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[Music] welcome to conversations about North Dakota history my name is Lou hopper mal I'm the director of the division of archaeology and historic preservation with the State Historical Society of North Dakota with me this morning is Professor William alas of the Mankato State University Mankato Minnesota dr. Laz is the author of the definitive work at this point at least on steamboating on the upper Missouri he is the author of a work history of steam boating on the upper Missouri River published in 1962 I believe by the University of Nebraska Press we're very happy to have you with us this morning dr. lass the steam boating on the on Missouri of the lower Missouri began I think as early as 18 19 or 1820 but steamboating on the upper Missouri came somewhat later and I think was associated primarily or initiated by the fur trade pierre chateau as a is a name that comes immediately to mind there and would you begin our conversation by commenting on him and his role in the development of steamboating I'll pay Pierre Chateau junior of st. Louis Missouri was the third generation of a Chateau trading family and he happened to be the president of the company that evolved into Pierre shto jr. and company in the early 1830s at that time the chateaus of st. Louis were affiliated with John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and in the course of conducting their fur trade on the upper Missouri they used keel boats the same type of boat that Lewis and Clark had used in 18 4 and 18 5 and the kill bolt was a boat that had to be operated manually that is they were either sailed or rode are quite often towed by men walking in front on a long hauler chateau was intrigued with the idea of using a powered craft hence a steam boat and in 1831 in large part at the instigation of kenneth mckenzie the so called king of the upper missouri chateau was convinced to have a steam boat built was the idea this would save time and in the business world where time is money it would be more efficient and save than expense so in 1831 for the first time they used a small steam boat by small I'm speaking here of a craft that was a hundred and thirty feet long and attempted to reach the upper Missouri they got to a point near present-day Pierre South Dakota the next year 1832 they used the same boat and dead managed to reach Fort Union with it very close to the present-day North Dakota Montana border the 1832 and 1833 trips of that particular boat are very well known because the trips included some celebrated passengers such as the artist Karl Bodmer who was actually part of a party led by the scientist Maximilian Prince ovide the artist George Catlin also made the steamboat trip to the upper Missouri and so much of what we know about the strips is based on these highly literate individuals who publicize them the a major obstacle that the steamboat trade or traffic had to overcome was the nature of the river itself which had differed so much from the Ohio and the Mississippi for example and that gave rise to a different kind of craft ultimately altogether explain the the nature of the Missouri a little bit and compare it to those other rivers well I think the outstanding characteristic of the of the Missouri is that much of the terrain on the upper Missouri was barren by present-day standards if people have an opportunity to look today at the Missouri River the part of it that is unaffected by dams they will tend to see a fair amount of timber along the river this is true in that very small portion in North Dakota that's unaffected by dams it's true of the Missouri in Montana above the Fort Peck dam which is unaffected by dams but those trees that you see today would not have been characteristic what say of frontier the when the country was ravaged by prairie fires there was much much less timber and so the appearance of the river has changed and if you had looked at an early scene of the Missouri such as the one we're looking at here which was taken in Montana in the late 1870s essentially you'd have seen a barrenness and almost Badlands type mmm terrain and the face of the river has changed in that respect probably what impressed people about the upper Missouri more than anything else was it shallowness a characterized you usually by a lack of water so much so that there's the story of the steamboat captain a while trying to proceed upstream one day saw an individual come down to the river and take out a bucket of water whereupon he shouted at him hey you put that back and sometimes it was virtually that close now what came out of this and this did not occur until after roughly 35 to 40 years of experimentation but ultimately by the 1870s a unique type of craft was developed which came to be known as the mountain boats Mountain boats because if you envision Missouri River navigation as originally taking place from st. Louis Missouri the goal was to reach the head of navigation Fort Benton Montana which by River was 30 miles downstream from Great Falls from the Great Falls of the Missouri so as a steamboat ascended the Missouri literally it would be like going up a winding staircase you're spiraling up and up in altitude and during the summer months when the navigation occurred primarily late spring early summer the steamboat people are not all we not were always conscious of climbing uphill against the current and they were also very conscious that they were going north because to these st. Louis people when they got into present-day North Dakota or present-day Montana they invariably commented about how long the nights were how long the evenings were because they were unaccustomed to those nine o'clock or 9:30 sunsets and