Monday, Answer
Mr. Nelson gets his gold lone star.
Decks on a riverboat varied from one to five decks high. Not all boats had all decks but from the keel were the overhanging MAIN DECK, for boilers, fuel, cargo. The overhang was a guard for protection of the sidewheels. Often this deck was double height. Above that for boats with multiple decks was the BOILER DECK but it was for passengers not machinery which was on the deck below. The roof of the Boiler Deck was the HURRICANE deck, especially the portion forward of the smokestacks which was typically not enclosed. That was followed by the narrower and shorter TEXAS DECK which was named (according to the source) because Texas recently became a state. It typically housed boat officers. On top of all was the Pilot House which controlled the boat direction by a large wheel linked by rope to the shallow rudder.
Other stuff: On riverboats, women were to the bow and gentlemen to the stern separated by a partition. According to the source, the use of the term staterooms is uniquely American and came from the fact that individual cabins were named for states of the Union. The term is now generic and applies to any cabin or room on transportation via rail or ship. On riverboats of the time were also purely deck passengers who were short distancers, frugal and/or rough trade, and they generally numbered two or three to one for cabin passengers. They slept where there was space and often on the cargo, exposed to weather on the main deck. These passengers cooked by open flame in the open air right with the cargo and fuel. Fire was a real possibility here, especially with wood and coal fuel and dry goods and raw cotton as cargo. If fire got to the steering rope and burned through, a ship would maintain mid channel and burn, and very few on board could swim. By 1853 there was at least one boat, the �Eclipse�, on the Mississippi that had a length of over 360 feet and a beam of 37 ft. and draft of only 8 ft. It featured a newly required dial pressure gauge and pressure relief valve to actually tell when a boiler was reaching an explosion point. Before that time it was the engineer�s guess, and the captain�s orders that controlled the boiler �bomb�. If it blew, it was the captain�s responsibility, but pity the engineer who was pushed for more speed as ordered from the wheel house, and who was most often dead. He got the blame.
Suprisingly to me on a typical navigable river the gradient is less than 14 inches per mile (excluding rapids and flood conditions) and the flow rate is 1 MPH in deep pools to 5 MPH at flood. Not often thought of, but before 1850 snags were the most dangerous problem for a river boat. After that time ice caused as least as much damage as did other hazards, as it could shred a drive wheel in less than a mile.
Source: Wikipedia and Life On The River, Norbury L. Wayman