This fierce current restrained ambitions for the commercial exploitation of the great central valley, for navigation of the Mississippi was at first limited to raft, keel, and flatboat, slow-moving vessels whose passage was hampered by attacks from Indians, river pirates, and the ever-present hazards provided by snags and shifting sandbars.

We associate the invention of the steamboat with Robert Fulton and the Hudson River, but both Fulton and his unfortunate predecessor, “Poor” John Fitch, had the Mississippi in mind as they went about perfecting steam-powered navigation. Indeed, Fitch might have been more successful in promoting his invention, which made a number of voyages along the Delaware River, had the navigation of the Mississippi not been controlled at the time by the Spanish and then the French governments. President Jefferson sent Robert Livingston to France to bargain with Napoleon for navigation rights to the great river and his representative returned with what became known as the Louisiana Purchase, a vast territory that greatly increased not only the United States but the importance to the new nation of the Mississippi and its western tributaries. By 1812, one of Fulton’s steamboats had made the trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, only five years after the Clermont was first launched on the Hudson.

It was not long before Fulton’s boat made regular trips between New Orleans and Natchez, and it was soon followed by other steam-powered craft eventually connecting towns on the Ohio with Southern regions. The importance of riverboat navigation to the economy of the West is suggested by the image the Kentuckian Henry Clay used in an 1824 speech as a metaphor to express the welfare of the United States as a whole:

The difference between a nation with, and without, the [manufacturing] arts may be conceived, by the difference between a keel-boat and a steam-boat, combatting the rapid torrent of the Mississippi. How slow does the former ascend, hugging the sinuosities of the shore, pushed on by her hardy and exposed crew, now throwing themselves in vigorus concert on their oars, and then seizing the pendant boughs of over-hanging trees: she seems hardly to move; and her scanty cargo is scarcely worth the transportation! With what ease is she not passed by the steam-boat, laden with the riches of all quarters of the world, with a crowd of gay, cheerful, and protected passengers, now dashing into the midst of the current, or gliding through the eddies near the shore? Nature herself seems to survey, with astonishment, the passing wonder, and, in silent submission, reluctantly to own the magnificent triumphs, in her own vast dominion, of Fulton’s immortal genius!

A similar contrast between keelboat and steamboat travel on the Mississippi was drawn in 1825 by the New England-born preacher Timothy Flint, in a retrospective account of the ten years he had spent on Western rivers, during which time the number of steamboats there had multiplied dramatically: “Justly to appreciate the value of steamboats on these waters, one must have moved up them, as long, as dangerously, and as laboriously, as I have done,” he wrote, recalling his travels in keelboats before moving on to a panegyric on the ease and luxuriousness of travel on “one of the better steamboats,” with

its splendid cabin, richly carpeted, its bar-room and sliding-tables, to which eighty passengers can sit down with comfort. The fare is sumptuous, and every thing in a style of splendor, order, quiet, and regularity. . . . You read, you converse, you walk, you sleep, as you choose . . . [while] the varied and verdant scenery shifts around you. The trees, the green islands, have an appearance, as by enchantment of moving by you.

By the time Flint’s book was published, the keelboat man was an endangered species on the Mississippi, his livelihood obliterated by the steamboat, and Flint tended to imbue him with romantic qualities as a figure associated with a rapidly disappearing scene. Thus he noted that the

stories, told by boatmen stretched at the foot of a tree, just below which was the boat, and the wave of the Mississippi, and interlarded with the jargon of their peculiar phrase, or perhaps interrupted by the droll comment, or the incredulous questioning of the rest, had often to me no small degree of interest; and tricked out in the dress of modern description, would have made very tolerable romances.

This hint was soon picked up by Westerners with literary ambitions, who celebrated the exploits of the most famous of Western boatmen, the boasting, vainglorious, and violent Mike Fink, who by 1825 had already retreated westward up the Missouri and been shot dead in an argument, to be made a legend in increasingly improbable tales.