the practice and steam voting was to navigate during the daylight hours and they had a very generous definition of daylight actually it was as soon as they could see in the morning quite often by 4:30 5 o'clock they'd be moving and that was that was a practice that differed from the the practice on Eastern rivers is that not correct well very often on the Mississippi River where they had a deep safe channel they would tend to cruise at night mm-hmm as a general practice on the Missouri River they did not navigate at night mm-hmm the only nights they would attempt to move would be nights in which there was a full moon or something very close to a full moon because they had because of shallowness of the river they had to be very concerned about sandbars they had to be very concerned about snags and so they are adapting their practice to the river now considerably later by say 1885 when steamboating was clearly and its death throes was on the upper Missouri then they introduced on the steamboats searchlights Ola electric powered searchlights uh-huh they're carrying their own generators and making their own electricity well that changed the nature of it somewhat but if you're thinking of it in that presearch light period then with the exception of the full moon nights yes it was a daytime activity and I don't mean to say that they could always operate during the day anyone who's familiar with the upper Missouri region is very familiar with the sweeping winds yes and so the winds tended to intensify in the river valley since it was low and quite often the boat could be blowing on a sandbar if you had something like a 40 or 50 mile-an-hour when you would not have the control with a steamboat say that you'd have with a present-day vehicle you have a big wheel you have a craft that comes about very slowly and it really couldn't likened to anything we know today by way of river Crafton and a side wind on a steamboat would make it virtually uncontrollable so there were whole days where they didn't move they tie up and wait for the wind to go down the this this characteristic of the windy conditions on the Northern Plains contributed to the design of the boat although they could never overcome apparently the the problems they had to confront with those strong winds it did influence the boat design can you can you talk a bit about the evolution of that design well first of all the boats that were built specifically for the upper Missouri where he usually built in the Pittsburg Pennsylvania area the craft of boat building was never extended to the Missouri River so these are boats built in the Pittsburgh area sometimes they were built at other Ohio River ports such as Evansville Indiana but the reason for Pittsburgh is that it was in the Pittsburgh area where you had your concentration of craftsmen who could not only design boats but who had appropriate aged material and who could actually finish boats the boat builders while they wanted something utilitarian they also wanted something that had a certain aesthetic nough stew it and so they always made much of finishing off the boat with a ship's Chandler and in Pittsburgh there were specific chandlery businesses there were specific businesses that would make steamboat parts so if you have a steam boat engine and that engine is driven by a piston then obviously that piston had to be very carefully Mae and it had to be made according to specifications and the housing for the engine would have to be made according to certain metallic special specifications and so it took a great deal of background to do that and then to in designing the boats faced with the shallowness of the upper Missouri what they really wanted to do is to have a boat that would carry as much tonnage as possible on as little water as possible they had a goal and it was really a very common saying not only on the Missouri but also on the Ohio River in the Upper Mississippi the boat builders wanted to design a boat that would sail on a heavy dew as they put it and there were times when they had boats as much as two hundred feet long that when empty and of course there's always some question as to what an empty boat does for you but at least it's a starting point that they design these things that when empty they draw only about a foot and a half of water I required don't recall the name of the boat but mention in your book of a boat constructed late in the steamboating air on the Missouri that I think drew 14 inches I think it's the one we see here the FY Bachelor was built at Pittsburgh and 1879 actually and was a rather well known boat because it was built as a family venture and during its maiden voyage actually made the trip from Pittsburgh to Fort Benton if you can imagine going by water from western Pennsylvania to Fort Benton Montana which in river miles would have been perhaps 4,000 miles approximately 4,000 miles because steamboat people reckoned the st. Louis to Fort Benton distance as 3,100 miles hmm today if you look up the distances of the Missouri River it's approximately 900 miles less than that but as the steamboat people said they they measured the way the boats went right they went by the sinuous ''tis of the straight but if you look at what you might regard as relatively typical Mountain boats some of the characteristics stand out on them is boats that were quite broad relative to their length so most of the mountain boats would have been in the 190 to 200 feet length range with that length they would have had a breath or a width of approximately 34 to 35 feet so roughly a sixth with in proportion to the lengths and the bottom would have been flat and the bottom and for that matter the rest of the boat would have been made out of relatively