The River: A fascination with steamboats of the rivers and the men and women who worked, lived on them

The riverboat captain is a storyteller, and Captain Don Sanders will be sharing the stories of his long association with the river — from discovery to a way of love and life. This is a part of a long and continuing story.

By Capt. Don Sanders
Special to NKyTribune

Charlie Ipcar, a preeminent Maine maritime troubadour, also harbors a curiosity for the blue and brown water-type steamboats. Charlie’s interest prompted the creation of a social media page where he recently posted a photograph from one of eight-thousand in Captain Fredrick Way, Jr.’s collection of Mississippi River-style steamboats. The image featured the sidewheel packet BEN FRANKLIN dead in the water, supposedly at Cincinnati. Still, any native of that stretch of the Ohio River immediately realizes that the BEN FRANKLIN is actually on the Kentucky side, lying off a woodyard somewhere in Newport. Cincinnati lies on the opposite shore in what appears to be a morning fog obscuring most of the large city.

The only other boat identifiable in the gloom is another sidewheel packet, the NICHOLAS LONGWORTH, whose name is barely readable on that steamboat’s larboard paddle box. Although named for one of the Queen City’s most illustrious citizens of the 19th Century, very little information about the vessel bearing his name survives a century and a half later.

The only complete photo I uncovered of the LONGWORTH exists in the University of Wisconsin’s “Historic Steamboat Photographs Collection.” It, too, is grainy and of poor quality. By the way the steamboat faces and the nearness of the buildings in the background close to the river, I’m guessing the picture originated in Louisville, not Cincy. The “NICK” LONGWORTH frequently steamed between the Falls City on the Ohio River and the Crescent City of New Orleans.

According to notes accompanying the UW picture, the LONGWORTH was built during the Civil War at Cincinnati in 1864 and lasted in service until 1875. Her Master in 1864 was Captain Joseph H. Williams. Eight Confederate artillery shells struck her in late May 1864 at Columbia Bend on the Mississippi River. One went through Captain Williams’ room, two through the cabin, and another through the pilothouse. In July 1864, she brought sick and wounded up to Cairo. Following the War, she ran Cincinnati-Memphis-New Orleans.

After the Civil War, by at least 1869, Captain Lewis “Lew” Kates commanded the NICHOLAS LONGWORTH with Eugene Bowers, the Clerk. If Kates was aboard when the LONGWORTH suffered damage by Confederate artillery is not known at this time. But I did discover court records originating in 1869 for a lawsuit by a disgruntled New Orleans horse trader verifying Captain Lew Kates as the Master of the “NICK LONGWORTH” with Eugene Bowers as Clerk. According to the documents, the plaintiff’s horses, enroute on the boat from Louisville to New Orleans, were put ashore to lighten the vessel to climb over a sandbar. After walking overland for some 20 miles, the nags found themselves back aboard at Newburg, Indiana. Soon after the steamboat arrived in the Crescent City, the horse trader sued for damages claiming the trip by hoof hurt his horses. After dragging through the Louisiana court system for nearly five years, the case settled in favor of Captain Lew, his boat, and his crew. Once dismantled in 1875, the LONGWORTH hull became a wharfboat at Cincinnati.

Although I possess a keen interest in the steamboats of the rivers I’ve spent much of my life pursuing, I am equally concerned with the lives of the men and women who worked, traveled, shipped, lived, and died on them. Without the human heart and soul, boats are no more than cold, hard doojiggers made of wood, metal, paint, and putty. So in that spirit, my quest for information on the officers mentioned above of the LONGWORTH began.

Cap’n Way’s Steamboat Directories list only the Steamer LONGWORTH for Captain Williams, and nothing about him appears in “Find-a-Grave,” one of the best research tools on the internet. However, with Captain Lewis “Lew” Kates, both Way and the graveyard website proved both fruitful and filled with information. Kates, born on 29 April 1826, died on 02 June 1894 and lies buried with his wife and family in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati.

Way’s Packet Directory, 1848-1944, lists eight and possibly a ninth steamboat associated with Captain Kates besides the “NICK” LONGWORTH. Cap’n Way says, “Lew Kates was a New Jersey native who spent three years at sea, then came by stage from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in 1848 and went to steamboating.”

