In October 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt was making an official visit to cities along the Mississippi River.

Roosevelt's trip jogged the memory of New Yorker Henry Mann. He wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times recalling a historic visit to the Mississippi Valley by another Roosevelt almost 100 years earlier.

"It may be worthy of note, in connection with President Roosevelt's journey on the Mississippi, that the first steamboat voyage on that river was made by a Roosevelt -- Nicholas J. Roosevelt -- of New York, one of [Robert] Fulton's most useful and gifted associates," Mann wrote.

"The steamboat was built at Pittsburg under Mr. Roosevelt's directions, and was ready for its journey in September, 1811," he wrote in a letter published Oct. 7, 1907. Mann used the official federal spelling for the city that was in effect between 1890 and 1911.

The actual date that the vessel left Pittsburgh was Oct. 20, 1811. "The steamboat sailed from this place, on Sunday last, for the Natchez," was The Pittsburgh Gazette's single-line report on its departure. "The Natchez" to which the newspaper referred was a small riverbank settlement in what was then called the Mississippi Territory. From there Roosevelt's vessel pushed on to the city for which it was named, New Orleans.

The journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers took 12 weeks. While the steamboat passed scattered communities on its more than 1,100 mile inaugural trip, most of the territory through which it traveled was wilderness.

The steamboat was built at a shipyard on the banks of the Monongahela River, below the bluff on which Duquesne University has been built.

Nicholas Roosevelt, the man who oversaw construction of the New Orleans, was a member of the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family. That was the side that three generations later produced Theodore Roosevelt.

Born in New York in 1767, Nicholas Roosevelt was a sometimes competitor-sometimes partner of Robert Fulton. Fulton, a Lancaster County native, and Robert Livingston are credited with constructing the Claremont, the first commercial steamboat, in 1807.

Forming a partnership with Fulton and Livingston, who stayed back east, Roosevelt came to Pittsburgh to build a similar boat. It was to serve the expanding western territories.

Roosevelt's 1811 trip down the Ohio and Mississippi was his second journey to New Orleans. In 1809, he and his new bride, the former Lydia Latrobe, had made a honeymoon voyage by flatboat from Pittsburgh to the mouth of the Mississippi. That voyage gave Roosevelt a chance to spy out the dangers and navigation problems his steamboat would face two years later.

"With pleasure we announce, that the Steam Boat lately built at this place by Mr. Roosevelt ... fully answers the most sanguine expectations that were formed of her sailing," the Gazette reported on Friday, Oct. 18, 1811. The watercraft had finished a successful trail run the previous Tuesday, the newspaper said.

Although built in Pittsburgh, once the boat left, it would never return. "We are told that she is intended as a regular packet between Natchez and New Orleans," readers were advised. A "packet" is the term for a regularly scheduled boat carrying mail, passengers and cargo.

"Mr. Roosevelt was accompanied on the journey by his wife, to whom he had been recently married," Mann wrote.

Mann was incorrect in believing that Nicholas and Lydia were newlyweds. When they left Pittsburgh aboard the New Orleans, they were accompanied by their toddler daughter, who had been born shortly after the end of their 1809 flatboat trip.

Mary Helen Dohan, the author of "Mr. Roosevelt's Steamboat," a 1981 history of the voyage, wrote that some Pittsburghers were scandalized that Roosevelt was risking the lives of his again-pregnant wife and their child on such a perilous trip.

Over the next three months, the travelers faced danger from both human enemies and nature. They were attacked by Indians and felt the effects of the New Madrid earthquakes, which changed the course of the Mississippi overnight. The Roosevelts and their crew made it safely to New Orleans, arriving in January 1812.