Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers

At the time of its publication in 1949, Louis Hunter's Steamboats on the Western Rivers must have seemed an odd duck indeed. Hunter's intellectual home was economic history, the headwaters as well for a small but vital stream of studies on technology and society, including works by Abbott Payson Usher and John U. Nef. The Committee for Research in Economic History helped sponsor the publication of Steamboats, a demanding endeavor given the book's specialized focus and massive dimensions (640 pages) and the perfectionist bent of its author. ¹ The extensive research behind the book and its authoritative treatment of its subject earned Hunter the Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association. But this was not your grandfather's economic history. While generally laudatory, a review in the Journal of Economic History noted that Hunter's "treatment of technological developments often seems needlessly detailed and even the economic historian will find it advisable to select pertinent passages for the uses of the moment." ² Hardly the send-off one would expect at the launching of a classic. Two decades later, however, Eugene Ferguson would describe Steamboats as "a model of technological history," and John Staudenmaier recently called it one of a handful of "breakthrough works within SHOT." ³ So how did a vessel christened so modestly become a Mayflower of technology history?

Steamboats achieved "classic" status for three reasons. It is vastly ambitious in scope. Its subject is specialized, even narrow: the rise, flowering, and decline of one mode of transport in the mere half century (1812-75) during which steamboats served as the leading means of travel and commerce in the region served by a single, albeit large, system of rivers—the Mississippi and its tributary streams. But Hunter delineated that topic from every possible angle, describing its place in and influence on technological, economic, business, environmental, labor, social, and political history. Even at this far remove, his synthesis is impressive. Perhaps he could achieve it only because historians had yet to splinter into these subdisciplines as we now conceive them. Second, Steamboats is a classic because of Hunter's indefatigable skills in research. He culled his material from memoirs, paintings, state statutes, Federal documents, case law, newspapers, business records, reports by European travelers, trade periodicals, and technical journals. If the resulting narrative is a bit unwieldy (and it is), it is not the only classic to be distinguished by its heavy displacement tonnage. Most importantly for our field, Hunter was among the first historians to integrate a thorough portrait of an evolving technology with the surrounding context that both animated and reflected that hardware. Before the conception of SHOT, before the publication of the first issue of Technology and Culture, Hunter provided an exemplary model of contextualist history of technology. Direct evidence of its classic status: Steamboats on the Western Rivers is still in print in a Dover edition, more than a half century after its initial publication. ⁴ Indirect evidence: Hunter's book was among the earliest examples in form and execution of those authoritative monographs that have since dominated among SHOT's Dexter/Edelstein prizewinners, works like Reese Jenkins's Images and Enterprise, Jeffrey Meikle's American Plastic, and Judith McGaw's Most Wonderful Machine.

By temperament and training, Louis Hunter was well suited to crafting this foundational text in technological history. He was born in 1895 in the Ohio River town of Wellsburg, West Virginia. ⁵ After college he pursued an engineering degree at Harvard for two years, but then shifted to American economic history. With a dissertation on Pittsburgh's iron industry, he received his doctorate in 1928. Although he authored the occasional journal article, Hunter preferred to work on a large scale. After Steamboats, he turned to his grand project, a three-volume history of industrial power in America. Water Power came out in 1979; it soon won SHOT's Dexter Prize. Steam Power...