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The River: There are countless steamboats he never worked on — but he would’ve if he could’ve


The riverboat captain is a storyteller, and Captain Don Sanders will be sharing the stories of his long association with the river — from discovery to a way of love and life. This a part of a long and continuing story.

By Capt. Don Sanders
Special to NKyTribune

Of the countless number of steamboats I never worked on, but “would’a if I could’a,”  the most common reason for my absence was, they came and went long before I was born.

For example:

The 300 by 30-foot CITY of CINCINNATI (CoC), built at the Howard Shipyard, Jeffersonville, Indiana in 1898 for Commodore Fred Laidley’s Louisville & Cincinnati Packet Company. The CoC ran in tandem with her sister, the slightly-larger CITY of LOUISVILLE (CoL).

The 300 by 30-foot CITY of CINCINNATI (CoC), built at the Howard Shipyard, Jeffersonville, Indiana in 1898 for Commodore Fred Laidley’s Louisville & Cincinnati Packet Company.

I once favored the CoL over the CoC because I “stood” watch on the DELTA QUEEN  with Captain Albert Sidney Kelley, who as a young man, piloted the Louisville-honored steamboat.

Cap’n Kelley, of course, knew the Commodore who built a lovely mansion on the corner of East Second and Kennedy Streets in Covington, Kentucky, across from Amos Shinkle’s grandiose digs among the homes in the neighborhood now known as the Riverside National Historic District.

The Commodore, according to Kelley, “wore chin whiskers like a billy goat that flapped when he talked.”  Whenever one of the L&C boats was due to land at the Cincinnati Public Landing, Laidley, holding his heavy gold watch in hand, would be watching from the gazebo high atop his Second Street home, and if the steamboat was late arriving, it left with a new captain.

“I hire just two men on my steamboats,” Captain Kelley told as he held his out-stretched hand beneath his chin imitating Commodore Laidley’s goatee that flapped as he talked.

“I hire the Captain – he takes care of my boat. And I hire the Purser – he takes care of my money.”

Edith Rice

Sadly for the steamboat trade on the Ohio River, both the “city boats,” the CoC and CoL, were destroyed by the impressive ice gorge of 30 January 1918 while my grandmother Edith Rice Sanders watched from her second story kitchen window at the Foot of Greenup Street alongside the Suspension Bridge.

“I saw those huge boats go under the ice,” Grandma often recalled.

Edith knew her steamboats, too. As a girl growing up on the river at New Richmond, Ohio, she recognized every boat before they came into sight by the sound of their steam whistles; a feat not unusual for girls and boys reared in any town along the river in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. In those days before smartphones, TVs, and other electronic gadgetry sounds regulated everyday life; primarily with whistles and bells. Steam whistles on factories announced the beginning of work shifts, lunchtime, and the end of the workday. Bells told the hours of the day. Both the whistles and bells of steamboats had their particular language that folks living along the river, include the young ones, understood. Grandmother Edith knew by the time she moved with her family from New Richmond to Covington what each resonance meant without looking.

The Colossus, the largest steam towboat ever built, “Big Momma” — the SPRAGUE.

Edith loved to rattle off the names of long-gone and mostly-forgotten steamboats she remembered from her youth playing on the Greene Line wharfboat at New Richmond: the COURIER that ran in the Cincinnati – Maysville trade and the little CHILO, among several others. After she came to the Cincinnati harbor area, Grandmother Edith learned to recognize the voices of most of the steamers that came and went from the Public Landing. Of course, she loved the first ISLAND QUEEN, the CITY of CINCINNATI, and the workhorse of the harbor, the old gentleman, the HERCULES CARREL, built in 1871.

The Colossus, the largest steam towboat ever built, “Big Momma” — the SPRAGUE, the last steamboat fabricated in 1902 at the Iowa Iron Works, Dubuque, under the supervision of the Scotsman, William Hopkins was another steamboat I’d like to have worked aboard. Hopkins also constructed the first iron-hulled steamboat on the Upper Mississippi River, the Rafter CLYDE., at the ironworks thirty-two years earlier.

Following the decommissioning of the SPRAGUE in March of 1948, she wound up as a showboat and tourist attraction at Vicksburg, Mississippi where I was to first walk her steel decks during the summer of 1960 as a young deckhand off the Steamer AVALON. My first encounter with Big Momma, however, was a year earlier in the autumn of 1959 when the celebrity steamer was in tow coming from a bicentennial celebration in Pittsburgh while returning to Vicksburg on the Lower Mississippi River.

The river community around Cincinnati was abuzz with excitement anticipating the passage of the SPRAGUE sometime before dawn. My family coincidentally chose to stay overnight on our family sternwheeler MARJESS, so I slept outside on the floats alongside our boat where I could watch each passing tow for the sight of the titanic steamboat.

