Two meanings of one word
The word keelboat has two separate uses. In the story told here, it means a working river boat of the American interior in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, used to haul freight on the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri and their tributaries before steamboats took over. The same word is also applied to a class of sailing yacht with a fixed, ballasted keel, as opposed to a dinghy with a centreboard. Those yachts belong to a later, recreational tradition and are only related by name. The history of the working keelboat is a different thing.
The need for an upstream boat
Settlers pushing into the Ohio valley and beyond needed to move goods in both directions. Downstream, the current did most of the work, and crude flatboats could carry farm produce to markets such as New Orleans. Many of these flatboats were broken up and sold for timber at the end of the trip, because getting them back upstream was impractical. Upstream traffic needed a different craft: one that could be moved against the current and carry manufactured goods, tools, salt, and other supplies to the settlements.
The keelboat was the answer. It was a long, narrow, shallow-draft boat with a pointed bow and stern, built for the muddy, shifting rivers of the frontier. It had a keel, in the sense of a strengthening timber running along the bottom, but was not designed like a seagoing hull. Typical examples were reportedly somewhere between 40 and 80 feet long, with a covered cargo box amidships and a walkway along each side for the crew.
How a keelboat moved
Moving a keelboat upstream was hard physical work, and the methods were as varied as the rivers.
- Rowing and sailing: Oars and a simple mast and sail could help in favourable conditions, particularly where the wind blew along the river.
- Poling: Crew members walked along the walkways pushing long poles against the riverbed, working from bow to stern.
- Cordelling: A long rope, called a cordelle, was fastened to the boat and hauled by men walking along the bank, in the manner of towing on a canal.
- Warping: In difficult stretches, a line could be carried ahead and fastened to a tree or other fixed object, then pulled in.
A trip upstream from New Orleans to the upper Ohio could reportedly take several months, whereas the downstream run could be done much faster. That difference in pace is the key to understanding why keelboats were so important for so long and why they gave way so completely to steam.
The Missouri and the Lewis and Clark expedition
Keelboats also served exploration and the fur trade. The Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 used a keelboat of about 55 feet to carry supplies up the Missouri River at the start of its journey, along with smaller boats. The keelboat was sent back downstream at the end of the first season, carrying specimens and reports. Fur traders on the Missouri used keelboats too, and the difficulties of the river, with its currents, snags and sandbars, tested every crew.
Keelboatmen in folklore
The keelboatmen had a reputation for toughness and for rough humour, and later folklore built heroic characters out of them. The best-known figure, Mike Fink, was a real person to some extent, but many of the stories told about him are legend and cannot be relied on as history. It is safer to say that the crews did demanding labour, were often hired for a single trip, and lived hard, dangerous lives on the water.
Steam takes over
Steam power began to reshape river transport in the early 19th century. The steamboat New Orleans made its famous voyage from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1811 to 1812, and in 1815 Henry Shreve’s Enterprise showed that a steamboat could make a successful trip upstream against the Mississippi’s current. The story of the steamboat pioneers is its own subject, but the effect on keelboats was clear. A powered boat could move goods upstream much faster, with fewer men, and keelboats lost much of their trade on the larger rivers during the following decades.
Keelboats did not disappear immediately. They continued to work on smaller streams and shallower stretches where steamboats could not go, and on the upper Missouri they were used for some time. Eventually railways and larger river craft replaced them.
The mechanical detail of how those steamers were driven, including the paddlewheel mechanism, is part of a wider story. The Mississippi trade also connected to Gulf Coast shipping at New Orleans, where river cargoes were transferred to seagoing vessels.
The yacht keelboat
The later use of the word comes from the sailing world. A keelboat in this sense is a sailboat with a weighted fin or full keel that provides stability and resists sideways drift, in contrast to a lighter dinghy that relies on crew weight and a retractable board. Small one-design keelboats became popular for club racing in the 20th century, and the term is common in sailing today. Many of these designs bear no resemblance to the frontier cargo boats, which were never built for racing or leisure. The shared name is an accident of language rather than a line of descent, and the sailing form is more fully covered in the history of sailboat design.