Looking through an old photo album purchased at an estate sale, this photo jumped out at me. As you can see, it's the pilothouse — and there's the pilot himself, though I don't know his name — of the steamboat Kate Adams, one of the most popular riverboats that ever traveled along the Mississippi River.
She was such a favorite with passengers that they gave her a special name — "The Lovin' Kate."
I've told her story before, including her construction and sad demise by fire while docked on the Memphis riverfront.
The photo album, showing a Memphis family at all sorts of places around town in the early 1900s, doesn't include any other photos of the Kate Adams, and I have to wonder how the photographer managed to scramble up so high to take this one.
As you can see, the pilot had a 360-degree view of the entire river, and if you've ever read Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, you'll know that it was the pilot — not the captain — who was the "king" of these riverboats. No one questioned him, and he decided when, where, and how fast the boats would go — long before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or the Coast Guard had placed marker lights and buoys and depth gauges to indicate the safest channel along Old Man River. The life of all the passengers was in his hands.
What a world it must have been.
