With its vast distances the West was peculiarly dependent on river transportation — at least until the coming of the railroads. Since the early 19th century, fur traders had floated their pelts down the natural highway of the Missouri and its tributaries to make St. Louis the great fur center of the nation. At the same time a hardy breed of rivermen poled and steered heavily-laden flatboats down the Mississippi to New Orleans, the early West’s great outlet. But such river traffic was largely one-way, and only when steamboats made it possible to travel upstream was western travel revolutionized. The two decades before the Civil War witnessed tremendous growth in steam navigation on the upper Mississippi, the Missouri, the Arkansas and the Red River of Texas. Overlanders to California and Oregon took steamboats up the Mississippi to St. Louis, then continued up the Missouri (the “Big Muddy”) to jumping off places like Independence. By 1860 steamboats had penetrated 2,200 miles up the Missouri’s winding course as far as Fort Benton in Montana, fostering a river trade that lasted until the 1880s when it lost out to the railroads.