Steamboat Natchez

The ninth vessel to bear the name Natchez is a magnificent Frankenstein: her copper bell was smelted from 250 silver dollars for a purer tone, her whistle reportedly salvaged from a ship that sank in 1908, and her 1925 steam engines once pushed coal for U.S. Steel. She is one of only two true steam-powered sternwheelers left on the Mississippi, a floating museum built from the bones of her predecessors.

The name has been recycled since 1823, when the first Natchez, a sidewheeler out of New York, carried the Marquis de Lafayette on his farewell tour of America before burning at her New Orleans dock a decade later. A later Natchez, under Captain Thomas P. Leathers, made the name famous for the wrong reason: a 1,210-mile race to St. Louis in 1870, lost to the Robert E. Lee by six hours and thirty-three minutes, fog at Devil’s Island cited as the excuse. The current Natchez, assembled in 1975 from other boats’ spare parts, has managed to keep the name without repeating the defeat.