or preventing and for fighting fire. One of the innovations
on the new boats in this particular was the substitution of wire for the
combustible rope formerly used to control the tiller, so that even in
time of fire the pilot could "hold her nozzle agin' the bank." Much
of the great loss of life in steamboat fires had been due to the
tiller-ropes being burned and the boats becoming unmanageable.

The arrival of the railroad at the head of the Ohio River in the early
fifties brought the East into an immediate touch with the Mississippi
Valley unknown before. But however bold railway engineers were in
the face of the ragged ranges of the Alleghanies, they could not then
outguess the tricks of the Ohio, the Mississippi, or the Missouri,
and railway promoters could not afford to take chances on having their
stations and tracks unexpectedly isolated, if not actually carried away,
by swirling, yellow floods. The Mississippi, too, had been known
at times to achieve a width of seventy miles, and tributaries have
overflowed their banks to a proportionate extent. It was several decades
ere the Ohio was paralleled by a railway, and the Mississippi for long
distances even today has not yet heard the shrill cry of the locomotive.
So the steamboat entered its heyday and encountered little competition.
Until the Civil War the rivers of the West remained the great arteries
of trade, carrying grain and merchandise of every description southward
and bringing back cotton, rice, and sugar.

The rivalries of the great lines of packets established in these days
of the steamboat, however, equaled anything ever known in railway
competition, and, in the matter of fast time, became more spectacular
than anything of its kind in any line of transportation in our country.
With flags flying, boilers heated white with abundance of pine and
resin, and bold and skillful pilots at the steering wheels, no sport
of kings ever aroused the enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands to such a
pitch as did many of the old-time races northward from New Orleans.

The J. M. White and her performances stand out conspicuously in the
annals of the river. Her builder, familiarly known to a generation of
rivermen as Billy King, deserves to rank with Henry Shreve. Commissioned
in 1844 to build the J. M. White for J. M. Converse of St. Louis, with
funds supplied by Robert Chouteau of that city, King proceeded to put
into effect the knowledge which he had derived from a close