A keelboat shoots the rapids on a Western river. Art by Harvey W. Johnson.
In a comment on “The Revenant” trailer, John Maddox Roberts noted that it depicts a keelboat, which is rare in movies. The keelboat is an almost forgotten piece of Americana — but once it was the king of river transport on the American Frontier.
Back before the railroads and before steamboats churned up and down the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers and their tributaries, the keelboat plied those waters. The first American Mountain Men penetrated the West not on horseback, but on the narrow decks of this workhorse river boat. Many a settler floated down the Ohio River on a flatboat, which were, as the name suggests, just flat-bottomed barges. They couldn’t go upstream, so when they reached their destination they were broken up and the lumber sold or recycled for homes and barns.
The keelboat was no settler’s barge. It was a purpose-built cargo boat that could go upstream as well as down — though upstream travel was brutally hard work. Imagine the shape those boatmen were in (despite an almost universal penchant for swilling vast quantities of popskull whiskey).
Keelboats were long, narrow craft, usually about 70-feet in length, though the first keelboats used by explorers and fur traders were smaller. They had a keel providing stability, especially for upriver travel. Unlike flatboats, they were designed to return up the river. As many as twenty-five men would work a keelboat upstream, using a variety of methods: Poling with “shoulder poles,” which rested on the bottom, and which the boatman pushed, walking from bow to stern as he did so; tow-lines, called cordelles, which were man-hauled from the riverbank in a method called cordelling {some keelboats also used a hawser (rope) which was mounted to a reel on board that could be attached to a tree or a stump on shore and wound in}; overhanging branches were used, grasped by the men from the deck, drawing the keelboat along in a method called “bushwhacking,” and finally there was a mast and sail useful depending on any prevailing wind (as the river changed direction in ox-bows etc, the sail would be hoisted or reefed). The boats moved upstream at about a mile-an-hour; in decent weather, with a 15 hour day routine.
It was a wild, free life. The shores of the Ohio and Mississippi were still largely unsettled. Boatmen hunted the woods and they supplemented the basic frontier ration of salt pork and hard tack with wild game. Of an evening, out would come the fiddle and the banjo, and there was music. The boatmen could be as violent as any of the half horse-half alligator toughs of the frontier, and whiskey-fueled brawls could be vicious eye-gouging, ear-chawing affairs. Rough pranks and petty thefts by boatmen against the settlers along the rivers were not unheard of. What were they gonna do about it? Law was spotty and a culprit down the river and gone. Some turned to outright river piracy, which could be a nasty, murderous business.
The fur trade expeditions up the Missouri River were, contrary to popular image, actually disciplined affairs. They had to be — they were exceedingly risky and headed out into territory beyond even the rough civilization of the Midwest and South. Still, the rowdy, roughneck boatmen could get themselves into trouble. The legendary Mike Fink, King of the Keelboat Men ( a real figure who became almost completely obscured in legend), was killed in a quarrel, which may have started over an Indian woman. This took place while the early William Ashley expedition was in winter quarters.
Fink and his longtime buddy named Bill Carpenter argued. To “make up,” they engaged in a traditional game of the keelboat men —” shooting the cup.” Carpenter placed a cup of whiskey on his head and Fink paced off about 30 steps or so. The object was to shoot the cup off his friend’s head, William Tell style. Mike Fink drilled Carpenter in the forehead. A miss? Or a very final way of settling the quarrel? A short time later, a mutual friend named Levi Talbot grew enraged at Fink’s drunken boasting that he had, indeed, killed Carpenter on purpose. Talbot pulled Carpenter’s own flintlock pistol from his belt and gunned Fink down. Talbot, who earned distinction in a major scrape with the Arikara Indians along the Missouri in the summer of 1823, later drowned trying to swim the Teton River.
As Fur Trade historian Hiram Chittenden noted:
Remarkable as this story is, it has authentic confirmation. In General (William) Clark’s letter book on Indian Affairs, now in possession of the Kansas Historical Society at Topeka, there is a list of deaths among Ashley’s and Smith, Jackson and Sublette’s parties before 1830. The statement says that in 1822 Mike Fink shot William Carpenter; that Fink was soon after shot by Levi Talbot, who was later drowned in the Teton River. The year should be 1823.
A sordid sort of frontier tragedy.
In their way, the keelboatmen were as colorful, wild and as significant the Long Hunters and Mountain Men who — generally without intent and often much to their own chagrin — opened up the interior West to settlement in the century running 1750-1850.
And a keelboat features heavily in “The Big Sky,” based on A.B. Guthrie, Jr.’s classic Mountain Man novel.
