Showboat

Showboat, name given to the floating theatres of the great North American rivers of the West, particularly on the Mississippi and the Ohio, which represented an early and most successful attempt to bring drama to the pioneer settlements. It is not known who first built a showboat or at what date. The first record of actors travelling by boat dates from 1817, when Noah Ludlow took a company of players along the Cumberland river to the Mississippi in his ‘Noah's Ark’. But they acted on land, and it was apparently William Chapman, formerly an actor in London and New York, who first commissioned the building of a true showboat. The interior was long and narrow, with a shallow stage at one end and benches across the width of the boat, the whole being lighted by candles. Here the Chapmans with their five children played one-night stands along the rivers wherever enough people could be found to provide an audience. The entrance fee was about 50 cents, and the staple fare strong melodrama or fairy-tale plays, ranging from Kotzebue's The Stranger to Cinderella. Starting in the autumn from as far upstream as possible, usually Pittsburgh, the showboat made its way downstream to New Orleans, where it was abandoned, the company returning to their starting-point to descend the river again in a new boat. Steam-tugs were later used to take the showboat, renamed the ‘Steamboat Theatre’, back to its point of departure, some managers even owning their own tugs. By the time Chapman died in 1839 there were a great number of showboats on the rivers, but his widow, with her two sons, continued to operate under the name of ‘Chapman's Floating Palace’ until 1847, when they sold the boat to Sol Smith, who lost it a year later in a collision. Another showboat captain of these early days was Henry Butler, an old theatre manager who took a combined museum and playhouse up and down the Erie Canal for many years, showing stuffed animals and waxworks by day, and at night producing nautical dramas such as Jerrold's Black-Ey'd Susan. A more elaborate boat was the ‘Floating Circus Palace’; built in Cincinnati in 1851, it was intended for spectacular equestrian shows, having living quarters, dressing rooms, stables, a museum, and a ring capable of holding 45 horses. The steamboat which accompanied it, the James Raymond, had a theatre used for straight dramatic performances. Showboats increased in numbers and popularity until the Civil War in 1861 drove them off the rivers.

It was not until 1878, when Captain A. B. French took his New Sensation, the first of five successive boats, along the Mississippi that showboats again became familiar sights. French had to live down a good deal of prejudice, but the high moral tone of his productions and the good behaviour of his small company soon made his entertainments popular. At one time French and his wife, the first woman to hold a pilot's licence and master's papers on the Mississippi, ran two showboats, piloting one each. Like other showboat captains of the time, they usually avoided the cities and larger towns, not wishing to risk comparison with the theatres springing up everywhere. A formidable rival to the Frenches was Captain E. A. Price, owner of the Water Queen, built in 1885. This had a stage 19 ft. wide, lit by oil, a good stock of scenery, a company of about 50, and, like all showboats, a steam calliope. Another well known manager was Captain E. E. Eisenbarth, owner of the first boat to bear the name Cotton Blossom. This was capable of seating a large audience, and on a stage 20 ft. by 11 ft. presented a three-hour entertainment of straight solid drama, usually popular melodrama. The Cotton Blossom was one of the first showboats to be lit by electricity. In 1907 Captain Billy Bryant, author of Children of Ol' Man River (1936), began his career as a showboat actor when his father launched the Princess. By 1918 the Bryants were able to build their own boats, on which they gave successful revivals of many good old melodramas, the most popular being Ten Nights in a Bar Room, one of the many dramatizations of a temperance novel by William Pratt. Other well-known showboat personalities were the Menkes, four brothers who in 1917 bought French's fifth and last New Sensation, built in 1901, from Price, who had purchased it from French's widow in 1902. They kept the old name and in 1922–3 took the boat on a trip which lasted a year and covered 5,000 miles. The plays given in her, as in the other boats owned by the Menkes, were still mainly melodramas and typical Victorian entertainments, though in the late 1920s they took to presenting musical comedies. In the years before the slump of 1929 a number of new managements made their appearance on the water, mostly offering melodrama and variety. But they were hard hit by the economic depression, and for some time the Menkes' Golden Rod and Bryant's Showboat were the only ones still functioning. The last to be built was the Dixie Queen, launched in 1939, and converted into an excursion boat in 1943. Found nowhere but in the USA, the showboat represents a survival of the colourful pioneering days of the Golden West.