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"Steamboat a'comin." These words bring to mind paddlewheels, Dixieland bands, gamblers, and adventure during the golden age of river travel, roughly 1847 to 1870. Wealthy Southern planters boarding the gangplanks in New Orleans, bound for St. Louis on business, were often accompanied by remarkably attractive Creole lasses of French ancestry. With flawless skin and classic features, they traded their looks and vivacious personalities, restrained only slightly by a bit of genteel culture, for the luxuries which accompanied life as a mistress to the rich. Their presence on the floating hotels undoubtedly contributed to the slanderous whisperings in the North that the luxurious steamboats were floating bordellos.
But these young women were not the only ,filles de joie found on the river. With heavy competition and a traveling public which was 75% male, the steamboats vied for approval with music from five-piece orchestras, the finest in wines and liqueurs, and restaurants filled with delectable offerings. Often the delectable offerings included the additional "convenience" of a woman. Although the captains usually denied any knowledge, no courtesan worked without their permission. The captains assigned them staterooms abaft of the wheel, told them which parts of the deck were restricted, and forced them to dine alone before the doors were opened to the other passengers. Drunkenness and disorderly conduct resulted in being placed ashore at the very next landing. On the whole, they must have practiced great decorum, as this passage in "History of River Navigation," reveals, as Captain E. W. Gould discusses their "ladylike" deportment, "Families traveling together were seldom aware that there were scarlet sisters among their fellow passengers." High praise when considering the source: Captain Gould was a religious man and strict disciplinarian who did not tolerate what Captain Samuel Rider called "the whore trade."
Northerner's mistakenly termed these women "Creole Belles", thinking Creole meant a person of mixed blood. The women were actually quadroons, the offspring of a mulatto and a white. Tall, long-legged, and graceful, they possessed the legendary beauty which had become famed at the annual New Orleans Quadroon Ball. By the standards of antebellum times, they earned "big" money both on the steamboats and in the river downs where men vied for the privilege of spending their money.
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