Early steamboat travel on the Missouri River tested boats, crews, and passengers, and between 1820 and 1900 several hundred steamboats were destroyed by fire or boiler explosions, crushed by ice, or sunk by snags. The first steamboat to navigate a significant distance on the river was the Independence, which left St. Louis in May 1819 carrying flour, whiskey, iron, sugar, and passengers, reached Franklin after 13 days and 150 miles to a huge celebration, continued to Chariton, and then returned to St. Louis. Its success encouraged further steamboat travel, and in June 1819 an army expedition of four steamboats and nine keelboats headed toward the Yellowstone River in present-day Montana. Maj. Stephen Long led the scientific part of the expedition in the Western Engineer and stopped at Franklin for a week-long celebration, but the other boats fell far behind; after a year the expedition had advanced only 860 miles, the boats were judged unfit to continue, and Congress ended further funding. Another 13 years passed before the Yellowstone completed the journey. As steamboats became more reliable, they carried people and goods along the river, and for Rocheport residents moonlight excursions on steam ferries became a favorite recreation. In 1836 the sidewheeler Diana sank on a snag at today's Diana Bend about 2 1/2 miles above Rocheport, the Little Dick steam ferry carried passengers in 1880 and 1881 before it sank, and in 1890 the Plow Boy promoted a grand excursion to Mammoth, now Rocheport Cave, three miles below Rocheport. Steamboating on the Missouri lasted from 1819 through the 1920s, but railroads gradually took away passengers and long-haul freight; by 1910 a few family-owned companies still ran small freight boats mainly on the Gasconade and Osage rivers, also carrying passengers on day trips. Steamboat trade helped build Missouri's river towns, and Rocheport was a major shipping port for tobacco and hemp before the Civil War.