Read Online The Great American Steamboat Race by Benton Rain Patterson - Free Book Online

not stopped, water would drain away from the leaking boiler and the boiler’s quarter-inch-thick iron plates would become overheated and burst apart, their fragments smashing into and bursting the other boilers, which would erupt in a devastating explosion and spread the furnace fires to the entire vessel.
    Ordinarily in such an emergency, the vessel would immediately put into shore and tie up to a tree while the furnace fires were doused with water and the boilers allowed to cool before a crewman would crawl into the boiler to find the leak and patch it. That procedure would take hours, perhaps days. The Robert E. Lee would be sitting idle while the Natchez steamed triumphantly past it and on to victory at St. Louis. Captain Cannon hated that thought. From the open furnace door, he and his engineers could see a spot where the furnace fire had been extinguished and where steam rose from the bed of the furnace and they guessed that the leak was from a connection just above that point. The connection was from the No. 4 boiler, which must be where the leak was, they reasoned. Somebody would have to crawl under the No. 4 boiler to find the exact spot and devise a way to patch it. In the meantime, the slowed Robert E. Lee would continue its course toward St. Louis. And all concerned would hope for the best.
    Chief engineer Perkins, though willing, was too old and not nearly limber or dexterous enough to squeeze himself into the hot, cramped, two-foothigh crawl space beneath the furnace and boilers to find the leak and make the repair. Tom Berry, the first assistant engineer, was too large a man to fit into the space, and while four other assistants stood deciding whether to volunteer, assistant engineer John Wiest stepped up and said he would try it.
    The leak was found to be actually in the mud drum, the long, cylindrical, troughlike device below the boiler and connected to it. Its function was to collect the sediment that was suspended in the water that was pumped from the river into boilers. The No. 4 boiler was the fourth boiler from the right side of the row of eight boilers. Its position between the other boilers made the underside of it probably the hottest spot beneath the boilers. In an attempt to cool off the bottoms of the boilers as best they could, crewmen brought out one of the boat’s hoses and sent a stream of water onto the bellies of the boilers.
    Wiest stripped off his clothes and put on a set of heavy, protective overalls. He tied a handkerchief around his head to protect it from the heat and pulled on a pair of thick gloves to protect his hands. Equipping himself with a hammer, a cold chisel and a poker borrowed from the firemen who manned the furnaces, he lowered himself to the deck and on his stomach wriggled his way into the space beneath the No. 4 boiler’s mud drum, then twisted his body to lie on his back. Not knowing whether he would be scalded or suffocated, he braved the searing heat and with the cold chisel in one hand and the heavy hammer in the other, he pounded away at the rivets until he had forced out enough of them to pry back a section of the iron plating. Through the opening he had created he was able to stab with the poker and widen a hole in the tile bed of the glowing furnace, close to the mud drum. Peering through it, he could see that it was not one leak but many and they were in the top flange of the mud drum, where the No. 4 boiler connected to it. Water was spraying from a number of small, rusty perforations.
    Then suddenly he blacked out, overcome by the stifling heat. Cannon and two other steamboat captains, anxiously watching him, saw his body go limp, and immediately crawled into the space, grabbed Wiest by the legs and hauled him out, then placed him on the starboard guard, the extension of the The Currier & Ives imaginative depiction of the race. The Robert E. Lee ’s lead was threatened, although not to the extent shown in the Currier & Ives print, when one of its boilers