When Horses Could Walk on the St. Lawerece

I can only imagine the talk of it.

Picture it: the year is 1815, and the St. Lawrence is doing what it does best—pretending to be a broad, lazy millpond just to make honest men curse.

Two figures stand on the stony shore where the Oswegatchie pours itself into the river—one of them a fellow named Henry Plumb, who had the look of a man not quite satisfied with the way the world was arranged. They stood there with their coats pulled snug against the damp wind, squinting into the pale morning light.

Out across the water, a single sailboat drifted back from Prescott, Ontario. Drifted, mind you—not sailed—its canvas hanging slack like laundry that never quite dried. A good hour it had been out there, moving just enough to prove it wasn’t anchored.

Henry watched it for a while, studying the hopeless progress, and then he turned to his companion with a glint that meant somebody’s peace of mind was about to be disturbed.

“I mean to build me a ferry,” he declared.

“A ferry?” The other man cocked his brow, as though Henry had suggested catching the wind itself in a burlap sack. “What need have we of that? There’s plenty of sailboats making the crossing already, as you well know.”

Henry never took his eyes off the drifting vessel. He nodded slowly, almost solemn.

“Aye. And tell me—how do they fare on a day when the air lies flat and the water’s still as glass, hein?”

The second man tugged at his whiskers, giving it the kind of serious thought men reserve for the question of who ought to buy the next round.

“Well...you wait, is all. The wind will come, sure enough.”

Henry finally turned to face him, tapping his forefinger against the other’s chest. “That’s the very point, mon ami. Men of trade don’t care to sit idle half the day, watching the sky like a calf waiting on supper. Time is worth more than sail.”

And that’s about the moment when an idea that was, by any measure, half mad began to take root.

The first vessel Henry launched was, depending who you ask, either one or two horsepower. And I mean that in the most literal sense—horse power, as in actual horses. No, no Evinrude outboards back then.

Now you may be wondering—how in the name of common sense does a horse drag a boat across the St. Lawrence River? And did they tow it from the shore like an oversized barge? Or perhaps harness them to the mast like some nautical chariot? No, nothing so ordinary.

Someone, somewhere, had the inspiration to build what they called a “Team Boat”. Not a “Steam Boat,” mind you. No lisp here. A Team Boat—as in a team of horses, or sometimes mules, depending on who was sober enough to do the harnessing that morning.

Picture it: on deck, maybe in separate stalls,  two stalwart nags - one maybe Plumb’s mother-in-law - plodding around on a great round treadmill—like a couple of oversized hamsters in a wheel. Each weary hoofstep turned gears and shafts, which in turn spun a paddle wheel or, depending on the design, a great clumsy propeller. Ingenious, really—though you’d best hope the horses were in a working mood, or else you’d be drifting just as aimlessly as any sailboat.

Of course, horses had been pulling plows, wagons, and canal boats since time out of mind, but on water? It was a novelty that must have drawn crowds to the dock, craning their necks to see if the thing would actually go—or if it would simply sink under the weight of such ambition.

I doubt the speed was anything to brag about. I can’t imagine Henry Plumb skimming along behind it on a length of rope, hollering like some pioneer water-skier. But what it lacked in velocity, it made up for in reliability. No waiting on a breeze—no praying for a squall. Just the steady clip-clop of hooves and the rhythmic churn of the paddles.

As for the “exhaust,” well—let’s just say whatever the horses left behind was likely pitched overboard without ceremony, which may explain the persistent green slime clinging to the rocks along the shore, the kind that wrapped around your ankles as a boy and made you swear some river monster was about to drag you under.

Why didn’t he build a steamer? That’s the question everyone asks, with the benefit of hindsight. But at the time, steam was newfangled, costly, and about as trustworthy as gas station sushi. The boilers alone would have cost a fortune, and in 1815 Ogdensburg, there weren’t exactly investors lined up, waving their purses in the air.

No, a Team Boat was just the thing—affordable, dependable, and in its own odd way, ahead of its time. And so it was that Henry Plumb put horses to work where no horse had ever thought to go, and in doing so, built more than a ferry—he built the first dependable link between two river towns that were never content to leave each other alone.