ROBERT FULTON (1765-1815)

Book: The Beginner's American History

Chapter: XXII | Robert Fluton

Author: D. H. Montgomery

What Mr. Livingston said about Louisiana; a small family in a big house; settlements in the west; the country beyond the Mississippi River.

Even before we bought the great Louisiana country, we had more land than we then knew what to do with; after we had purchased it, it seemed to some people as though we should not want to use what we had bought for more than a hundred years. Such people thought that we were like a man with a small family who lives in a house much too large for him; but who, not contented with that, buys his neighbor's house, which is bigger still, and adds it to his own.

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If a traveller in those days went across the Alleghany Mountains to the west, he found some small settlements in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, but hardly any outside of those. What are now the great states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were then a wilderness; and this was also true of what are now the states of Alabama and Mississippi.

If the same traveller, pushing forward, on foot or on horseback,—for there were no steam cars,—crossed the Mississippi River, he could hardly find a white man outside what was then the little town of St. Louis. The country stretched away west for more than a thousand miles, with nothing in it but wild beasts and Indians. In much of it there were no trees, no houses, no human beings. If you shouted as hard as you could in that solitary land, the only reply you would hear would be the echo of your own voice; it was like shouting in an empty room—it made it seem lonelier than ever.

Emigration to the west, and the man who helped that emigration.

But during the last hundred years that great empty land of the far west has been filling up with people. Thousands upon thousands of emigrants have gone there. They have built towns and cities and railroads and telegraph lines. Thousands more are going and will go. What has made such a wonderful change? Well, one man helped to do a great deal toward it. His name was Robert Fulton. He saw how difficult it was for people to get west; for if emigrants wanted to go with their families in wagons, they had to chop roads through the forest. That was slow, hard work. Fulton found a way that was quick, easy, and cheap. Let us see who he was, and how he found that way.

Robert Fulton's boyhood; the old scow; what Robert did for his mother.

Robert Fulton was the son of a poor Irish farmer in Pennsylvania*. He did not care much for books, but liked to draw pictures with pencils which he hammered out of pieces of lead.

Like most boys, he was fond of fishing. He used to go out in an old scow, or flat-bottomed boat, on a river near his home. He and another boy would push the scow along with poles. But Robert said, There is an easier way to make this boat go. I can put a pair of paddle-wheels on her, and then we can sit comfortably on the seat and turn the wheels by a crank. He tried it, and found that he was right. The boys now had a boat which suited them exactly.

When Robert was seventeen, he went to Philadelphia. His father was dead, and he earned his living and helped his mother and sisters, by painting pictures. He staid in Philadelphia until he was twenty-one. By that time he had saved up money enough to buy a small farm for his mother, so that she might have a home of her own.

*Fulton was born in Little Britain (now called Fulton) in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Fulton goes to England and to France; his iron bridges; his diving-boat, and what he did with it in France.

Soon after buying the farm for his mother, young Fulton went to England and then to France. He staid in those countries twenty years. In England Fulton built some famous iron bridges, but he was more interested in boats than in anything else.

While he was in France he made what he called a diving-boat. It would go under water nearly as well as it would on top, so that wherever a fish could go, Fulton could follow him. His object in building such a boat was to make war in a new way. When a swordfish* attacks a whale, he slips round under him and stabs the monster with his sword. Fulton said, 'If an enemy's war-ship should come into the harbor to do mischief, I can get into my diving-boat, slip under the ship, fasten a torpedo* to it, and blow the ship "sky high."'

Napoleon Bonaparte liked nothing so much as war, and he let Fulton have an old vessel to see if he could blow it up. He tried it, and everything happened as he expected: nothing was left of the vessel but the pieces.

*Swordfish: the name given to a large fish which has a sword-like weapon, several feet in length, projecting from its upper jaw.

*Torpedo: here a can filled with powder, and so constructed that it could be fastened to the bottom of a vessel.

What Fulton did in England with his diving-boat; what he said about America.

