In the upbuilding of steamboat navigation the thriving, bustling,
boastful spirit of the West found ample play. Steamboat owners
vied with one another in adorning their vessels with bowsprits,
figureheads, and all manner of tinseled decorations, and in
providing elegant accommodations for passengers; engineers and
pilots gloried in speed records and challenged one another to
races which ended in some of the most shocking steamboat
disasters known to history. The unconscious bombast of an
anonymous Cincinnati writer in Timothy Flint's "Western Monthly
Review" in 1827 gives us the real flavor of the steamboat
business on the threshold of the Jacksonian era:
"An Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen,
would not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental
gorgeousness and splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the
Walk in the Water, The Lady of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever
existed in the imaginative brain of a romancer, much less, that
they were actually in existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as
on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests, and
walking against the mighty current 'as things of life,' bearing
speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies, everything real,
and everything affected, in the form of humanity, with pianos,
and stocks of novels, and cards, and dice, and flirting, and
love-making, and drinking, and champagne, and on the deck,
perhaps, three hundred fellows, who have seen alligators, and
neither fear whiskey, nor gun-powder.
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