Full Steam Ahead: Reflections on the Impact of the First Steamboat on the Ohio River, 1811–2011 ed. by Rita Kohn (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2012 97 Full Steam Ahead: Reflections on the Impact of the First Steamboat on the Ohio River, 1811-2011 Rita Kohn, ed. In this book intended for a popular audience, nine contributors offer their assessments of how steamboats helped shaped life and culture along the Ohio River. The book is both timely and welcome. The first riverboat traveled the Ohio River in 1811 and immediately caused a sensation. Despite the importance of steamers to American history, they have attracted moderate attention from popular historians and only scattered interest from scholars. Although they share the general theme of steamboats on the Ohio River, the essays vary immensely in quality, length, approach, and utility. Leland Johnson’s essay provides an overview of the New Orleans’s 1811 journey from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Johnson’s heroic account of Nicholas Roosevelt hardly breaks new ground, but it provides a useful starting point for readers unfamiliar with the origins of steamboat traffic on the western waters. Alan Bates follows with a discussion of the evolution of riverboat design from its utilitarian origins to its graceful lines. Like Johnson, Bates does not have new material but his summary of the design changes in boats provides a nice background for those who need a primer on steamboat design. The book’s third essay examines the origin of towboats on the Ohio River. Jack Custer’s essay has potential but is bedeviled by difficulties. For instance, he asserts that during the 1830s demand for coal in the South was so great that “it was the most valuable cargo that could be carried downstream” (38). This assertion surprises given the incredible importance of cotton to river traffic, and more discussion and evidence would have been welcome. Custer also argues in his conclusion that towboating “originated with the Union army’s need for coal to fuel its military operations” (61), a statement that begs for more discussion. The book’s next three essays are the most scholarly in the book. Rick Bell provides a microhistory of sorts of the creation of Portland and Shippingport, two small communities southwest of Louisville. Both towns owed their existence to the Falls of the Ohio which interrupted steamboat traffic and forced most vessels to offload their cargo. The essay is quite interesting but Bell could have used the opportunity to discuss how environmental factors shaped urban development along the western waters. Thomas Buchanan’s narrative of how steamboats changed the Ohio River Valley is the most sophisticated in the collection and also the one that comes closest to fulfilling the promise of the book’s title. While Buchanan discusses the effect of steamboats on Native Americans, he devotes most of his essay to examining the labor of African Americans on riverboats. He effectively Rita Kohn, ed. Full Steam Ahead: Reflections on the Impact of the First Steamboat on the Ohio River, 18112011 . Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780871952936 (paper), $19.95. BOOK REVIEWS 98 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY The Family Legacy of Henry Clay: In the Shadow of a Kentucky Patriarch Lindsey Apple If families tend to be interesting to outsiders in proportion to their dysfunction, the descendants of Henry Clay ought to be appealing fodder indeed for the historian. Alcoholism, melancholy, thwarted ambition, disease—the Clays exhibited all these qualities, and more, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Given that, it is surprising that Lindsey Apple’s Family Legacy of Henry Clay is not more interesting. This is partly because Apple seems to have made it his mission to rehabilitate the Clays, and the “patriarch ” in particular, from their critics. Robert Remini takes a beating here. But it also turns out that the Clays themselves were a less interesting bunchthantheyappearatfirstglance.Inpart,that seems to be because family members, with an eye to the clan’s reputation, took care to destroy letters and other documents that discussed embarrassing —and revealing—incidents. Much of the evidence we have about alcoholism, gambling, and mental instability must be inferred, and Apple does not flinch in presenting these facts. Even so, the Clays simply do not capture the imagination as did, say, the Percys in the book to which...