine, and it would carry four light howitzers. In addition, the expedition would requisition up to $3,000 worth of goods in St. Louis for making presents to the Indians.⁴

Calhoun called Long back to Washington in the spring, and their plans for coordinated military and scientific expeditions began to take shape. Calhoun thought, too, perhaps the military force would use steamboats for its advance up the Missouri River, and Long encouraged his thinking on that score. Rather than marching troops hundreds of miles on foot and hauling supplies up the river by keelboat, the army would contract for services by one or two steamboat operators. Although western steamboats had barely ventured up the Missouri by that point in time, they were proving their mettle on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Long was reasonably confident that the transport by steamboat could be done. But make no mistake, he advised Calhoun, the Missouri was a uniquely challenging river. With its surging waters and logjams and sandbars bristling with downed trees, it was a horrific stream to navigate. The army’s occupation of the upper Missouri would involve, he expected, “one of the most arduous undertakings that ever was encountered in the military operations of the Country.” It would require “a proportionate expense of treasure and labor” and, considering the fighting spirit of the Plains Indian tribes, “possibly of blood.”⁵

Meanwhile, Long prevailed on Calhoun to give him command of a topographical and scientific expedition that would ascend the Missouri at the same time as the military expedition. Long’s expedition would be borne on a steamboat of the major’s own design. He already had in mind the boat’s dimensions, its approximate cost, and the various scientific instruments it would carry. He would take a small group of scientists with him, and besides making a survey of the Missouri and ascertaining its geographical position relative to the boundary with British America, his expedition would gather information about the geology, botany, zoology, and Indian tribes of the area. With the aid of the steamboat, they would explore the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Platte, and possibly other western rivers. He envisioned a lengthy exploration of as much as four years. This plan was similar to the one he had put to President Monroe a year and a half earlier, but now it centered on the upper Missouri instead of the upper Mississippi.⁶

After discussing his ideas with Calhoun over the summer, Long put them into a formal proposal which he submitted to the secretary on August 31. He only had to wait two days for a reply. Calhoun not only approved the idea of coordinated military and scientific expeditions, he authorized Long to draw upon the services of the Quartermaster’s Department in Pittsburgh to build his steamboat. Long’s new orders were to report to the army’s Allegheny Arsenal located two miles up the river from Pittsburgh, where he would assemble a team of shipwrights and mechanical engineers to help him build it.⁷

Long, now in the prime of life, at last had command of the expedition he had been dreaming of since his first trip to the West in 1816. But there was one more thing he wanted to do that winter of 1818–19 before embarking on what would surely be the grand adventure of his military career. He wanted to marry a young Philadelphia woman named Martha Hodgkis.