Soon after arriving in Pittsburgh, the 22-year-old former bluewater sailor, Captain Way recalled,  “shipped aboard” the RINGGOLD, a 138-ton sternwheeler, built in 1846, “as a deckhand, then became a fireman, and then the second mate;” in later life, he owned the WILL KYLE. The KYLE, a Cincinnati-built sternwheeler named for Capt. Will Kyle, who died at age 33 in Texas, came out of the shipyard in 1879 with Captain Lew in command. 

A year after his original job decking on the RINGGOLD, Captain Kates assumed his first command as the Master of the GENERAL BEW, a small sidewheeler built at Paducah in 1849. Five years later, whether Kates was aboard or not has yet to be discovered; the GEN’L BEW snagged and was lost at Walnut Bend on the Arkansas River with a loss of ten lives. 

In 1865, a sidewheeler, the MINNEOLA, slid down the ways at Parkersburg, West Virginia, but was completed at Cincinnati for the Dean Line to run from the Queen City under the authority of Captain Lewis Kates. In March of 1868, the steamer brought 1,914 bales of Southern cotton to Cincinnati, the largest cotton delivery ever made to that city by way of the river.

Captain Lewis Kates found himself in charge of the Cincy sidewheeler, the ROBT. MITCHELL, sometime before 1875. The MITCHELL, another Cincinnati – New Orleans packet, built in 1871, belonged for a time to Captain Gus Fowler of Paducah fame. Fowler then sold the boat to a Cincinnati conglomerate which included Captain Kates. In the Spring of 1876, the ROBT. MITCHELL delivered 315 live alligators to Cincinnati from New Orleans. The gators ranged “from six inches to 14 feet long,” according to Captain Way’s recollection. 

The THOMAS SHERLOCK, a 1,353 ton, 290 by 46-foot sidewheeler built in Cincinnati in 1873, found Captain Lew Kates as her Master in 1878. Once, when the SHERLOCK lay moored at Louisville, the famed newspaper reporter, author, poet, and popular songwriter Colonel William Shakespeare Hays, better known as “Will S. Hays,” came aboard and later reported: “Capt. Lew Kate’s famed mockingbird Dick is with him on the THOMAS SHERLOCK, but he has grown old and feeble now, and his once cheerful voice, so full of melody, is now reduced to a faint refrain… Poor old Dick! The Terrible Reaper will soon call him to sing no more… but to enter the kingdom of that beautiful bird heaven where his melodies will make his kindred jealous of his musical voice.” Such a personal and intimate mention in print by Col. Hays is a testimony to Captain Lew’s celebrity on the river among his peers. But WHAT about poor old Dick?

Again, Captain Kates commanded a steamboat fresh off the ways in 1892 as the first Master of the JOHN K. SPEED, a Madison, Indiana-built sternwheeler, also in the Cincinnati to New Orleans trade. With Cap’n Lew in charge, the SPEED hauled a boatload of tourists to the Crescent City Mardi Gras from “Ragtown,” as the river community sometimes labeled Cincinnati.
  

The NEW MARY HOUSTON, a sidewheeler built at the Howard Shipyard in Jeffersonville, Indiana, in 1877, ran from Cincinnati to New Orleans. She was often called the “Sloppy Molly” by certain river wags of that time. Captain Way noted: “Capt. Lew Kates was Master in later years. She had just come into Cincinnati from New Orleans with a big cargo on Jan. 10, 1893, when an ice gorge broke above. She and the wharfboat were carried away. She hit a pier of the C&O bridge, knocked down her stacks, and drifted opposite Petersburg, Ky., where the LEVI J. WORKUM landed her. The wharfboat sank at the Big Miami River. Soon after, the NEW MARY HOUSTON was dismantled, and the hull became a barge.” 

Just a few days ago, I’d never heard of Captain Lewis “Lew” Kates. However, since poking around during my quest for more information on the NICHOLAS LONGWORTH, I’ve become infatuated with what I’ve uncovered about an extraordinary Steamboat Captain whose name and fame time has stolen. Perhaps the more I find, the more his name and reputation can be restored and remembered among river men and women living now in an age far removed into the future since Captain Kates was a riverman known and respected among his peers.

Captain Don Sanders is a river man. He has been a riverboat captain with the Delta Queen Steamboat Company and with Rising Star Casino. He learned to fly an airplane before he learned to drive a “machine” and became a captain in the USAF. He is an adventurer, a historian, and a storyteller. Now, he is a columnist for the NKyTribune and will share his stories of growing up in Covington and his stories of the river. Hang on for the ride — the river never looked so good.

 

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