(Source: "A Mass of Steamboats"; Pictures for the People: Visual Multiples...)
Rise of Steamboats
The steamboat was a tremendous turning point in transportation, commerce, and westward expansion. It demonstrated the capabilities of steam power, the driving force of the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840 in Britain, 1820-1870 in the U.S). Two decades after the Clermont’s maiden voyage (1807), steamboats became a principle mode of river transportation for inland commerce. Steamboats opened America's interlocking system of rivers, thereby strengthening the economy and producing unified, interdependent states.
 (Source: "Canals and the Steamboat"; Columbia University in the City of New York) A Comparison of Steamboat Expansion in 1825 and 1860
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 (Source: Steamboats Docked at Vicksburg; Vicksburg's Old Court House Museum) Steamboats Docked at Vicksburg - circa 1866
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“The early steamboats were a marked improvement over the upstream travel time of the keelboat and barge. Ordinarily it took a keelboat or barge from three to four months to make the journey from New Orleans to Louisville, with ten to twenty miles a day the average rate. Pioneer steamboats in 1815 and 1817 made the trip in twenty-five days, though trips of thirty to thirty-five days were more usual.”
- Donald T. Zimmer, “The Ohio River Pathway to Settlement in Transportation and the Early Nation: Papers Presented at an Indiana American Revolution Bicentennial Symposium
Click below to see specific ways in which the Steamboat was a major turning point.
