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Steamboat engines were routinely pushed well beyond their design limits, tended by engineers who often lacked a full understanding of the engine's operating principles. With a complete absence of regulatory oversight, most steamboats were not adequately maintained or inspected, leading to more frequent catastrophic failures.
New Orleans was the first steamboat on the western waters of the United States.Her 1811–1812 voyage from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to New Orleans, Louisiana, on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers ushered in the era of commercial steamboat navigation on the western and mid-western continental rivers.
The route of the steamboats began in the Colorado River Delta, where there was at first just an anchorage near Robinson's Landing in Baja California, 10 miles (16 km) above the river mouth and 40 miles (64 km) below Fort Yuma. Here they picked up their cargoes from ships in the river, to avoid paying Mexican customs duties for landing their cargo.
During its early trips on the route it made $16,000 each trip for the Simmons, Hutchinson & Company. The second and larger steamer up the Sacramento was the 755-ton side-wheel steamship SS Senator, a former Atlantic coastal steamer from Boston. It arrived from its voyage around Cape Horn, on October 7, 1849, and began running on the river ...
Major tributaries of the Columbia that formed steamboat routes included the Willamette and Snake rivers. Navigation was impractical between the Snake River and the Canada–US border , due to several rapids , but steamboats also operated along the Wenatchee Reach of the Columbia, in northern Washington , and on the Arrow Lakes of southern ...
The last steamboat in regular service on the Upper Yukon River was Klondike (Klondike II), which made her last run on July 4, 1955. The last commercial steamboat to operate under its own power on the Yukon River was the Keno, from Whitehorse to Dawson City on August 26–29, 1960. It was an equipment run to move the boat for purposes of putting ...
In much more recent decades, starting in the early 1980s, a number of replica steamboats have been built, for use as tour boats in river cruise service on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Although still configured as sternwheelers, they are non-steam-driven boats or ships, also called motor vessels , powered instead by diesel engines .
Unlike later steamboats, no detailed plans of the ship were made. Instead, a wooden model of the hull was carved and altered according to Vanderbilt's satisfaction. Using the model as a guide, full-sized outlines were then drawn in chalk on the timber to be used for the hull, which was then cut and assembled by carpenters.