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16 Youth's Golden Gleam
of the big Ohio-Mississippi boats is depicted by Mark Twain who, a decade later (i 856-1857) was- to live in Cincinnati for a short time, working there as a printer.20 We need only imagine Stephen instead of Mark exploring "a big New Orleans boat/' Said Mark:
I began to prowl about the great steamer and fill myself with joy. She was as clean and dainty as a draw-ingroom; when I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of^ prism-fringed chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant; the bar was marvellous. . . . The boilerdeck [i.e., the second story of the boat, so to speak] was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of deck-hands, firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers. This was unutterable pomp.21
The pomp and the glory were symbolic of the very real economic importance of the steamboat in that period. River Commerce or River Intelligence was a standing head- |
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