light material so if you can imagine a boat that big and the bottom planks on it would be say typically two by twelves made out usually out of pine I don't dry pine if they had used oh let's say oak that had a thickness of four to six inches they'd have had much safer boats but on the other hand they would have drawn much more yes and so the tendency was to make these things out of light we would what just part of the reason they wrecked so easily mm-hmm and if you look at the designs of the boats in this case here where you see the Rosebud under steam on the Missouri River and outstanding characteristic of the boats if you'd look at that particular picture where the bow of the boat meets the water the front is curved and it's low in the water what was called a spoon Bell construction and the reason for the rounded spoonbill bow on the boats was to enable them to slide up and over shoals the upper Missouri the extreme upper Missouri approximately 200 miles downstream from Fort Benton usually had a rocky bottom and hence the so called rocky river and in that portion of the river it was very common for steamboat men to encounter what they call bumping in other words the boat is bumping rocky shoals and when this occurred what they wanted was something that would tend to rise up and over the rocky shoals and that rounded front would accomplish that and then also in designing the boats to get back to the matter of the Prairie wind notice in and the boat pictures show this very well this one of the Rosebud here boats that were typically to use a present-day vehicle expression low profile you wanted something that the wind would not Buffett and so a boat like the rosebud here quite simply has a lower deck an upper deck and then a pilot house you contrast that to some of the passenger boats that you'd see on the Mississippi River and they were multi-tiered sometimes four or five decks and even the total height of this at the top of the smokestacks that show on the rosebud hair approximately 55 feet from the water level so these tended to be boats that were designed for freight purposes and in that respect there they're very utilitarian anyone who traveled on an upper Missouri River Mountain boat should not have expected even decent passenger accommodations most of the time the only people who had cabins would be the boat officers and usually 16 to 18 passengers and the rest of the passengers would share the lower deck with the cargo and on the lower deck of course you had the steam they had the furnace you had the boilers you had a steam engine itself and you had space for people to sleep and people who booked deck passage got just that they got a space on the boat uh-huh and there were times when they would crime two to three hundred people on that lower deck and at night it was roll up on the deck and be sandwiched in between other people definitely a close on some of warm fuzzies are very close and of course on the summer nights you'd expect that lower deck typically they tied up on the bank next to timber and mosquitoes would swarm on to the boat and one thing that relatively few passengers commented on but the very primitive toilet conditions there would be one toilet and that was located near the star actually over the paddle mill and about everybody shared the one of the things that that people tend to forget today when we cross the highway bridges over the Missouri and whatnot is the water today of course is so very clear certainly in the days of the steamboat trade that was not the case and that presented major problems for the mechanical operation of the boat from time to time it presented problems in a lot of ways they river water the well of course to the steamboat people they originally referred to the Missouri as the Big Muddy the water was characteristically silk Laden very dirty they used that water for a pilot purposes they used it for cooking purposes they used it actually and the bartender he used it to mix drinks there were individuals who had some problems with let's say whiskey and water mmm where it would be river water mixed with the liquor and the big problem they had from practical standpoint is that this was the water that was used in the boilers and so if you can imagine a boiler and usually these boilers were much larger than people would think quite often 30 to 35 feet in length and they'd have a diameter of about 3 feet the reason for the diameter is that it was necessary to clean the boilers periodically because you can imagine with muddy water that you're boiling inside of a metal container the mud residue would build up in the boiler yes the same way today in water you get limey or you'd get mud if you were using it and when that mod collected in the boiler it crusted or baked and so normally about every week they would have to lay over and the boilers were designed so an end of the could be unscrewed huh and then they would send somebody in to clean the boilers and usually this was a cub engineer quite often boy 15 16 years old and quite often a small boy mm-hmm because if you're working with a three-foot diameter you couldn't accommodate a large person and very often this was done on hot humid days in the closed conditions and they would simply go in there and with a scraper and scrape away that packed mud and then flush it out with hoses and in the course of a course of a trip from st. Louis to Fort Benton that could occur that process could occur as many as perhaps eight or ten times B that was I'd say that would be true because the st. Louis de Fort Benton trips in the late 1860's early 1870s very often took about 60 days a house but approximately a two month trip lengthy trip yeah yes yes yes what are the boats that we're