GREAT STEAMBOAT RACE WILL STOP BY CAPE GIRARDEAU

Since 1991 the Great Steamboat Race has made a special stop in Cape Girardeau as a kickoff to the area's July 4th celebration. This year is no exception.

Steamboats represent the romance and splendor of the Wild West when it was young. Brightly painted and suitably adorned, two of those Southern ladies, the Delta Queen and Mississippi Queen, will be docking at the Broadway floodgate between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Wednesday on a leg of their 18th race up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis.

The Great Steamboat Race is a reenactment of the famous 1870 race between the Natchez and Robert E. Lee and isn't actually a race until the final 6 miles to St. Louis.

The first Great Steamboat Race pitted the wily Capt. John W. Cannon, a Hancock County, Ky., native and his Robert E. Lee against Capt. Tom P. Leathers' Natchez. Leathers challenged Cannon after tiring of hearing about Cannon's exploits on the Mississippi River.

Cannon prepared his boat by removing the glass from the Robert E. Lee's pilot house, the steam escape pipes, doors, windows shutters, hoists, anchors and rigging -- all of which may have been responsible for Cannon beating Leathers to St. Louis by more than six hours. The Robert E. Lee's time of three days, 18 hours and 14 minutes over the 1,135 river miles is still a record.

"In the flush times of steamboating a race between two notoriously fleet steamers was an event of vast importance," Mark Twain wrote. "The date was set for it several weeks in advance and from that time forward the whole Mississippi Valley was in a state of consuming excitement. Politics and the weather were dropped and people talked only of the coming race."

The 285-foot-long, 43-foot-tall Delta Queen was built in 1926 and spent 19 years in the service of the U.S. Navy before she began steaming the Mississippi River in 1947. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989.

The Mississippi Queen is much larger at 382-feet long and 54-feet tall. She was commissioned in 1976 at a cost of $27 million and is modeled after a traditional Mississippi River steamboat design.

Both boats are owned by the Delta Queen Steamboat Co. of New Orleans, and are two of the last three steamboats left in the United States. Between them they'll carry more than 500 passengers and 250 crew members in this year's race.

The boats will be at the Cape Girardeau floodgates until 3 p.m. Wednesday when they will pull out to resume their trip. While here, there will be a banner contest between the two steamers, but the boats will not be open for public tours.