The keelboat was the workhorse of river transport and the Fur Trade. It oughta be remembered.
jim says
Years ago I read an article in a magazine about the Mississippi or Missouri river being at very low flow and a keelboat was found buried in the mud. The cargo was mainly black bear pelts packed in bales and the inner pelts in the bales were still in pristine condition. What a time capsule to find.
JimC says
Must have been an interesting story behind the wreck, too.
Ruth Moscato(Skaggs) says
My Uncles. Were Long Hunters..my Gr Grandfather was Uriah Skaggs,he was a capt on the Ohio in the 1800s.Have you any info.re him ? He was b.in Pa.in1814.Uriah lived in marrietta,Ohio in the 1800s and was married to Jane Henry.Their boys also worked on the Ohio Riverboat with their Father in the 1800’s
JimC says
The Skaggs family were prominent among the longhunters. That’s serious Frontier Partisans heritage.
John says
Although fiction, Poe wrote some amazingly detailed descriptions of traveling on a keelboat in The Journal of Julius Rodman, starting around page 11. It was a serial publication, one that Poe never completed.
http://ebookclub.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Edgar-Allan-Poe-The-Journal-of-Julius-Rodman.pdf
He wrote so convincingly about this 1791 expedition that Congress put it forth as true account in 1840, effectively hoaxing themselves.
John C.
JimC says
Well dayammn — that’s a fine piece of obscure knowledge.
john maddox roberts says
On this subjects, and 19th century river culture in general, I highly recommend the book “Wicked River,” by Lee Sandlin. It’s loaded with river minutiae and is a sure cure for any nostalgia for the time and place. Life on the river was. let us say, a tad rough. The chapter on the cycle of diseases alone is horrifying.
JimC says
That’s a GREAT book. Some interesting stuff about the religious revivals that swept the region. Apparently they were ecstatic in more ways than one. Orgies in the woods… The stuff on dueling was really fascinating.
One of those books that reminds you that the weirdness in Cormac McCarthy’s stories isn’t fiction. The River was the Old Weird America for sure.
Cannoneer No. 4 says
Upper Missouri Keelboat Co. http://www.mrkeelboat.com/
The keel boat Mandan built for the 1952 The Big Sky movie is a couple blocks down river from Old Fort Benton in Fort Benton, MT.
Most keel boatmen were Illinois Frenchmen whose fathers and grandfathers were canoe paddling voyageurs from Montreal. The American keel boatmen mostly came from Pittsburgh.
Think about all the calories those Pork Eaters burned dragging boats all day! Meat was keelboat fuel, and American hunters on each boat ranged up and down the river banks several miles inland to kill and fetch animals back. Frenchies didn’t like to get out of sight of their keel boat.
Edward Rose was supposedly a river pirate. Hugh Glass was a Gulf Pirate. Wonder if they ever got drunk together and told pirate stories?
JimC says
Arrrr!
Good stuff Cannoneer No. 4. Thanks for the link. Didn’t know the Mandan still existed.
john maddox roberts says
I was unaware of that Poe story, though I believe I’ve read everything he completed. Poe was fascinated with all things nautical. In his sole novel “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” he goes into a Melvillean digression on stowage in a ship that I found fascinating. He goes into great detail about how a hold was filled efficiently, and the big screw-presses that were used to keep the cargo from shifting. Of course, he wrote all this because he was getting paid by the word, but it’s great reading about a lost art.
John says
JMR,
Poe completed six installments of this serial, and then was fired by the publication, and refused to continue the story. I have a “Complete Works” volume of E.A. Poe, and The Journal of Julius Rodman is not included or mentioned. Maybe they should have titled the volume “Completed Works” instead. A. Gordon Pym is a great story. I may have to go back and read it again. It’s been years.
John C.
Lane Batot says
So was that a Keelboat captained by good ole John Huston in the movie “Man In The Wilderness”? I know, Jim C., you say you haven’t seen that movie yet, but I have a premonition you will be before too long(ahem!)……They sure had a way of making a keelboat go upstream in that movie, although they weren’t entirely successful with the technique, thanks to the Arikara!….L.B.
JimC says
Premonition… The earth is gonna shake and the wind is gonna blow
Well that’s all right
This premonition is killin’ me
But that’s all right
I must be crazy, I must be seein’ things
Lane Batot says
No, this premonition WON’T be killin’ you, but you WILL be seein’ things……
JimC says
Hah!
Wayne says
A. B. Guthrie’s great American novel, The Big Sky, includes one of the best fictional accounts of an early 19th Century keelboat trip. The movie from which the clip above was drawn was an unfortunate Holywoodized version of the book. If ever there was a western film that deserved to be remade, The Big Sky is it.
JimC says
I’d like to see it done as an HBO miniseries including the lesser but still wonderful “Fair Land, Fair Land.”
Rich Fisher says
Is there a grave marker for Mike Fink ?? Not the one in West Virginia.