looking at here okay the two boats we're looking at here are two of the best-known boats that operated out of Bismarck in the mid to late 1870s the Far West and the Nellie PEC the far last was probably the single best known steamboat on the upper Missouri because it has the boat that captain grant marcio's to evacuate wounded after the Custer yes incident in Montana the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the other boat the Nellie Peck was operated by the Peck line and one of the patterns and steamboat naming in its own sense is rather interesting the Colson line which was based in Yankton Dakota Territory present-day Yankton South Dakota had a reputation for having boats that always had names with seven letters huh so it's such names as the far glass the red but a rosebud rather the Montana the Wyoming the Dakota but Dakota tah so it came out of seven letters and the tradition among the steamboat people was that one of the partners and the Colson line was superstitious and so all of the names had to have seven letters another fairly common pattern of both naming was to name it after women members of the family so you will get such boats as this one here the Nellie only had the Katie Coates the Florence Meyer this type of thing frequently as I understand the wives of captains or operators in the business were part owners of boats and they spread the ownership of these craft out for a particular reason and I think that says something very important about the nature of that that trade could you expand on that yes boats that you're looking at here the Far West and the Nellie pack were both built in the mid 1870s the cost of a single boat like this it varied a little bit depending on how they they finished them in terms of the chandlery and the like but normally the cost would be about $24,000 but this is $24,000 in an economy where say a laborer was paid a dollar a day mm-hmm so if you think of hourly wages as being something like twelve or fifteen cents an hour or it's in an economy where bacon would sell for a nickel a pound and be very substantial and so it's a great amount of money and actually in that economy usually with an investment of the twenty four thousand dollars it would not be possible for boat owners to obtain insurance from a single company if they did obtain insurance it was normally done through an underwriting process they would contract with an underwriter who would obtain insurance from as many as seven or eight different companies hmm who might cover a liability of each they'd cover a liability of $2,000 or $3,000 and then the premiums on that insurance would typically cost ten percent of the bullets value so if you're saying a twenty four thousand dollar boat and each year you're talking about twenty four hundred dollars in premiums yes and so usually the boats were insured at less than full value so if you take something like the Colson line which usually had a fleet of six to seven boats they would involve everybody in the company would be involved in the ownership of a piece of each one and no in one individual would own a boat totally and sometimes that ownership was extended to the point where an individual would have a 132nd interest in a boat so if the boats lost it's a way of distributing the liability spread the risk really right yeah and they they were actually in a risky business and part of the reason for the for the risk was the the fragile construction of the boats part of it too was the delays in delivering cargo sometimes when they had government contracts contract was the army contracts was the Bureau of Indian Affairs there would be penalties built into the contracts if they did not deliver a specified percentage of the goods by a particular date and so they were very conscious of delays and if you look at the pictures here of the Farwest and the null APEC notice in the front part of the boats another thing that was very characteristic of upper Missouri steamboats you see on both sides of the bow spars ahead of the smokestacks and it might look casually that those sparse were there for the purpose of helping to load the boat this was not the case at all they were colloquially known as grasshopper polls uh-huh because if the boat was hung up on a sandbar those poles were swiveled at deck level they could be dropped over the front of the boat and planted in the sandbar hmm and then running through the pulleys on the poles were cables but led to a small steam engine that was mounted actually below the floorboards in the bow and this steam engine operated a small wench that would take up the cable as it turned a turnstile that would take up the cable as it took up the cable assuming the spars did not break and let me say that this happened involved and then not because you're dealing with to rather spend Li pieces of wood there yes so if you assume the spars would not break then the effect of taking up the cable would be to lift the boat you'd literally jack the boat up and as you jacked it up and the cable became tighter and tighter then the boat in effect would fall forward moomer the spars and every time you went through that process you could gain six or eight feet high and it might take a day or sometimes two days but you could grasshopper your way yes off sandbars yeah and and that's the reason for the poles I recall your account of one captain that used a different technique I think a large chain to which three men on either side would would attach themselves and a draw it under the hole that's loosening the sand and I will have to say I found only one record is there and this was actually from a rather embittered individual who booked passage from Fort Benton Montana uh-huh and then when they would get