When Horses Walked on Water: Horse-Powered Ferries in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

"When Horses Walked on Water: Horse-Powered Ferries in Nineteenth-Century America" by Kevin J. Crisman and Arthur B. Cohn is reviewed.

When Horses Walked on Water: Horse-Powered Ferries in Nineteenth-Century America. By Kevin J. Crisman and Arthur B. Cohn. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. xviii, 292 pp. $37.50, ISBN 1-56098-843-6.)

In 1983, an underwater survey of Lake Champlain revealed a mysterious artifact: a century-old boat with a pair of paddle wheels but no engine. Among those recognizing that horses provided the boat's motive power, authors Kevin J. Crisman (a nautical archaeologist) and Arthur B. Cohn (a museum director) spent the next several years cataloging the wreck and researching the career of horse-powered ferries in the antebellum United States. The resulting book, the subject's only extant scholarly treatment, is a valuable addition to the fields of historical archaeology, the history of technology, and nineteenth-century American social history.

Readers interested in the integration of historical and archaeological methodologies will appreciate the authors' goal of describing both the horse ferry's "design and construction" and "the people who owned and traveled on horseboats." The book succeeds admirably with the former: the last three chapters and appendices provide a detailed account of underwater recovery expeditions, laboratory analysis of artifacts, technological specifications, and conclusions based on the material evidence. Although many historians will be disappointed with the scant discussion of the horse ferry's impact on the daily lives of its clients, others will applaud the carefully researched details concerning ferry owners' businesses and the work of their human and equine employees. For example, historians know very little about the role of animals in nineteenth-century American society; this book sheds new light on horses' crucial contributions (and human perceptions of them). Combined, the archaeological evidence of broken horseshoes and the historical evidence of travelers' descriptions of "Poor Charlie" and other ferry-horses provide a rare depiction of horses as living engines.

Social historians and historians of technology will appreciate the authors' extensive research on an important but previously obscure topic. Newspapers, travel accounts, paintings and photographs, broadsides, and business and patent records provide context for the archaeological material. Ferry owners' stategranted monopoly charters, for example, provide an important nineteenth-century illustration of the American system of public/private cooperation to maintain transportation and other social institutions. To their credit, the authors avoid the common presentist slant with which horse-powered transportation is usually viewed (even by scholars); they build rich descriptions of horse ferries from their evidence rather than condemning the animalpowered vessels as inefficient "relics of a quaint bygone era."

The book may be best utilized by most historians as an evidentiary and methodological treatise rather than an analytical one. The book's first half (the historical discussion) would benefit from attention to transitions and overall narrative flow. Removing the separation of the historical evidence from the archaeological evidence (in the book's second half ) would help the reader more easily connect the two. Finally, this reviewer would have preferred more analysis of the importance of horse ferrying to citizens of the American towns and neighborhoods that it served. These points aside, this book provides an important bridge between the work of historians and archaeologists. We can all benefit from the interdisciplinary strategy so well recommended by

When Horses Walked on Water.

Susan D. Jones

University of Colorado

Boulder, Colorado