At least twice, I gently brought the QUEEN alongside the wafer-thin hull of the old steam towboat as it lay parallel to the banks of the Yazoo Diversionary Canal at the Vicksburg riverfront.

My vigilance paid in spades around 5 a.m. the following foggy morning when, closing alongside our houseboat, a ghost of another age in river history moved silently past moored to a barge with the diesel towboat to the inside of the apparition giving the impression that Big Momma, herself, was shoving the tow instead of the other way around. The vision of the shadowy specter remains as clear in my memory as though I watched it on last night’s evening’s news.

As an 18-year-old deckhand off the excursion boat, the Steamer AVALON, I enjoyed the unbridled run of the old boat back home on the Yazoo less than a year after she passed mysteriously in the haze through the Cincinnati harbor. The shafts of the mighty steam engines built by William Hopkins, I soon discovered, had been sliced in two at Pittsburgh. An electric motor attached to them could then turn the mighty paddlewheel at an ever-so-slow creep lest the torque ripped the SPRAGUE from her moorings although her solid sternwheel bucket planks were removed and replaced with thin furring strips.

There been one steamboat I could get into a time machine and go back and beg my way aboard; it would be the loveliest steamboat I have seen in pictures, the palatial packet, EDWARD J. GAY.

The most excellent personal relationship Big Momma and I shared was when I was a thirty-year-old master of the renowned Steamer DELTA QUEEN. Talk about a thrill! At least twice, I gently brought the QUEEN alongside the wafer-thin hull of the old steam towboat as it lay parallel to the banks of the Yazoo Diversionary Canal at the Vicksburg riverfront. One hard bump and the hull of the elder sternwheeler would have cracked like an egg sending the historical relic to the bottom of the canal. That’s not the sort of mistake an apologetic “Oops” would satisfy any angry parties.

Although I missed the chance to steamboat aboard the SPRAGUE due to my tender age, I did work with Captains “Handsome Harry” Hamilton and Sewell Smith, both pilots on the old girl. And I knew her last master, Captain Eugene Hampton who often visited the DELTA QUEEN whenever we were in Vicksburg City.

There were hundreds, if not thousands of steamboats I would have loved. The CAR OF COMMERCE, J. M. WHITE, ROBT. E. LEE, NATCHEZ, CANDO, BELLE of the BENDS, ISLAND QUEEN I, OMAR, ORCO, and the HERBERT E. JONES were but a few. But had there been one steamboat I could get into a time machine and go back and beg my way aboard; it would be the loveliest steamboat I have seen in pictures, the palatial packet, EDWARD J. GAY.

The grand boat honored the name of the New Orleans financier and member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Louisiana, Edward James Gay.

Completed in the Cincinnati Marine Railway yard in July 1878, the grand boat honored the name of the New Orleans financier and member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Louisiana, Edward James Gay. Gay attended Augusta College in Bracken County, Kentucky from 1833 to 1834 and died while in-office at his home, the St. Louis Plantation in Iberville Parish, in May of 1889.

The Steamer EDWARD J. GAY was just over 251-feet by 41-feet and was towed South by the also-new J. M. WHITE, the 276th steamboat built by the Howard Shipyard in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The GAY ran in the New Orleans – Bayou Sara trade and carried the U. S. Mail under government contract until January 1880. She was managed by the illustrious Captain Thomas Paul Leathers, originally from Kenton County, Kentucky; also the owner of the Steamboat NATCHEZ that raced the ROBT. E. LEE, “de ole Hoppin’ Bob,” in July of 1870.

But, for solid good looks and classic design, no other boat of the “Golden Era of Steamboating” following the Civil War, could hold a pine-pitch torch to the EDWARD J. GAY! And that’s more than saying a mouthful!  

So if I come up missing, perhaps I do have a secreted time machine standing ready to whisk me back to a world I would understand better than I do these confusing times. Take a magnifying glass and carefully scan the photographs of the EDWARD J. GAY, and if you look especially hard, you may find me either in the pilothouse, on-deck or somewhere in-between.

Captain Don Sanders is a river man. He has been a riverboat captain with the Delta Queen Steamboat Company and with Rising Star Casino. He learned to fly an airplane before he learned to drive a “machine” and became a captain in the USAF. He is an adventurer, a historian, and a storyteller. Now, he is a columnist for the NKyTribune and will share his stories of growing up in Covington and his stories of the river. Hang on for the ride — the river never looked so good.

Click here to read all of Capt. Don Sanders’ stories of The River.


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3 Comments

  1. Ron Sutton says:

    Only saw the Sprague once, high and dry on the bank of the Yazoo. Wish now that son Jim and I had broken in and explored.

  2. Joy Scudder says:

    Would love to have been a deckhand on the Edward J. Gay. Let me know if you invent that time machine, Capt. Sanders.

  3. Jessica C Yusuf says:

    As usual, an entertaining and informative peek into the past. Thank you!

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