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The American Queen
'Is best of old and best of new.'

By John Stanchak


	Although constructed in the 1990s, the American Queen* recaptures life on the Mississippi as it used to be.*

Hard steam-driven arms jab out through the stern, over and over, cranking the American Queen's great red wheel. With every deliberate punch, steam jets out the turning arms — fully extended, each is as long as two cars.

The jabbing and cranking is incessant. So is the bass hum of engines, the lisping of steam pistons and the sound of an endless rain made by the turning paddle wheel's spray. The engine room walls are a sterile off-white and the air there is still just lightly scented by oil, grease and diesel fuel. The place looks, sounds and smells like power—new power— and there is the odd sense the whole scene is 150 years old, and that it's not.

The place looks, sounds, and smells like power.

The 3rd Engineer, a tired, hawk-nosed Pole, sits at a computer monitor behind a guardrail, watching the boat's heartbeat. Proud, he points at the firing pistons and his video screen and says in a heavy accent, "Is best of old and best of new."

It's his view of the historic first long-distance run of the largest Mississippi steamboat ever built, an escapade tying together the adventures of Mark Twain, the opulence of America's "Gilded Age," the mythic qualities of the Mississippi River, the service of a quality hotel and all the hope, ambition, money and retro-science a company can muster at the end of the 20th century. In the days ahead, the mix will be topped off with touches of hard luck and humor. It'll all go into the record books as a trip that genuinely offered history fans an impressive travel adventure. After the story gets out, it'll also guarantee a new generation of hard-core travel lovers will have a new experience to add to their wish lists.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, in early June 1995, speaking for the Delta Queen Steamboat Company, national radio broadcast icon Paul Harvey addressed a crowd of well-wishers and, along with his wife, took part in christening the company's newest vessel, the American Queen. A band played, the crowd applauded, and the boat churned up and down the Mississippi, giving friends of the company short rides. Then on June 9 the AQ, as she is known to company veterans, took off north on her maiden voyage.

In New Orleans, where shipbuilding and tourism contribute serious money to the economy, the boat's christening and first trips received respectful press. But on Sunday, June 18, the American Queen won notice on national TV and in wire-service reports when she became trapped on an Ohio River sandbar close to Troy, Indiana.

In the days that followed, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and the AQ's crew swapped blame for the incident — authorities suggesting the boat became stuck through actions of the crew, the company suggesting the vessel went aground on the bar because the river quickly dropped 3.5 feet when operators of a nearby dam adjusted the level without warning. The upshot was, though the boat was forced to sit still for the best part of the week, more newspaper readers and TV viewers got to know her and something about her historic mission than if the American Queen's entertainers had given free performances in every river town along the way. Even under trying circumstances, nothing beat the free publicity.

My own part in the tale started at New Orleans' Robin Street Wharf on June 9. I signed on for the Queen's first trip, a ride I knew was to be her shakedown cruise. Her passenger manifest was made up of company employees, consultants, travel agents, subcontractors and several of their family members, more than 40 engineers and representatives of the company that built her, and honored members of the Paddlewheel Steamboatin' Society of America — a fraternity of frequent steamboaters who regularly patronize the other two boats in the Delta Queen Company line. Some time back, after taking rides on both the antique Delta Queen and the 20-year-old Mississippi Queen, I was given a lapel pin that made me an honorary member of the club.

Every passenger understood this would be a unique trip for travelers accustomed to luxury cruises, one offering a few unpolished edges. That's the purpose of a shakedown, to find out what needs fixing and then deal with it. But I went on board with my own agenda, ready to buttonhole everyone from deck crewmen to officers and get their impressions of what it was like to be in on the enterprise from the beginning. It was my simple reasoning that since we Americans have a reputation for being impressed by most anything that is quantifiably the biggest, the fastest, the richest or the first, the story of the American Queen and her large, fast, opulent maiden voyage had the potential to leave them awestruck.

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John Stanchak is the founding editor of Historic Traveler. Devoted to exotic transport and learning, he says the Delta Queen Steamboat Company combines both interests, offering non-credit history seminars on a few cruises each year.