Meriwether Lewis and Keelboat:Part IV

As a result of the Whisky Rebellion of 1794 in four counties of Western PA, President George Washington called out a militia to march to Pittsburgh. One of the volunteers, at a restless age of 20 years old, was Meriwether Lewis. He enlisted as a private and was promoted to ensign later in the year. He remained in the military and in the region after the militia went home that year. He joined the regular army on May 1, 1795 with the rank of ensign. In the fall of 1795, he ended up in the Chosen Rifle Company under Captain William Clark, until Clark left the military six months later. Lewis became a captain on December 5, 1800. Relevant to our story here, Lewis was immersed in frontier Ohio, went back and forth to Pittsburgh and Detroit, and traveled along the Ohio River. He came to know the frontier and river transport by keelboat.

Eleven days before his first presidential inauguration, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Lewis, dated February 23, 1801, asking him to serve as the President’s Private Secretary in Washington. At the same time Jefferson wrote a letter requesting Lewis’s release from active duty in the army, with rank and all rights of promotion. The letter to Lewis reached him in Pittsburgh two weeks later, and the offer was accepted by his reply letter of March 10, 1801. Thus began the direct circumstances leading to the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Lewis arranged to have the Expedition’s keelboat built in Pittsburgh, but not without a test of his patience. Pittsburgh boatbuilders were not sober souls, so Lewis spent half of July and virtually all of August 1803 there while trying to get the work done. He departed, westward on the 31st of August when the rivers were low, partly because of the lateness of summer, and partly because the season had been particularly dry. At Wheeling, he even diverted some of the load to a wagon to lighten the load.

Lewis’s keelboat was planked, 55’ in length, eight feet wide in the middle, and fitted with one square sail on a 32 foot high mast. It had 22 oars. A model of it can be seen on-line at the Lewis & Clark Visitors Center in Iowa. William Clark left behind a rough sketch, now held by the Beinecke Library, Yale University, on which basis it is known.

Although designed specifically for upstream movement, keelboats were difficult at best to maneuver upriver, especially with heavy cargo. Depending on conditions, they were pushed by hands, or driven by oar, and only sailed with favorable conditions. Nevertheless, keelboats were known as “tankers” for the inland fur trade west of the Mississippi River, and they were dominant on the Missouri River until at least 1830.

Thereafter, the steamboat gradually replaced the keelboat. Already in August of 1807, Robert Fulton was making his initial steamboat run on the Hudson River. This was with the vessel known to us as the Clermont. By 1811 he was launching the New Orleans from a shipbuilding yard on the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, to serve the Mississippi River and the developing lands of the Louisiana Purchase.

Technological change in the “west” was very visible, even within a lifetime, just as is so today for all of America. By 1874 Mark Twain had published a story with tales of Mississippi River steamboat travel in “Life on the Mississippi.” The real west had already been overrun by settlers in the 1840’s traveling overland to Oregon and California in “prairie schooners.” Schooners were lightened versions of the Conestoga wagons used in Lewis’s time to ship cargo over the Allegheny Mountains. By 1850, the end had come for the schooners, while the steam engine enabled the railroad to come to Pittsburgh. In the next decade the pony express and stagecoach of the west each had its very short run in time, while awaiting the westward extension of rails.

The message of Lewis’s keelboat is that it was what to use for a brief moment in the technology flow of transportation. You can get a taste for all these 19th century means of transportation in books such as: (1) DeVoto, Bernard, “Across the Wide Missouri,” Boston: Houghton Mifflin (1947); (2) Boorstin, Daniel J., “The Americans: The National Experience,” New York: Vintage Books (1965); (3) Flammang, James M., “Robert Fulton, Inventor and Steamboat Builder,” Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers (1999); (4) Parkman, Francis, “The Oregon Trail,” Boston: Little, Brown, and Company (1910); (5) Frederick, J.V., “Ben Holladay: The Stagecoach King,” Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press (1989).