delayed on the shallow river all the passengers would have to get off and walk to lighten the load on the boat and then in the case of this one particular sandbar the captain did have them get out and do sort of a tug of war with a heavy chain was the idea of loosening the sand under the boat and replacing the sand with water and actually for a nearly empty boat that's flat-bottomed it wouldn't take much water mm-hmm to give the necessary buoyancy and that's what he was he was trying to accomplish they did have another method of getting boats off sandbars it again involves that small steam engine in the front and that would be to use what they called a Deadman which consisted of taking normally a huge cottonwood log ha burying it in a trench either at the end of the sandbar or on shore and then running a cable from that little steam engine to the Deadman and then taking up the line mm-hm and quite often this would work if the log was buried the resistance provided by the log in the trench would be sufficient to polt steam boil they did have to be conscious when they did that though of punching holes in the bottoms of the boats because they're they're really very fragile and in this particular case here you see a close-up of the steamer Helena actually at the Bismarck landing this happened to be in 1884 when the Helena was being used as a ferry boat that's why you see so many people on there yes it's hardly a typical passenger situation but it's a rather good view of the close-up of the boat and if you look closely at the picture you can see something of the rickety nature of those boats notice the railing on the upper deck rather much undulate sits hardly secure yes and notice too that on the lower deck simply do not have a railing mm-hmm so for individuals on a steamboat it behooves them to stay away from the water's edge and above all else to stay sober and for heaven sakes don't walk on something that had monitor you could end up in the river in the river there was a there was a hazard here and then if you look at this particular view here you get a very good close-up view of those spar poles in front the grass Humbert poles mm-hm and this boat again is howling on a boat owned by the Fort Benton transportation company or the powerline that's why you see between the smokestacks the block P logo P for Thomas power and his brother John and this this craft was actually their second boat the powers wanted to publicize Montana a great deal so when they built their first boat or had their first boat built in 1875 they named it the Benton after Fort Benton aha the second boat they named the Helena after the capital of Montana their third boat they named the Butte after built in Montana and they they use this actually as a form of advertising for their territory not through the bulk names the preceding slide was interesting it pointed out a kind of irony about the about steamboating on the Missouri I think and that is that as the railroads progressed established new rail heads along the missouri towns in terms of the steamboat trade as well as the railroad trade of course wood would flourish but as soon as a new point had been established further north on the river the importance of of the community would pass away as a yes it's it's a major consideration to that has to be taken into account in steamboating conventional wisdom has it that railroads of course economically kill steamboating what is not so well recognized and one of the things I have concentrated on in my studies is that there was a period of time where you had railroad steamboat cooperation because railroads would be built to a particular point on the river yes and hence a rail head would be established Bismarck is actually the classic case in point because the Northern Pacific Ridge Bismarck in the spring of 1873 later that year the panic of 1873 which was followed by a very prolonged depression sat in and as a result the Northern Pacific Railroad was not extended west of the Missouri rivers for six more years yes so for six years Bismarck was the end of the track and in actuality when you consider the route of the Northern Pacific from Bismarck to Dickenson to Glendive and Miles City in Montana until the Northern Pacific reached Glendive in 1881 bez mark would be the end of track for all practical purposes and so all of the commerce that flowed from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota towards Montana came by rail to Bismarck and then was trapped by steamboat and this particular picture here you'll course see the meeting of the technologies the railroad bridge there was completed at Bismarck in 1883 prior to 1883 say after 1879 when track started to be laid west of the Missouri River steamboats played a hand in railroad construction yes during the winter months the railroad would lay track on the ice at Bismarck and they'd use nature's bridge the track on the ice during the summer months they used specially designed steamboats the steamboats that we have been looking at here the typical mountain boats were all Stern wheelers a single wheel at the end yeah at the start and the reason for this is that there were so many embedded trees or snags in the Missouri that such a boat usually would not get those trees entangled in the wheel the way a sight we learned what but the Northern Pacific Railroad had two special boats built that were referred to as transfer boats huh they were both side wheelers and the reason for it was that both ends of the boat bow and stern were open and what ran down the middle of the boat was a railroad track yes and by backing such a boat up say on the east bank at Bismarck the Northern Pacific could run on six railroad cars mm-hmm take the boat directly