Showboat

A showboat, or show boat, was a form of theater that traveled along the waterways of the United States, especially along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers (www.brittanica.com). A showboat was basically a barge that resembled a long, flat-roofed house, and in order to move down the river, it was pushed by a small tugboat (misleadingly labeled a towboat) which was attached to it. It would have been impossible to put a steam engine on it, since it would have had to be placed right in the auditorium. However, since the box-office success of MGM's 1951 motion picture version of the musical Show Boat, in which the boat was inaccurately redesigned as a deluxe, self-propelled steamboat, the image of a showboat as a large twin-stacked vessel with a huge paddle wheel at the rear has taken hold in popular culture. (The two earlier film versions of Show Boat, and most stage productions of it, feature a historically accurately designed vessel, rather than the kind built for the 1951 film, and Edna Ferber, in the novel on which the musical is based, gives a description of the "Cotton Blossom" that accurately reflects the real design of a nineteenth-century showboat. Modern-day showboats, however, with their more advanced technology, are designed as steamboats.)