The steam engines that turn the Steamboat NATCHEZ's paddlewheel were built in 1925, half a century before the hull they now drive. Salvaged from the steamer Clairton and rebuilt for river service, they still answer the engine-room telegraph by hand. That is why a New Orleans riverboat dinner cruise leaving the Toulouse Street Wharf moves under genuine steam rather than diesel. The vessel is the ninth to carry the Natchez name on the lower river. Her 32-note steam calliope, mounted forward of the pilothouse, carries across the French Quarter when the lines come off. The river explains much of the rest. Downstream of the wharf the channel bends almost ninety degrees at Algiers Point, a turn pilots rank among the most exacting on the lower Mississippi River. Soundings there run well past a hundred feet. The current is fast and the traffic is working traffic: bulk carriers riding high, bunkering barges, the gantry cranes of the Port of New Orleans, the sugar refinery stacks downriver at Arabi. A Mississippi River sightseeing cruise is never a closed loop through scenery, then; it is a passage through a commercial waterway that still earns its keep. Music arrived by the same logic. Excursion steamers carried bands out of New Orleans from the 1910s onward, and Fate Marable's riverboat orchestras employed Louis Armstrong before records made him famous. New Orleans riverboat dinner cruise tours inherit that arrangement almost unchanged: a small band on the dining deck, a Dixieland and swing repertoire, a horn line set against the rhythm of a working paddlewheel. The Creole Queen holds a parallel line downriver, steaming toward Chalmette, where the fighting of January 1815 closed the War of 1812. Most travellers meet these boats through New Orleans riverboat dinner cruise tickets, yet their credentials are mechanical rather than decorative. Oak, brass and mirrored panels finish the main saloon. The engine room stands open to view, so passengers can watch the pitman arms swing and the wheel throw water astern. Three decks give different versions of the same city: the dining deck at table height, the promenade near the waterline, the hurricane deck level with the Crescent City Connection and the spires above the levee. Creole kitchens supply the galley, but the hull itself is pure nineteenth-century logic — shallow draft, sternwheel propulsion, a pilothouse set high enough to read the river two bends ahead.