Within a decade, however, Fink had become overshadowed by another figure associated with the wildest aspects of Mississippi River life, Davy Crockett. A Tennessee politician who encouraged the public perception of himself as incarnating the rambunctious spirit of the Western frontier, Crockett gained literary fame in the last five years of his life through his efforts and those of others. His death at the Alamo in 1836 considerably liberated the association, allowing Eastern hack writers to invent improbable deeds and widen Crockett’s comic range, transplanting him from the wilds of Tennessee to the great river, and imposing upon him the fabulous outlines of that folkloric amphibian combining the features of horse and alligator. This was the Davy Crockett of yearly comic almanacs, virtually all of which were published in Eastern cities during the fifteen years following the death of the historical Crockett.

Where Fink was associated with keelboat life, Crockett became a virtual incarnation of the steamboat, a transformation licensed by his famous political slogan, “Go Ahead!”—the steamboat pilot’s order once the paddlewheels had reached open water. Crockett and his cry were exploited by Whig politicians eager to convert him into a folk hero with which to do battle against Andrew Jackson, for “Go Ahead!” perfectly expressed the buoyant optimism of the Whigs, who were champions of progress in its many commercial forms, including internal improvements like the building of canals, the widening of natural waterways, and the removal of impediments to navigation.

In 1835, the year that Crockett headed west for his apotheosis at the Alamo, there was born in Florida, Missouri, an infant who would emerge as the spiritual child of the famous Tennessean, becoming for the last third of the nineteenth century what Crockett became soon after he died: the premier riverman of the United States. Born of parents with Southern (Virginia and Kentucky) origins, young Samuel Langhorne Clemens was also born a Whig, a political patrimony that links him not only to Henry Clay but to Abraham Lincoln, with whom he has often been compared. Both men, in quite different ways, inherited the mantle of Davy Crockett, sharing the Whig faith in American progress while leavening it by means of humor, the rough backwoods variety that comes with leaves, branches, and bark still attached and plenty of earthiness stuck to its roots.

Both men are associated with life on the Mississippi, Lincoln early on having built a flatboat and guided it down to New Orleans. In this, however, it is Clemens who enjoys the preminence, not so much because of his actual experience—he spent a scant five years as a steamboat pilot on the river—but because he so successfully exploited the association, commenting with his pen name taken from the leadsman’s cry, “Mark Twain!” (indicating safe water, it somewhat resembles Crockett’s “Go Ahead!” in implication). However, not only did Lincoln become a lawyer and politician, but even before Sam Clemens began his apprenticeship as a river pilot, Lincoln was representing railroads in decisive court cases that would signal the doom of the riverboat as the primary mode of transportation in the great central valley. Whigs may have championed the removal of obstructions to navigation, but Lincoln made sure that railroad bridges were not counted as such.

By the time Sam Clemens had set up shop as Mark Twain, the steamboat man had followed the keelboat man down the stream of time and the paddlewheel steamboat had become a symbol of past glories, not modern triumphs of technology. In Mark Twain’s famous novels featuring the Mississippi, the great river serves chiefly as a dramatic backdrop for scenes depicting Midwestern American life prior to the Civil War. During that time—roughly the 1840s—the river was enjoying its hegemony as the chief agent of transportation and the dominant symbol of progress in Western regions. But his most extended account of his river experiences, Life on the Mississippi, differs from his fiction, starting with the fact that it is a mixture of autobiography and travel narrative and ending with the fact that it is overwhelmingly what its title advertises. Published the year before Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and containing an episode that was cut from that narrative, Life on the Mississippi presents a contrasting picture of the river experience—a different perspective from that found in his greatest novel.

As a passenger on a raft floating down the Mississippi, Huck is a passive spectator of the passing scene, whose movements are keyed to the motions of his craft, which in turn are caught in the power of the river’s currents. His is a vessel at all times at the mercy of the river’s whims, whether flood, fog, or thunderstorms, and which passes through vistas of unsurpassed beauty and permits moments of tranquillity undisturbed.