The Steamboaters Author:Harry Sinclair Drago From the Early Side-Wheelers to the Big Packets — Steamboaters and steamboatmen who pioneered our great inland waterways and bound the country together wrote one of the great American epics. In less than half a century they fanned out from Pittsburgh, the head of navigation on the Ohio, to the Pacific Coast. When the thosands of emigrants who wen... more »t over the Oregon Trail spread out into the valleys of the Columbia and the Williamette, almost miraculously steamboats appeared to carry their produce. In California it was teh steamboats that transported the goldseekers to the diggings.« less