The stern-wheeler Belle of Louisville holds its annual race with the Delta Queen during the Kentucky Derby Festival.
From there, they met another steamer, which ferried them across the 40-mile-wide lake to a stern-wheeler destined for the Caribbean.
The George M. Verity stern-wheeler is preserved as a riverboat museum, and a replica of Iowa's first schoolhouse (the Galland School, 1830) is just north.
I felt excited inside, like when the stern-wheeler is coming up the river for the first time after the ice breaks up".
From his terrace, shaded by the magnolia and black locust trees that grow along the bluffs, he can watch stern-wheeler riverboats and barge traffic moving in the swift brown current.
By some miracle of good sense, all motorboats are banned, so the waters are roiled by nothing more modern than sculls, canoes and a poky little excursion stern-wheeler.
With the assistance of Berton Churchill, Eugene Pallette, Francis Ford and a newcomer who calls himself Irvin S. Cobb, "Steamboat Round the Bend" emerges with merry success.Here Mr. Rogers is a kindly medicine man and proprietor of a rattletrap stern-wheeler who crowns a career of amiable chicanery by defeating Mr. Cobb and "The Pride of Paducah" in the great steamboat race.
From the old dock areas along the riverfront, where stern-wheelers once called regularly, the streets rise steeply to the east.
The Showboat Majestic, a historic monument, stages popular theatre productions on the riverfront, and renovated stern-wheelers are based across the Ohio River at Covington.
During the period 1920 1940, flat-bottomed stern-wheelers operated on the Mackenzie, but they were replaced after 1945 by small diesel tugs that could push several barges.
