The Steamboat Bertrand and Missouri River Commerce - Softcover

Switzer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806151935 ISBN 13: 9780806151939

Publisher: OUP, 2015

Synopsis

On April 1, 1865, the steamboat Bertrand, a sternwheeler bound from St. Louis to Fort Benton in Montana Territory, hit a snag in the Missouri River and sank twenty miles north of Omaha. The crew removed only a few items before the boat was silted over. For more than a century thereafter, the Bertrand remained buried until it was discovered by treasure hunters, its cargo largely intact. This book categorizes some 300,000 artifacts recovered from the Bertrand in 1968, and also describes the invention, manufacture, marketing, distribution, and sale of these products and traces their route to the frontier mining camps of Montana Territory.

The ship and its contents are a time capsule of mid-nineteenth-century America, rich with information about the history of industry, technology, and commerce in the Trans-Missouri West. In addition to enumerating the items the boat was transporting to Montana, and offering a photographic sample of the merchandise, Switzer places the Bertrand itself in historical context, examining its intended use and the technology of light-draft steam-driven river craft. His account of steamboat commerce provides multiple insights into the industrial revolution in the East, the nature and importance of Missouri River commerce in the mid-1800s, and the decline in this trade after the Civil War.

Switzer also introduces the people associated with the Bertrand. He has unearthed biographical details illuminating the private and social lives of the officers, crew members, and passengers, as well as the consignees to whom the cargo was being shipped. He offers insight into not only the passengers’ reasons for traveling to the frontier mining camps of Montana Territory, but also the careers of some of the entrepreneurs and political movers and shakers of the Upper Missouri in the 1860s. This unique reference for historians of commerce in the American West will also fascinate anyone interested in the technology and history of riverine transport.

About this title

From the Author

This book took more than 40 years to write owing to the extensive research involved. It is meant to be a research tool for historians, students, and those who are interested in American nineteenth century material culture. In addition to the history of the boat, and biographical material concerning its officers, crew, and passengers, it contains a cross-section of goods being shipped to the Montana goldfields and the histories of the companies that produced them. Information about American patrimony is often difficult to find in historical literature, periodicals, journals, and reference books. Hopefully this volume sheds a little light on the origins and manufacture of of some common and recognizable things and upon some not so common artifacts from our past. Perhaps it will serve to encourage more studies of nineteenth century American material culture.

From the Back Cover

"The wealth of new information in this book is staggering. The Steamboat Bertrand and Missouri River Commerce fills several gaps in our understanding of life on the American frontier during the steamboat era. The book will interest the general public and scholars of western history and archaeology."
Annalies Corbin, author of The Steamboat Montana and the Opening of the West: History, Excavation, and Architecture.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0806151935
• ISBN 13: 9780806151939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376