American river steamers were said to float on a heavy dew
Paddle steamers on the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri in the early 1800s were built to sit so high in the water that they could work in channels less than two metres deep. People joked that they could navigate on a heavy dew. Their design, from the fuel to the paddle's position, answered the problems of shallow, snag-filled rivers.
The classic steamboat burned wood in iron boilers, with twin tall smokestacks throwing out smoke and cinders. Crews could buy fuel from woodcutters along the banks instead of hauling coal. A big paddlewheel at the stern, driven by two pistons, turned in water already cleared by the hull, so it rarely hit submerged logs, survived groundings and was easy to fix. A short gangway at the bow let the boat nose into an undeveloped bank to load people and cargo. Modern riverboats use propellers and pairs of diesel engines of several thousand horsepower.
River travel is ancient. Rafts and dugouts were used for fishing as early as 20,000 BC, Roman writers around 50 BC described heavy traffic on the Rhine, and medieval towpaths let animals or people haul boats upstream. Because they face neither ocean waves nor gales, river craft can be lighter than seagoing ships, but bridges and channel depth cap their size. On the Kalgan River in Western Australia, the Silver Star lowered her funnel to pass a low bridge between 1918 and 1935, and the tourist boat that works there today drops its roof under the same span.
Progress upriver could take decades. On British Columbia's Skeena River, the steamer Union entered in 1864, the Mumford stalled in 1866, and only in 1891 did a Hudson's Bay Company sternwheeler, the Caledonia, force Kitselas Canyon and reach Hazelton.
Barges remain the cheapest way to move goods per ton mile. Because most of China's big rivers run east to west while its roads and railways mostly run north to south, ramp barges carry trucks along the Yangtze, and one observer noticed that new trucks going upstream were all blue while those heading downstream were all white.
Source: Riverboat
