First Steamboats on the Missouri

The Missouri river has a long tradition of steamboat traffic and over the many decades that the steamers ruled the river they paid a heavy price for this dominance. More steamboats met their demise on this river than anywhere else in the nation. Fires, explosions, snags, floods, ice and sometimes simple exhaustion of the crews led to many wrecks the length of the river.
The first boats were relatively small, about 75 feet long, around 20 feet wide and generally drawing no more than 3 feet of water. These boats were all side-wheelers up until around 1850 when the stern wheelers began to dominate the scene. Usually they were equiped with single cylinder, single expansion steam engines with engines and boilers mounted below decks in the rounded, carvel planked hull. The main deck was the only one enclosed. Atop this sat a small wheel house and behind that, the open "hurricane" deck. Though this last was sometimes sheltered by a canvas canopy. Indeed some of the earliest boats continued to sport a mast and sail to assist the contrary engines of the day.
The first boat to test the dangerous waters of the Missouri was the Constitution in 1817, however it was a simple excursion from St. Louis that turned around about eight miles above the mouth and returned. The first real assault on the Missouri was two years later in 1819 by a boat called the Independence.
On this voyage Capt. John Nelson carried a cargo of whiskey, flour and iron castings 230 miles upriver to the settlement of Franklin. This trip took 13 days from St. Louis though only seven were spent actually steaming. These small boats were limited in the amount of fuel they could carry and still reserve space for their cargo.
Even a smallish steamer such as this would burn about ten cords of wood a day. That equaled a stack of wood eight feet wide, eight feet high and twenty feet long or about 25% of the available deck space.. This required frequent stops to load wood and take on water for the boiler.
After reaching Franklin and depositing its cargo, the Independence continued upstream a short way to the old town of Chariton just above where Glasgow is located today.
With his successful return, Capt. Nelson proved to the St. Louis merchants that steamboats were the way to reach all points west and the day of the riverboat had dawned on the Missouri.
The boats themselves were the basis of a whole new industry as small settlements were established to provide the wood they needed for fuel. From these settlemnts farms began to spread and the blank spaces on the map began to rapidly vanish. But at the same time they were the cause of the loss of the grand hardwood forests of oak, hickory and walnut that once blanketed large parts of the river valley itself.
This clearcutting led to the dominance of faster growing cottonwood and maple forests on the rich bottomlands along the river and caused changes in the ecosystem that persist even today.