Then Fulton went back to England and tried the same thing there. He went out in his diving-boat and fastened a torpedo under a vessel, and when the torpedo exploded, the vessel, as he said, went up like a "bag of feathers," flying in all directions.

The English people paid Fulton seventy-five thousand dollars for showing them what he could do in this way. Then they offered to give him a great deal more—in fact, to make him a very rich man—if he would promise never to let any other country know just how he blew vessels up. But Fulton said, 'I am an American; and if America should ever want to use my diving-boat in war, she shall have it first of all.'

Fulton makes his first steamboat.

But while Fulton was doing these things with his diving-boat, he was always thinking of the paddle-wheel scow he used to fish in when a boy. I turned those paddle-wheels by a crank, said he, but what is to hinder my putting a steam engine into such a boat, and making it turn the crank for me? that would be a steamboat. Such boats had already been tried, but, for one reason or another, they had not got on very well. Robert R. Livingston was still in France, and he helped Fulton build his first steamboat. It was put on a river there; it moved, and that was about all.

Robert Fulton and Mr. Livingston go to New York and build a steamboat; the trip up the Hudson River.

But Robert Fulton and Mr. Livingston both believed that a steamboat could be built that would go, and that would keep going. So they went to New York and built one there.

In the summer of 1807 a great crowd gathered to see the boat start on her voyage up the Hudson River. They joked and laughed as crowds will at anything new. They called Fulton a fool and Livingston another. But when Fulton, standing on the deck of his steamboat, waved his hand, and the wheels began to turn, and the vessel began to move up the river, then the crowd became silent with astonishment. Now it was Fulton's turn to laugh, and in such a case the man who laughs last has a right to laugh the loudest.

Up the river Fulton kept going. He passed the Palisades; he passed the Highlands; still he kept on, and at last he reached Albany, a hundred and fifty miles above New York.

Nobody before had ever seen such a sight as that boat moving up the river without the help of oars or sails; but from that time people saw it every day. When Fulton got back to New York in his steamboat, everybody wanted to shake hands with him—the crowd, instead of shouting fool, now whispered among themselves, He's a great man—a very great man, indeed.

The first steamboat in the west; the Great Shake.

Four years later Fulton built a steamboat for the west. In the autumn of 1811 it started from Pittsburg to go down the Ohio River, and then down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The people of the west had never seen a steamboat before, and when the Indians saw the smoke puffing out, they called it the "Big Fire Canoe."

On the way down the river there was a terrible earthquake. In some places it changed the course of the Ohio so that where there had been dry land there was now deep water, and where there had been deep water there was now dry land. One evening the captain of the "Big Fire Canoe" fastened his vessel to a large tree on the end of an island. In the morning the people on the steamboat looked out, but could not tell where they were; the island had gone: the earthquake had carried it away. The Indians called the earthquake the "Big Shake": it was a good name, for it kept on shaking that part of the country, and doing all sorts of damage for weeks.

The "Big Fire Canoe" on the Mississippi; the fight between steam and the Great River; what steamboats did; Robert Fulton's grave.

When the steamboat reached the Mississippi, the settlers on that river said that the boat would never be able to go back, because the current is so strong. At one place a crowd had gathered to see her as she turned against the current, in order to come up to the landing-place. An old negro stood watching the boat. It looked as if in spite of all the captain could do she would be carried down stream, but at last steam conquered, and the boat came up to the shore. Then the old negro could hold in no longer: he threw up his ragged straw hat and shouted, 'Hoo-ray! hoo-ray! the old Mississippi's just got her master this time, sure!'

Soon steamboats began to run regularly on the Mississippi, and in the course of a few years they began to move up and down the Great Lakes and the Missouri River. Emigrants could now go to the west and the far west quickly and easily: they had to thank Robert Fulton for that.

Robert Fulton lies buried in New York, in the shadow of the tower of Trinity Church. There is no monument or mark over his grave, but he has a monument in every steamboat on every great river and lake in America.

Summary

In 1807 Robert Fulton of Pennsylvania built the first steamboat which ran on the Hudson River, and four years later he built the first one which navigated the rivers of the west. His boats helped to fill the whole western country with settlers.