In this way, steamboats came to dominate the freight and passenger trade on the Mississippi. Thousands of people and hundreds of tons of cargo passed through the western waterways. In a country with no standing nobility, money was often the deciding factor for a man’s social standing. For canny steamboat operators this meant that the money they made could see their social standing increase. The steamboat trade initially focused on fur and lead trades. With the rising conflicts of the times though, soon many captains had taken to delivering Native American grants, transporting soldiers, delivering manufacturing equipment and raw materials to industrial cities such as Pittsburg.

With the promise of wealth and escalated social standing, in the …show more content…
They would set rules and conditions that were meant to protect both the insurer and the policy holder but many captains found the insurance companies to be too restrictive for their liking. These rules included a limit on the amount of cargo that could be carried, how it was stored and loaded and also set guidelines on the number and quality of the crew. These policies and the conditions surrounding them, meant that the insurance companies had a great deal of power over how the vessel was managed. Captains would often see this outside influence as an infringement on their freedom to operate their steamer in the manner they thought best. Despite this many gritted their teeth for the security that the insurance company alleged to …show more content…
When steamboats first began to appear, vessels were insured for three quarters of their total value but by mid-century this had lowered to two thirds and by the end of the 1800s a vessel was insured for only half its value. The captains would often work out ways around this though. Some captains would pay higher premiums to have larger percentages of their vessel covered by the insurance company, others would take out multiple policies on a single vessel. Part owners would often insure themselves privately, so that if tragedy struck then they would not be adversely impacted. Men that had experience on the river but left the river for one reason or another, would often find employment in the insurance company. They would be employed as insurance assessors, sent out to inspect a vessel and its crew before a policy was issued or to ensure that the rules for its policy were being followed. Needless to say tensions between the crew and such an individual were often high, as many of these assessors had previous scores to