[PDF] A History Of Showboats On The Western Rivers eBook

Author : Louis C. Hunter
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 721 pages
File Size : 28,56 MB
Release : 2012-04-30
Category : Transportation
ISBN : 0486157784

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Richly detailed definitive account covers every aspect of steamboat's development — from construction, equipment, and operation to races, collisions, rise of competition, and ultimate decline of steamboat transportation.

Author : Philip Graham
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 40,69 MB
Release : 2014-01-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0292775555

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This book is a delightful and authoritative record of America's showboats from the first one, launched in 1831, to the last, ultimately tied up at a St. Louis dock. It is also a record of the men and women who built and loved these floating theaters, of those who performed on their stages, and of the thousands who sat in their auditoriums. And, lastly, it is a record of a genuine folk institution, as American as catfish, which for more than a century did much to relieve the social and cultural starvation of our vast river frontier. For these showboats brought their rich cargoes of entertainment—genuine laughter, a glimpse of other worlds, a respite from the grinding hardship of the present, emotional relaxation—to valley farmers, isolated factory workers and miners, and backwoodsmen who otherwise would have lacked all such opportunities. To the more privileged , the showboats brought pleasant reminder of a half-forgotten culture. They penetrated regions where churches and school had not gone, and where land theaters were for generations to be impossible. Like circuit preachers, they carried their message to the outer fringes of American civilization. In spite of many faults, it was a good message. The frontier had created this institution to fill a genuine need, and it lasted only until other and better means of civilizing these regions could reach them—good roads, automobiles, motion pictures, schools, churches, newspapers, and theaters. But although the showboats have passed into history, they have left a rich legacy. As long as the Mississippi flows into the Gulf, their story will fire the imagination of Americans. Showboating has become so legendary that few Americans know what this unique institution was really like. In Showboats, at long last, the true story emerges. It differs in many important respects from the motion picture and fictional versions to which Americans are accustomed, but it is not a whit the less glamorous. Philip Graham has told his story with imagination, genuine insight, and complete devotion to facts. No one who is interested in America's past should fail to read it.

Author : Billy Bryant
Publisher : Pickle Partners Publishing
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 23,90 MB
Release : 2018-12-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1789125030

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RECOLLECTIONS OF A FAMILY WHO LIVED THEIR LIVES AS SHOWBOAT ENTERTAINERS ON AMERICAN RIVERS. Children of the Ol’ Man River, which was first published in 1936, tells the colorful and witty life story of the Bryants, a poor family who found fortune aboard the Mississippi steamboat they built and performed on at the beginning of this century. In addition to chronicling his own family’s history, Bryant provides an excellent introduction to the importance and history of river travel and entertainment on the most famous of American rivers. For many years, colorful showboats traveled the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries, bringing entertainment to eager audiences in communities large and small. Huntington was a regular stop for the showboats, which made their arrival known by the musical strains of a powerful steam calliope, audible for miles around. Hearing the music, people would make a beeline for the 10th Street river landing to have a look at the boat and see what time the show would start. Some of the boats were lavish floating palaces, while others were far from grand. Some traveled only for a summer season or two, others for years. Billy Bryant’s Showboat plied the inland waterways of the Ohio River watershed from before the First World War until 1942, bringing a blend of melodrama and vaudeville, laughter and therapeutic tears, into the lives of isolated people in rural communities along the way.

Author : John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe
Publisher :
Page : 80 pages
File Size : 11,21 MB
Release : 1871
Category : Maryland
ISBN :

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Stories heard as child by author, backed up by documentation, of voyage taken by his sister and her husband, Nicholas J. Roosevelt in 1811.