This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
The universe may lay claim to the first and the biggest bang, but the Upper Mississippi has witnessed some pretty good echoes ever since the first steamboat exploded in 1837. That year, with Iowa and Northern Illinois newly opened to settlement, the steamer Dubuque bound upstream from St. Louis, blew one of its boilers, throwing a sheet of scalding steam and water over the deck passengers, killing twenty-two of them.
For the next sixty years, similar explosions ended the careers of more steamboats than snags, sandbars, or collisions.
The high pressure steam used to turn the large paddles made even a new boiler marginally safe. Before long, that boiler had rusted, its rivets weakened. The heavy sediment from the Mississippi river water pumped into the boilers settled out and clogged valves, adding to the danger.
But the most dangerous part of the boiler, as with the automobile today, was the operator. Safety valves on the boilers were designed to keep the pressure at a safe level, but few engineers could resist the temptation of hanging a wrench on the handle of the valve to weight it down in response to a friendly challenge to race from a passing boat. Engineers frequently kept rosin wood or meat fat on hand to feed the fire and make it hotter, further increasing the pressure on the boiler way past the safe point.
And who cheered the engineers on to these efforts? Why the captain and boat owner, who stood to lose an expensive boat. And the deck passengers who stood to lose their lives in a selection of ways: scalded to death by steam, impaled by pieces of flying metal from the blowing boiler, or by drowning in mid-channel as the boat disintegrated. And the crew itself, working right on the boiler deck, and who would be the first to go.
"It won't happen to us," they said. "Not this time, not this trip." And so the explosions continued. The Potosi blew, as did the Red Wing, then the Lansing, the result of some primitive apparently universal urge almost as old as the Big Bang
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
