This book presents a familiar story of steamboats on American rivers, framed in a limited geographical setting, filtered through modern categories of analysis, and enhanced by two new claims about the impact of these nineteenth-century leviathans. The research is prodigious and original, though much of the evidence drawn from it is anecdotal and impressionistic. Still, the writing is clear and effective and the new claims are worth the price of the book.

The familiar story is the rise and fall of the steamboat on America's rivers in the first half of the nineteenth century. From the first steamboat passage between Pittsburgh and New Orleans in late 1811 until the railroads began to take business from the river boats in the 1840s, the “golden age of steamboats” (p. 158) on the rivers beyond the Appalachian Mountains transformed the early American Republic.

The limited geographical setting of this book is what the author calls the “Southwest” or “the interior states,” by which he means “those slave states west of the Appalachian Mountains” (pp. 5–6). In practice, this turns out to be Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas—something like the western cotton belt minus Georgia and Oklahoma. And, as the title suggests, cotton is the object of the study, though by no means it's only subject. Predictable rivers appear—the Mississippi, Missouri, Cumberland, and Tennessee—along with some that will be less familiar: the Big Black, Red, Green, and White, to say nothing of the Atchafalaya, Tallahatchie, and Yazoo.

The modern categories of analysis through which this familiar story is filtered are, predictably, race, class, and gender. Steamboats, says the author, reinforced gender norms. Their main decks were sites of “raw masculine identity” (p. 46) where “gendered expectations of the antebellum South failed to take hold” (p. 59). “Gambling provided a marker between male and female culture,” (p. 73) and “the ladies’ cabin … mediated the tension between the very masculine world of the steamboat and the need for women to inhabit the public space.” (p. 75) Of course, class distinctions abounded, between the wealthy passengers in well-appointed cabins and the riffraff on deck, between the salaried captains and clerks and the rest of the crew—to say nothing of the slaves who often rode and worked the steamboats. Often the conventions of gender and class “faltered,” but steamboats were consistently successful in enforcing racial order.

The evidence for this social history is heavily anecdotal, relying on apocrypha, “tall tales,” myth, and legends (pp. 67, 70–72). At one point, the author admits that “it is unknown how many saloons were abuzz with rumors of late night indiscretions,” but that does not stop him from concluding that “riverboats did not live up to expectations to guard a woman's virtue” (p. 75). The problem with these stories, however, is not so much that they are unreliable as that they are beside the point. The author's stated purpose is to explore the impact of the steamboat on the Southwest. That work is limited mostly to two chapters. But those two chapters make serious and substantial claims backed by solid—if not conclusive—evidence.

Chapter 2, on Indian removal, makes two claims. First, the growing penetration of steamboats into the secondary rivers of the Southwest opened up new land to white settlement and agricultural development—especially cotton. More than any other crop or industry, cotton moved into this new territory, expanding the economy, the export market, and the demand for slaves. King Cotton, in short, came to power on lands made possible by steamboats. And, of course, these were the lands to which Native Americans had previously retreated as whites took possession of the choicer lands on the coast. So Indian removal in the Southwest was accelerated by the increasing demand for the lands occupied by the Native Americans. Furthermore, says Robert Gudmestad, the steamboats carried most of displaced Native Americans during at least part of their migration to Oklahoma. Indeed, the author believes that displacement of the Indians may have weighed less heavily on the consciences of the white evictors because the Indians were being transported by such a humane conveyance—though there is no evidence to support that surmise.

The author's second and central argument, appearing in Chapter 7, is that the steamboat was a “floating engine of capitalism” (p. 155). This claim flows from the argument about Indian removal. The steamboat opened up vast new acreage to American agriculture—mostly cotton—by promising settlers on the new lands cheap and reliable transportation to take their products to a worldwide market and to bring goods back up stream to furnish their mansions, adorn their persons, and laden their dining tables. At this juncture, the book begins to have a familiar ring to it, but the wealth of detail about the secondary rivers and the transport of cotton bales on the decks of steamboats lends it a fresh and stimulating flavor all its own.