across the river to Mandan and run them off on the track and these were the famous transfer balls huh but then after the bridge was completed in 1883 that obviously there's no need for the transfer boats yes and the the bridge did create a great many problems because usually on the Missouri River when the river was moving rapidly you tended to get eddies of water swirling water a whirlpool type action around those bridge piers yeah and that was quite a hazard for steamboats the the I believe it was the Colson line that constructed toward the end of the steamboating air on the Missouri the Lord of the of the mountain steamers and I believe two of those had major problems with bridges on the southern portion of the river yeah the the boats that you're mentioning here Colson in 1879 for some reason of his own no one has really been able to understand this had three extra large boats built the Montana the Dakota and the Wyoming and those boats were all about 250 feet long they're v again as long as the typical mountain boat and they had a breadth of nearly 50 feet huh they could carry when loaded approximately 600 tons just whether he thought that someday the Missouri would be ripe for a lively passenger trade I don't know usually the boats could not be loaded relate to capacity and in all cases they were attended to be accident prone very much so it's almost as if they were faded and so if you look at some of the hazards of navigation on the on the Missouri the sort of thing that was involved this happens to be the wreck of the Montana during its first season it was docked at Bismarck briefly and apparently was hit by either a very strong straight wind or a small tornado uh-huh and virtually wrecked and you can see Timbers scattered around and the pilothouse down the boat was rebuilt and then two years later hit a bridge pier at near present-day Kansas City Colson took the boats and sent them to the lower Mississippi to operate in the cotton trade during the winter months and this this boat was wrecked and ultimately solar the Dakota and the and the Wyoming now another problem that upper Missouri steamboat man had in the days before railroads reached the upper Missouri which would have been in the case of Sioux City pre 1868 with Yankton and Bismarck pre 1873 invariably the boats were wintered at st. Louis or reused on the Lower Mississippi after rail heads reached Yankton and Bismarck then the tendency was to keep most of the boats on the upper Missouri during the winter months on specially constructed steamboat ways which meant that they were pulled up on the banks and rested on winter supports over the winter in 1881 all of the Colson line boats were on ways at Yankton when the great ice jam occurred high in the flood of 1881 and here you see two boats while one of them's a power line both the Helena the Helen and the Western were on the ways at Yankton when the ice jam moved in so most of what you see in the foreground is huge blocks of ice and those boats were just crushed like you might crush a little wooden box and this is much of what caused the Colson line to reassess its position of the upper Missouri and those boats were not rebuilt and within two years Colson had decided to get out of steam body and go into safer things banking farming and ranching one of the characteristics of the trade on the upper Missouri you've pointed out is that when particularly I believe when Yankton and Bismarck were established as Maine primary shipping points along the river that the boat owners and captain's whatnot became more personally involved in in their communities generally resided in in the communities and whatnot well very much so when Yankton and Bismarck became steamboat ports then in those communities you had a buildup of what you might think of as the steamboat fraternity yes and saw the steamboat captain's and the steamboat pilots became they were local people their families tended to live there at least during the navigation season and in the case of Colson and his associates who were originally all from the Pittsburgh area they moved to Missouri River towns they brought their families the best-known individual in Bismarck's history for steam voting purposes was a Pennsylvanian by the name of Daniel W Murata he always preferred to be called DW Mirada the DW stood for Daniel Webster but since he was active in Democratic Party politics and apparently didn't share his parents fondness for Daniel Webster he insisted on being called DW but in bharata's case you'll find a person that when he left steam voting in 1884 he was soon named the marshal of Dakota Territory in part because he'd been active and Democratic Party politics and then he was removed of course when the Republicans won the presidency in 1888 in 1892 when Grover Cleveland won again then you will find maracas being sent to Melbourne Australia as the consul the American Consul General in Melbourne mhm and there's a certain tendency to think of these steamboat people as maybe being rather crusty sorts who were tied to the river but a lot of them in their day and age were really regarded as top-level businessmen entrepreneurs and through that they had no difficulty getting out of steam voting and moving into other things when they could use their talents the political connections are are interesting there was obviously a great deal of lobbying for government contracts and and transport of annuities to the reservations on the upper Missouri and whatnot that really accounted for a very substantial portion of the trade so they they were very active in lobbying efforts yeah the the government contracts came primarily in two forms there would be the contracts to supply the army and then the contracts to