1875 Currier and Ives View of Steamboat Racing on the Mississippi River

A gorgeous 1872 Currier and Ives hand-colored lithograph of steamboats racing on the Mississippi River. By the time of its publication, steamboat racing and river steamboats were becoming less popular, imbuing the piece with a touch of nostalgia.

A Closer Look

The view depicts a nighttime scene, with two steamboats, the Memphis and the James Howard, racing neck-and-neck down the Mississippi River. In reality, given the times and distances involved and the potential dangers of collision, ships racing each other rarely came so close, but Currier and Ives have taken some artistic license to heighten the drama. An unknown artist has signed his initial (M.) in the bottom-left corner. Though both ships were well known in their time, there is scant record of their having raced each other aside from references to this print, suggesting the race was imagined (in the original 1860 printing of the view, the ships were named Natchez and Eclipse).

Steamboat Racing

Long before Americans enjoyed watching cars, planes, and other 20th century vehicles race, they were equally enthralled by horse, train, and steamboat races. Though there was unquestionably a sporting element to the races, they were also undertaken to spur and demonstrate improvements in shipbuilding technology. The result was that from the 1820s to the 1840s, trip times between Louisville and New Orleans on the Mississippi River were cut from several weeks to several days.

While these improvements in travel were a tremendous accomplishment, steamboat travel was extremely dangerous. Boilers were prone to explode, igniting cargo such as gunpowder and cotton, and crashes were common. Passenger steamboats often engaged in informal or illicit racing, needlessly putting dozens and hundreds of lives at risk, as is presumed to be the case with the boiler explosion and sinking of the Henry Clay near Yonkers in 1852, which killed some 80 passengers. River traffic was also often unregulated, especially in earlier years of steamboat travel, so that the first boat to reach a dock or pier would have first crack at any waiting passengers, encouraging fierce competition.

This work was published near the end of the golden age of river steamboats in the United States. In 1870, one of the last well-publicized and certainly the most gambled upon race of the era took place between the Robert E. Lee and Natchez. Dubbed the 'Great American Steamboat Race,' between New Orleans and St. Louis, the modern ships and crack crews demonstrated the highest potential of river steamboats, even as they were becoming obsolete due to an ever-expanding railroad network. The race was a media sensation, especially in the South, which was still reeling from the American Civil War (1861 - 1865). Wounded Southern pride was somewhat soothed by the history of the ships - while one was named after the Confederacy's best general, the Natchez had carried Jefferson Davis to Montgomery, Alabama for his 1861 swearing in as President of the Confederacy.

Publication History and Census

Currier and Ives originally published this print on a larger format in 1860, then issued it in a smaller format in 1875 (changing the ships' names in the process), while a third printing was undertaken in 1890 (changing the ships' names back to the Natchez and Eclipse). The present 1875 printing is held by the American Antiquarian Society, the D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts, the Legion of Honor (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), and the Museum of the City of New York.