Who would have thought a steamboat trip could spark a revolution? Yet, the epic voyage of the New Orleans, first steamboat to descend the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, changed American civilization as well as the lives of its passengers and crew. Departing Pittsburgh in October 1811, the New Orleans received gala welcomes at every port, and its passage was marked by the Great Comet of 1811 streaking across the sky and by the greatest earthquake ever recorded in the continental United States. Aboard the steamboat, the passengers and crew saw their craft under threats of tribal attack and fire. They experienced romance, weddings and births on deck, weathered disbelief and found new faith, participating unknowingly in the demise of one civilization and the rise of another. America was never the same after the first inland river steamboat passed on to glory.

This first steamboat on western waters, harbinger of the industrial revolution that changed America, was owned by Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston and constructed by Nicholas Roosevelt, whose wife and children joined him as the first steamboat passengers on inland rivers. From the voyage of the New Orleans in 1811 until the docking of the Delta Queen in 2008, steamboats carried passengers along the Ohio and connecting rivers day and night for two centuries. Steamboats stimulated manufacturing and economic development along the inland rivers, launching the Ohio valley's industrial revolution and moving the nation's freight until supplanted by railroads trucks, and towboats. To fuel the New Orleans, some of the first coal mines in the Ohio valley opened, presaging the boating of coal along the rivers to generate power for homes and industry. Pressing the frontier steadily west, steamboats carried Native Americans to new homes and converted agricultural villages into boat construction centers, manufacturing emporiums, and, ultimately, cities, altering the social fabric of both native American and Euro-African settlers alike; even today, steam engines supply most of the energy powering our home appliances and manufactories. The voyage of the New Orleans changed not only the lives of its passengers and crew, it changed ours.

Summary provided by Dr. Leland Johnson

In the dark hours of October 28, 1811, Louisville's Fourth Street wharf was awash with excitement. The steamboat New Orleans had arrived eight days out of Pittsburgh. The noise of the steam pistons was so great that one person felt the end of the world was at hand while an enslaved man assured others that the Day of Judgment could not come at night. Perhaps not, but the Day of Judgment had come for Lexington. Land locked and sixty miles from the Ohio River, her days as Kentucky's commercial center would end. When the steamboat showed it could go back up river, it quickened the pace of Louisville's growth. Described as an enchanter's rod waved over our progress, the era of Mike Fink ended and that of Mark Twain began. In 1820 Lexington had more than three times the population of Louisville, but by 1860 Louisville was seven times larger.
~ George Yater