Steamboats on Louisiana's Bayous

In an extraordinary feat of research and intrepid historical navigation, Carl A. Brasseux and Keith P. Fontenot serve as guides through the labyrinthian and often harrowing world of Louisiana bayou steamboat journeys of the mid to late nineteenth century. Brasseaux and Fontenot brace readers with a boldly revisionist picture of the opulent Mississippi River floating palaces: stripped-down, utilitarian freight-haulers belching smoke from twin stacks, churning through shallow swamps and narrow tributary streams, and encountering such hazards as shoals, sawyers, stumps, high-water and dry-bed seasons, and the remains of vessels claimed by those treacheries. For decades, steamboats transported goods, passengers, and mail between New Orleans and south Louisiana's vibrant interior agricultural region, bearing testimony to the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and tenacity of crews in conquering the challenges posed by a forbidding environment. Brasseaux and Fontenot marshaled a monumental array of information, including sources long-buried in courthouses, private collections, and the records of the Army Corps of Engineers. They offer data on some five hundred steamboats, keel-boats, and barges known to have operated in the bayou country. The first major study of a fascinating slice of the steamboat industry, this book showcases a trade critically important to New Orleans's prosperity but largely forgotten in southern historiography until now. It captures the period just before the iron horse emerged as America's undisputed master of inland conveyance.