Delta Queen Steamboat Company Inc.: the American spirit is back on all three sternwheelers - Company Profile

Cruise Travel, May-June, 2003 by Theodore W. Scull

We learned from him why boats that are pushing barges are oddly called tows (because the origin of the word is a noun referring to the barge as the tow) and how one barge can carry as much as 60 tractor trailers. So multiply that by 15 to apply to the typical Mississippi River tow churning past carrying coal, stone, fertilizers, and grain. It's a big haulage business on the rivers. On the looping Tennessee that first aims southwest, then due west and finally north to the Ohio, we pass into a lock chamber at Muscle Shoals that drops the boat 94 feet. This single lock is higher than the combined height of the three Gatun Locks in the Panama Canal. Muscle Shoals got its name from the abundance of mussels, but no one seems to know why the spelling got changed. There are theories about the muscles the Indian canoeists needed to paddle up through the rapids, but there are no hard facts.

Everyone has a favorite stretch of river, and on this cruise more than half the passengers are repeaters, so they delight in sharing what they like best. The Upper Ohio from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati offers a downriver route past farms and faded industrial sites, small towns that still consider the river their front yard, and big cities where flotillas of small pleasure boats can cause a navigation headache for river pilots. The Lower Mississippi is a commercial Waterway, hemmed in by levees that hide the columned plantations (such as Houmas House and Oak Alley, both settings for Hollywood films) and towns with square blocks of ante-bellum homes such as St. Francisville, Natchez, and Vicksburg. The Upper Mississippi from St. Louis to St. Paul offers Huckleberry Finn's Hannibal, high bluffs, spectacular fall foliage, and locks where folks gather to watch the steamboats pass through.

Occasional trips that appeal to veteran steamboaters ply the Intracoastal Waterway between New Orleans and Galveston; the Atchafalaya River to the Gulf of Mexico; the Red River to Shreveport, Louisiana; the Arkansas River to Little Rock and Tulsa, deep into Oklahoma; the slack-water Cumberland River to Nashville; the canyon-like Kanawha River to Charleston, West Virginia; and the Illinois River in the direction of Chicago. Every river has its own characteristics, and some steamboat aficionados are out to collect them all, the way some folks collect states (see map on page 24).

On the Delta Queen, the pianist, singer, and even the captain can play the steam calliope, and when in lock chambers or passing towns, tradition calls for a tuneful burst of Cruising Down The River, I'm Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover, or Raindrops Keep Falling--as they did for the first two days of my most recent trip. At Clifton, Tennessee, a line of cars on a parallel road swerved off to the shoulder to watch us pass, and later at a railroad bridge a train engineer blew his horn and we replied with a throaty whistle accompanied by a tall column of white steam.

The riverboats are American icons, and the commercial river rats--pilots and crews--don't mind that the passenger boats get preference in locking through. The Delta Queen steamboats have an even more important mission, archaic as it may seem, that puts them at the top of the list. They are registered Post Offices carrying the U.S. Mail, and lucky recipients back home get uniquely stamped postcards to prove it.