Belated passengers were dodging and skipping among those frantic things,
hoping to reach the forecastle companionway alive,
but having their doubts about it.

In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain described the daily tumult of the New Orleans Riverfront as mile after mile of paddlewheel steamboats prepared to depart each afternoon:

Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than the usual emphasis: processions of freight barrels and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard the stage planks; belated passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the fore-castle companionway alive, but having their doubts about it.

As first a cub, or trainee, and then as a full-fledged riverboat pilot, Twain was very familiar with the excitement, adventure, and yes, confusion of the New Orleans Riverfront in the days before the Civil War. From the very beginning in the 1700s, New Orleans was the gateway to the American heartland and, with the arrival of the first steam-powered paddlewheel in 1812, the city became the premier market for the new nation’s bounty. Millions of bales of cotton— called by some “the South’s white gold”— traveled down the Mississippi by steamboat to New Orleans. The rewards of prosperity— fashion, grand pianos, French wine, the latest books, actors, opera singers, news— flowed upriver from New Orleans to plantations and towns.

New Orleans was pivotal in this economic exchange of raw material for fine finished goods; and, for over a century, row after row of steamboats stretched for miles along the city’s Riverfront. The Mississippi was alive with their comings and goings.

While the old packet boats are gone from the Mississippi River today, their legacy lives on in New Orleans. Several excursion boats offer daytime and evening cruises that give modern-day visitors the same view of St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square enjoyed by steamboat passengers over a century ago.

While they no longer number in the hundreds, these paddle wheelers of New Orleans help recall a scene set by Mark Twain so long ago: Under a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying...steamer after steamer falls into line, and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river.

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