Once Upon America

America has always been about moving on. It has built the best and fastest wooden ships, railroads, automobiles, airplanes and spacecraft. Even its unique style of architecture, the balloon frame house, was intended to be mobile. And, arguably, the most American of music, the Blues, has the sound of the Big Muddy rolling under the keel of a Mississippi riverboat.

It has been so since the beginning.

Point -- When the U.S. 44-gun frigate Constitution slipped her ways in 1797, she became the first of a class of American supercruisers. Built at great cost, incorporating cutting-edge technology, she was a phenomenal financial and military risk for the new government. But the risk paid off. Crossmembers on her gun deck braced the hull against a motion called "hogging" that made the larger European frigates less maneuverable and able to carry fewer guns. Shot taken from the British Guerriere during the War of 1812 struck the Constitution's thick timbers and bounced off, prompting the crew to cheer "Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!". With the sinking of the frigates Guerriere and Java, the British Admiralty issued instructions that British warships were to approach Constitution-class frigates only in squadron strength.

Point -- Commerce along the length of the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans and westward on the Missouri, made possible by the invention of the high-pressure steam engine and the flat-bottomed riverboat, carried with it enormous potential for profit and prodigious risks. These included the dangers of foundering on submerged snags and being ripped apart by exploding boilers. Before the coming of railroads, it was the riverboats that carried Americans on their race for fortune and glory on the Western frontier.

Point -- The lack of good roads had been the main obstacle to western expansion. The riverboat removed that obstacle. However, there were not enough waterways to open up all of the interior to commerce. For that, you needed a different kind of river. European technology had already provided part of the answer in the form of steam-driven engines running on steel rails. Americans seized that solution and raced on. Railroad builders who came to the United States from the old world in the 1840s and '50s to see how Americans laid track so fast were horrified to find that it was done using narrow gage, tightening-radius, negative-bank rails which no conventional locomotive could hold. The bogie truck, invented by a self-taught engineer from New York, mounted four little wheels on a swivel at the front of the engine to guide it around curves. With the help of narrow gage railroads and John Bloomfield Jervis's bogie truck, Americans crossed the Rockies on rivers of steel and sent back the goods that fueled the growth of Eastern cities for generations.

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