Customer Reviews

Come Hell or High Water: A Lively History of Steamboating on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers

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"Come Hell or High Water" is a delightful and informative anthology of accounts from steamboat passengers, crews and newspapermen from the 19th century. Gillespie explores all aspects of steamboat travel from the development and construction of the vessels to the personal accounts of steamboat races, accidents and the pleasures of steamboating on the Western Rivers.

I found it readable, substantial, and well-informed.

After a family vacation to Missouri and Arkansas, I needed to read more on the Steamboating era of the Mississippi, and Gillespie's "Come Hell or High Water" caught my eye.

It was very well and smoothly written, cascading from one topic to another effortlessly. Besides the writing, the content was more than expected, covering the history of steamboating, the architecture and engineering behind the boats, what it was like to ride or work on a boat, etc. Gillespie's descriptions are complete enough to permit rather clear pictures of the scenes described. He artfully weaves his own text around the first-hand eyewitness accounts that add much depth and credibility to the book. In the end, it was nearly complete in its coverage of all facets of the steamboating era. I have a more profound appreciation of what these workhorses accomplished and the vast cargos these vessels transported (and the huge amounts of fuel consumed!).

I'm a hobbyist historian who enjoys reading regional histories, specifically about what life was like for the average citizen of the era. This book was perfectly suited for that purpose; it pleasantly exceeded my expectations.

If you've already read books on the Mississippi and steamboating, then I suppose this book might appear a bit stale and rehashed. But, this just might be the perfect book for the average reader about to take a vacation to the Mississippi River valley.

_Come Hell or High Water_ by Michael Gillespie might as well be titled "everything you ever wanted to know about Mississippi (and Ohio) River steamboats but was afraid to ask." A very thorough book, Gillespie covered every aspect of steamboating and the history of this form of transportation one might hope. As I knew very little about steamboats before picking up this book, I learned quite a bit.

Gillespie produced what he called an anthology, a collection of first person accounts of life on a steamboat, written by a passengers, crewmen, reporters, and members of the military. Much of the book consisted of huge blocks of quoted text, sometimes just a few paragraphs, other times most of a chapter, describing construction, navigation, operation, entertainment on, and military uses of steamboats. Thankfully, Gillespie modified the text of such passages so that spelling and grammar were modern for the most part, though I will have to say once in a while I got tired of reading so many quoted passages. Still, for those interested in this type of vessel it is great primary source material.

From the around the start of the second decade of the nineteenth century until the 1880s (Mark Twain proclaimed the era dead in 1882) steamboating was king on the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers, a 16,000 mile system known collectively as the Western Rivers, which included all of the navigable streams of the Central Basin of the United States, from the Appalachians to the Rockies. Unique in the history of ships (though the they were called boats, no matter how large they got), steamboats were specifically designed for the demands of the Western Rivers. They were built to run in very shallow depths and in narrow confines, primarily on waterways devoid of swells. Propelled by paddlewheels either on the sides or at the stern, they were even able to lift themselves up over shoals, reefs, and sandbars. In their heyday they carried hundreds of tons of cargo and thousands of passengers, making regular runs connecting such cities as New Orleans, Vicksburg, Memphis, St. Louis, and Cincinnati as well as scores of lesser communities that vanished with the arrival of the railroad and the passing of the steamboat era.

I had no idea how dangerous steamboating was until I read this book. I had heard of boiler explosions - one of the few things I knew about steamboats - and I had heard of the worst maritime disaster in American history, which involved a steamboat (the explosion and fire on the steamboat _Sultana_ on April 26, 1865 killed 1,547 passengers and crew, a disaster Gillespie covered). The author discusses the nature of fire and boiler explosions - why and how they occur, how they were dealt with, and what was done (if anything) to prevent them - and I found it very interesting. Mechanical defects and shipboard accidents aside however, the river itself presented a whole host of challenges. The Mississippi River was often filled with debris thanks to eroding banks and frequent flooding, especially floating logs. A half-submerged log, unseen at night, forty feet in length and four feet in diameter hitting a wooden hulled steamer could cause terrific damage wrote Gillespie. Planters were logs that became waterlogged at their root end, the still-buoyant top end angled up and forward like a lance to impale an unwary boat; planters sent many ships to a watery grave. Sawyers were very similar; the rooted end was embedded into the bottom, but not so firmly that the tree didn't bob up and down, occasionally breaking the river's surface. Snags were completely submerged trees, often unseen if the current was slight or if light was poor; snags and wrecks of other boats could present huge problems, either as obstructions themselves or by the way they altered the channel of the river, leading even experienced pilots off course. So dangerous were snags and other related obstacles that specially constructed, eventually federally operated snagboats were used to remove them. Other hazards included low water groundings, ship collisions, severe weather (the author included an account of a ship hit by a tornado), rapids (only on a few areas of some rivers), and bridges (which could create hazardous sailing conditions thanks to currents and eddies created by their support pillars).

The author was very thorough; he included an extensive bibliography, charts and diagrams showing steamboat engines and steamboat hull construction (where a reader will learn just what a texas is and the difference between low-pressure and high-pressure engines), and provided thorough coverage of the many types of passengers and crew on these boats (from rousters to mud clerks, pilots to stewards, gamblers to the unfortunate people in deck passage).

My grandfather grew up near the Mississippi river and I decided to buy this as a Christmas gift. He really enjoyed the book.

With this book I expected what the subtitle promises -- "a lively history of steamboating on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers."

But there is little or no new material in this book. It consists largely of old accounts, mostly contemporary with the steamboat era. Most of the extracts are long, and even with spelling and punctuation modernized, they're difficult to wade through due to the obtuse language and the amount of commentary not related to steamboats. The library of any really serious student of steamboat history will probably already contain much of the original source material for these lengthy quotations. Mine does.

If you seek contemporary "verbal snapshots" of a few eccentric individuals who traveled once or twice on steamboats, this book may be for you. For the serious steamboat historian, however, it covers too little new ground to be an important history while, containing too much heavy, archaic language to be an enjoyable read.