Ever wonder what it was like to eat on an American steamboat in the 1830s?  No need to keep wondering; James Logan, a Scotsman who traveled through America in the early 1830s, described it.  He traveled deck passage, which meant that all you got was a place on the deck amidst whatever cargo was also being shipped.  You had to bring your own food, although a stove was supplied so passengers could stay warm.

He traveled on the Ohio River.  He paid $8 for a ticket up the Ohio and $3 more for some bread, cheese, and apples, which lasted him for the four day voyage from St. Louis to Louisville, but then his food ran out.

“We remained here for a day,” he wrote, “and my store of provisions being exhausted, I purchased a coffee-pot, some ham, Indian flour, and a sack, from one of the passengers….Some coffee, bread, and apples, cost nearly two dollars more, and my stock was now reduced to two dollars, on which I had to travel nearly three hundred miles.”  To avoid paying another dollar to keep traveling he gathered wood for the steamer, which had a wood-fired boiler.

Later, when he got off the steamer, he thought back on cooking for the trip.

Three other passengers, who had no coffee-pot, joined me at meals, but I used to cook for all, as the rest were not so good at it.  I kneaded the Indian corn into cakes, fired them, fried the ham and sausages, and prepared the coffee.  Besides all this, I frequently wooded twice a day, and thus was kept in exercise.  Although I cooked only twice a day, about eight in the morning, and five in the evening, we found the two meals quite sufficient.

All in all, though, he found the trip uncomfortable, and the first thing he did on disembarking in Pittsburgh was eat a big breakfast.

Source: James Logan, Notes of a Journey Through Canada, the United States of America and the West Indies (Edinburgh: Fraser and Co., 1839), pages 117-118, 124.