1865 Kelly View of Steamboat Racing on the Mississippi River

This is Thomas Kelly's c. 1865 large, folio hand-colored lithographic view of a nighttime steamboat race on the Mississippi River. Such races were a dangerous but popular sport in mid-19th-century America, when steamboat companies on the Mississippi and other major rivers competed for the 'fastest ride'. Some such races became famous and were recorded in many popular paintings and decorative prints by artists like Kelly, as here, and Currier and Ives.

A Closer Look

The view displays two paddle steamers, the Fulton and Danna, speeding through the waters of the Mississippi River. It contains evocative details such as fires bursting out of the boats' smokestacks, moonlight glinting off the surface of the water, and submerged trees. Some of the stevedores along the shore in the foreground call to passengers aboard the Danna, cheering them on.

In producing this work, Kelly misspelled the name of one of the contestants as Danna instead of Diana, perhaps an honest mistake, belying his Yankee origins, but more likely to prevent a claim of copyright infringement. The Diana was one of the best-known paddle steamers in operation on the river at the time. It gained acclaim in the 1830s for making the run from New Orleans to Louisville in just under 6 days and for years afterwards was a regular participant in steamboat races.

The Fulton also looks to be a case of deliberate mistaken identity, a nickname created by Kelly derived from Robert Fulton (1765 - 1815), the engineer who developed the first commercially successful steamboats. Despite the misnaming, this illustration is of a famous March 1858 race between the Diana and the Baltic between New Orleans and Louisville, depicted in a similar, c. 1859 lithograph by George Fuller (A Steamboat Race on the Mississippi).

Steamboat Racing

Long before Americans enjoyed watching cars, planes, and other 20th-century vehicles race, they were equally enthralled by horse, train, and steamboat races. Though there was unquestionably a sporting element to the races, they were also undertaken to spur and demonstrate improvements in technology. These were so significant that from the 1820s to the 1840s, trip times between Louisville and New Orleans aboard steamboats on the Mississippi River were cut from several weeks to several days.

While these improvements in travel times were a tremendous accomplishment, steamboat travel was also extremely dangerous. Boilers were prone to explode, igniting cargo such as gunpowder and cotton, and crashes were common. Passenger steamboats often engaged in informal or illicit racing, needlessly putting passenger lives at risk, as is presumed to be the case with the boiler explosion and sinking of the Henry Clay near Yonkers in 1852, which killed some 80 passengers.

This work was most likely published near the end of the golden age of river steamboats in the United States. In 1870, one of the last well-publicized and certainly the most gambled upon race of the era took place between the Robert E. Lee and Natchez. Dubbed the 'Great American Steamboat Race,' between New Orleans and St. Louis, the modern ships and crack crews demonstrated the highest potential of river steamboats, even as they were becoming obsolete due to an ever-expanding railroad network. The race was a media sensation, especially in the South, which was still reeling from the Civil War.

Publication History and Census

This print was published by Thomas Kelly in New York, c. 1865 or perhaps earlier. This print was related to and very possibly an 'inspiration' for similarly titled lithographic prints by the likes of Currier and Ives, Sala and Co., Yates and Co. / Rogerson, and Haskell and Allen, though those works are typically smaller and provide similar but distinct content (the names of the boats and other details changing). By the same token, as described above, Kelly's view was clearly 'inspired' by George Fuller's c. 1859 'A Steamboat Race on the Mississippi (between the Baltic and Diana),' changing some minor details and the names of the ships.

There are several different editions and sizes of this view, some issued in partnership with William C. Robertson. The present example does not have Robertson's imprint and was instead 'Published and Printed' by Kelly, suggesting an early state. Other known examples that conform to this state are held by the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. Most either provide a date of c. 1870 or do not offer a suggested date. Scarce on the market.