1819 sixty-three steamers, of varying tonnage from twenty to three hundred tons, were plying on the western rivers.  Four had been built at New Orleans, one each at Philadelphia, New York, and Providence, and fifty-six on the Ohio.  The upper reaches of the Mississippi still lagged in the race, for most of the boats turned off up the Ohio River, into the more populous territory toward the east.  It was not until August, 1817, that the “General Pike,” the first steamer ever to ascend the Mississippi River above the mouth of the Ohio, reached St. Louis.  No pictures, and but scant descriptions of this pioneer craft, are obtainable at the present time.  From old letters it is learned that she was built on the model of a barge, with her cabin situated on the lower deck, so that its top scarcely showed above the bulwarks.  She had a low-pressure engine, which at times proved inadequate to stem the current, and in such a crisis the crew got out their shoulder poles and pushed her painfully up stream, as had been the practice so many years with the barges.  At night she tied up to the bank.  Only one other steamer reached St. Louis in the same twelve months.  By way of contrast to this picture of the early beginnings of river navigation on the upper Mississippi, we may set over some facts drawn from recent official publications concerning the volume of river traffic, of which St. Louis is now the admitted center.  In 1890 11,000,000 passengers were carried in steamboats on rivers of the Mississippi system.  The Ohio and its tributaries, according to the census of that year, carried over 15,000,000 tons of freight annually, mainly coal, grain, lumber, iron, and steel.  The Mississippi carries about the same amount of freight, though on its turbid tide, cotton and sugar, in no small degree, take the place of grain and the products of the furnaces and mills.

But it was a long time before steam navigation approached anything like these figures, and indeed, many years passed before the flatboat and the barge saw their doom, and disappeared.  In 1821, ten years after the first steamboat arrived at New Orleans, there was still recorded in the annals of the town, the arrival of four hundred and forty-one flatboats, and one hundred and seventy-four barges.  But two hundred and eighty-seven steamboats also tied up to the levee that year, and the end of the flatboat days was in sight.  Ninety-five of the new type of vessels were in service on the Mississippi and its tributaries, and five were at Mobile making short voyages on the Mississippi Sound and out into the Gulf.  They were but poor types of vessels at best.  At first the shortest voyage up the river from New Orleans to Shippingport—­then a famous landing, now vanished from the map—­was twenty-two days, and it took ten days to come down.  Within six years the models of the boats and the power of the engines had been so greatly improved that the up trip was made in twelve days, and the down in six.