The Washington times. (Washington [D.C.]) 1901-1902, 1902-03-02
A CENTURY OF STEAMBOATS,.
Fulton's Clermont the Earliest Practical
Craft of That Sort.

The unwilling of the monument to the
memory of Robert Fulton, in Trinity
Churchyard New York, the other day,
brought to the front few antiquarans
| who say that Fulton was not the inventor
of the steamboat, after all. BY the same
sort of reasoning Shakespeare has often
been shown to be a plagiarist. 1t does not
require a great deal of lore to show that,
technically, the antiquarians are correct,
though actually they are wrong.
Seine crude attempts to apply steam to
Fulton was born, and in a few of them
boats were run for short distances. James
Ramsey. on the Potomac, and John Fitch.
on the Delaware, made some experiments
more than twenty years before Fulton's
Clermont was launched Ramsey's and
Fitch's experiments were so promising in
fact, that Manasseh Cutler, the agent
of the Ohio Company, who melted the
ordinance Of 1887, said, in a pamphlet
written in that year to boom his pro-
jected colony at the mouth of the Musk
ington, that 1T is found by late expert
ments that sails are used to great ad-
vantage against the current of the Ohio,
and ii is worthy of observation that, in
all probability. steamboats, will be found
to be of infinite service in all our river
navigation
Nevertheless, Fultons Clermont.
launched in 1907. twenty years after Cut
1er's prediction, and which made trips be-
tween New York city and Albany, was the
earliest practical demonstration of the
application of steam to river navigation.
Just four years later. or in 1911, Fulton,
his wealthy patron, Robert r. Livingston,
and Nicholas J. Roosevelt, the last named
being the granduncle of the present Presi-
dent of the United States. launched their
little vessel, the New Orleans, built near
Pittsburg, and sent it down the Ohio and
the Mississippi, the fist steamboat which
appeared on Western waters.
The fire boat the comet, computed
by Herschel to be 100. 900 900 miles in
length which hlazed across the western
sky in the autumn of that year, and the
earthquake which destroyed New Madrid.
Mo, and other settlements, and which
shook most of the Mississippi Valley,
came simultaneously. and to some OF the
residents on the river who saw it the
boat seemed to be rather the most porten
tious of these appartions. Thus. twenty
four years after il was made Mapasseh
Cutters prediction about the application
of the new agent in the waters of his
Ohio settlement was certified. AS Cutler
death did not take place until 1923, ne
lived to see scores OF steamboats, on the
Vests rivers.
Fulton's application of steam to. river
navigation, which soon extended to navi-
CATION of the Great Lakes, and then to,
the oceans, had such momentous conse-
auences for Fulton's country and the
world that the memorial just erected
ought to have been put up long ago. The
day in the summer of-lslS when the Cen
eral Pike the first steamboat which
assembled the Mississippi to any point
north of the Ohio's mouth, tied up at the
foot of Market Street. in St. Louis. ought
to be one of the datemarks in this city's
history.
When the Independence entered the
Missouri, in 1919, and went up as far as
Franklin, in Howard county, and when
Major Long. the explorer, rode up the
same stream a few weeks later in the
Western Engineer, they revolutionized the
methods employed by Lewis and Clark,
by Pike and by the Indians and voyagers
on the same stream before their day. In
1881 the American Fur Company's steam
boat, the Yellowstone, went up the Mis-
souri, into the Dakotas, and carried the
new era into the shadow of the Rockies.
All these boats as we'll as the Lucania,
the Deutschland, and the rest OF the ocean
flyers of today are lineal descendants of
the Clermont.-St Louis Globe Democrat.