supply the Indian service and in both cases when the government let those contracts they were annual contracts for the entire upper Missouri area and a company they had to bid on the contracts there was a competitive bidding process but the company that won the bed and was awarded the annual contract basically it was given a monopoly of the armies business for a year were you the the contracts were let competitively but there was always the qualification that the successful bidder had to be able to prove a certain ability to carry out the Contra so there were times when you would have individuals bid on the contract and they did not own sufficient bolts to carry out the contract if they could convince the military that they would solve lat with other people then the army might say fine we'll give you the contract but the army especially during the military crisis of 1876 after the Battle of the Little Bighorn the army of the United States was understandably embarrassed and so immediately the decision was made to fortify the Yellowstone River Valley and you then think in terms of rushing new troops into the Yellowstone River Valley and building two forts yes well to build those two forts they brought in approximately 500 civilian workers from Minnesota from the st. Paul Minneapolis area and it was necessary to take into Montana not only those 500 men but such things as cut lumber so you'll find railroad car after railroad car cut lumber yeah coming to Bismarck sometimes 20 to 25 railroad cars at lumber to load onto a single steamboat mm-hmm well if you're rushing those then into the Yellowstone River Valley the army was always concerned about let's have a company that can deliver and this is when they turned invariably to the Colson line Colson Sanford the Colts and the president of the line had a nice little model old reliable reliable line and that they they put this on their letterhead and they put it in the on the memo is in the dining saloon and they advertise themselves widely that way but on the side Olsen and his principal lieutenant Murata were very active in Democratic Party politics and there was one noteworthy incident in 1878 where they were outbid for the contract and they used their political influence with members of Congress to have the decision reversed to get a ticket to get a contract yeah yeah and so there's a there's a political aspect to it and these were people who they cultivated their government connections and so you will find Sandford Colson while he normally did not take an active role in traveling in the boats if you had someone like the army commander William Sherman come out to inspect the Yellowstone River area in 1877 well Coulson is there to meet show yeah and he's going to travel with him and Sherman by the same token had to convince the politicians that he was taking appropriate measures to quell the Indians and so he found it convenient to say I am dealing was the most reliable steamboat company and I know Sanford Colson was always known as common Oracle's you know there were certain individuals who had the designation of Commodore and he was one actually a rather a little fin de mitchamore and saw some of his critics referred to him as the Napoleon of the Big Muddy mm-hmm that he was an emperor within a rather small route he was a steamboat captain himself I believe he established a record for a run between Sioux City Fort Benton and forth yeah he was very successful as a practical navigator and had started out as an engineer and then had moved into a captaincy and apparently an individual who was very proficient in a in a mechanical sense he could deal with steam boat engines and you think in terms of well what does this mean but suppose you have a cylinder say that is faulty and you're on the upper Missouri yes you can send back to Pittsburgh and say send us out another piston and you can give the specifications for it but you've got to have somebody there who knows how to put it in yes or if you break a spar while grasshopper hang off a sand bar obviously you need somebody who can go on shore cut a spar install the spar and make that part work again now one of the things that happened of course with steamboating is that really in the early 1880s as railroads are first of all pushed into the Yellowstone River area the old mountain boats as they were wrecked or wore out were generally replaced by smaller steam boats yes such as the one you see here this unfortunate craft has the interesting name of Excelsior uh-huh but unlike the Excelsior of the poem it was hardly soaring onward and upward it's hung up on a sandbar at this one stones and there you see a fairly typical River scene of a boat that's on a sandbar and these later boats did not have grasshopper poles mm-hmm so until the water rises or until you dug the sand out from under at door until you told it off with another boat it's going to be there you were stuck and then from time to time we've been referring to hazards of the Missouri this happens to be not a photograph but a photograph painting Karl Bodmer rendering of the yellow stone coming up the Missouri and you got a fairly good representation of snags large trees was the rooked embedded in the river and the current then would cause them to point downstream and the current would also break off the tops so they'd be sticking up out of the water downstream like so many large sorts and many of these were broken off just below the surface so you can imagine a broken tree trunk that sharpened on the end yes in dark water mm-hmm we've been speaking this morning with dr. William alas professor of history at Mankato State University thank you very much dr. lass for being with us it's been my pleasure thank you [Music]