“Western steamboats showed an appalling accident record,” wrote historian Daniel J. Boorstin in 1965. “A voyage on the Mississippi, it was often said, was far more dangerous than a passage across the ocean.”
As if these hazards weren’t enough, steamboats soon began racing each other in what quickly became a nationwide sensation. In some cases, the races were planned and advertised in advance, with spectators lining the riverbanks beforehand to enjoy the spectacle. Others were impromptu affairs, sometimes urged on by thrill-seeking passengers. Steamboat captains competed as a matter of pride and ego, while boat owners believed that establishing a winning record would draw more passengers and sell more tickets. Gamblers also bet on the outcomes; in one celebrated 1870 race, total wagers amounted to more than $1 million (around $23 million today).
In addition to bragging rights, the winning boat was typically awarded a large pair of deer antlers, often painted gold, that could be mounted in a prominent place for all to admire.
“I think that much the most enjoyable of all races is a steamboat race,” wrote Mark Twain in his 1883 memoir, Life on the Mississippi. “Two red-hot steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, straining every nerve—that is to say, every rivet in the boilers—quaking and shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam—this is sport that makes a body’s very liver curl with enjoyment.”
Twain deemed horse races “pretty tame and colorless in comparison,” noting that he’d never seen anybody killed at one. Deaths were all too common in steamboat racing. Passengers and crew were scalded or blown to pieces in boiler explosions; burned alive in fires; or forced to take their chances in the water, where they often drowned. Boiler explosions were even more likely during races, when crews often circumvented safety valves in order to pour on extra speed.
Just as Flexner saw the steamboat as a distinctly American innovation, the 19th-century humorist Charles Godfrey Leland said much the same about steamboat racing. “From the days of the Romans and Norsemen down to the present time, there was never any form of amusement discovered so daring, so dangerous and so exciting as a steamboat race,” he wrote in 1893, “and nobody but Americans could have ever invented or indulged in it.”